Web fixer and community participation guru Mike Targett points out that Contrarian is about a week away from a quarter-million page views....

26 January, 2011

An alert reader [points out] claims that although musician Denis Ryan is one of Nova Scotia's most successful investors, he is not now and has never been a restaurateur. Perhaps that's why he is such a successful investor. [Update: Several readers report that Ryan once held an interest in the Antigonish bar now called Piper's Pub. I think that makes this a correction within a correction to a correction.] Darn. All those Irish folksingers look alike. I've corrected the original post, which, ironically, was prompted by another news organization's similar flub. In strict blog etiquette, I should leave the original mistake in place, but...

13 December, 2010

[Updated below] Our friends at AllNovaScotia (subscription required) appear to have been punk'd by [restaurateur] singing investor Denis Ryan and Halifax folksinger-comedian Tony Quinn in a YouTube spoof of a profane Irish expat turning the air blue-green with outrage over the Emerald Isle's financial travails. The NSFW clip identifies Quinn as a reporter for "the Financial News," which morphs to "the Financial Times" in the AllNS piece. As alert Contrarian reader DR points out, however, the clip does not turn up on any site calling itself  'Financial News,' and the reporter definitely doesn’t say, 'Financial Times.' Also, the 'reporter' looks and sounds remarkably like...

10 December, 2010

Contrarian reader Andrew Bourke is reconsidering a trip to Disney World after seeing this video of Transportation Safety Agency screeners in Chattanooga Tennessee manhandling an upset three-year-old. (If you can't see the video, try this link.) The San Francisco Chronicle explains: A TSA employee gave Mandy the pat down and she started screaming and kicking her legs...

17 November, 2010

In response to my post about "seeing" baseball on the radio (and the iPhone), Cliff White writes: Although I am not now, nor have I ever been, a major sports fan, I remember clearly listening as a young boy in the fifties to radio broadcast of local and major league games. I remember nothing of those games except the rhythm and pacing of the broadcasts. I suspect much of the nostalgia for the fifties golden age of baseball is rooted in the soothing, tension dissolving effects of those broadcasts. At a time when fears of the mushroom...

30 October, 2010

Please don't think me old, but I grew up in a suburb of New York City, listening to Vin Scully call Brooklyn Dodger games on a radio the size of a bread box, powered by vacuum tubes. The experience was formative in the sense that it left me with the belief baseball games are best seen on the radio, in singer Terry Cashman's evocative phrase. Tonight at 10, I set out from Sydney, Nova Scotia, for the 75 km. drive to my home on a remote stretch of Cape Breton's Bras d'Or Lakes. Before pulling out of the parking lot, I plugged...

29 October, 2010

Another media outlet has presented admiring coverage of the campaign by Halifax restaurateur Lil MacPherson and Halifax actress Ellen Page to oppose something one might expect environmentally conscious citizens to campaign for: the productive recycling of composted human waste as a worthy alternative to dumping it, semi-treated, in the ocean. A Contrarian reader describes today's Herald story as: One-sided journalism at its worst. Lil MacPherson is not an environmental scientist. Ellen Page is not an environmental scientist. Nowhere in the entire story is there any effort to present the case in favour of biosolids. Even the headline “Rising in defence of province’s...

28 October, 2010

Haligonian Warren Reed objects to the thoughtlessly patronizing word choices many journalists apply to wheelchair-users and those who discriminate them. In an email to two Chronicle-Herald reporters who recently wrote about separate cases of discrimination by Metro Transit and the Nova Scotia Justice Department against wheelchair users, he complained about three sentences in their stories: "The driver even called his supervisor, who confirmed that wheelchair-bound passengers are not allowed on [Bus No.] 60." "However, Sunday morning the driver said that he could get in a lot of trouble for letting wheelchair-bound passengers onto non-wheelchair routes." "Amy Paradis, 16, is quadriplegic and...

25 October, 2010

The cutline reads: The documentary was filmed over three years. Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall. Which propelled University of Pennsylvania sociologist Jeff Weintraub to ask: Were Merle & Kris & Robert ever actually married? What the caption writer neglected, of course, was the serial comma, the one that comes (or is omitted) after "crackle" in "snap, crackle, and pop." When left out of a sentence, this tiny mark sometimes seeks revenge by sneaking up on a unwary writer and landing a devastating blow. In a similar, but more famous example, perhaps apocryphal, a book dedication implied a...

24 October, 2010

On the evening of September 12, a hit-and-run driver struck Neil Alan Smith on Fourth Street North, St. Petersburg, FL, throwing him off his mountain bike. Smith, 48, a dishwasher at the Crab Shack restaurant in St. Petersburg, died six days later at Bayfront Medical Center. When the Times announced Smith's death on its website, a reader commented: A man who is working as a dishwasher at the Crab Shack at the age of 48 is surely better off dead. Times editors swiftly removed the post, deeming it offensive and insensitive to the dead man’s friends and family. Then they took another, more...

02 October, 2010
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