Jane Kansas takes time out from her walk to mount the simplest, most easily understood defence I've heard of a women's right to choose face coverings like the niqab and the burka. Money quote: At the beaches of Nice, Cannes and Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat most women were young and slim and topless. In all the cafes, women wore only tiny bikini bras and sarongs, or simply sat and scarfed down their Croque Madames and Ricards in their bikinis. It was what was done. I sure didn’t. I come from a place where women do not sit in restaurants in their bikinis. I would be...

26 June, 2010

The Whitest Kids U'Know present Matt Clint for Senator: Money Quote: For the last 15 years, I've lived my life in such a bland, uncontroversial, and repressed manner that it's almost unnatural. Why? Because I've been preparing to be your representative since I was a child....

26 June, 2010

In the wake of February's cross-burning in Hants County, the Globe and Mail did what Nova Scotia newspapers ought to have done: assigned a top notch reporter to research and write a searching report on Nova Scotia's unfinished history of racism. Many of you will have seen Les Perreaux's piece when it appeared last month, but I missed it. He began by noting African Nova Scotia's unique backstory: [N]o other region on this side of the 49th parallel has Nova Scotia's long history of a black-and-white divide. Until the immigration reforms of the 1960s, 37 per cent of Canadian blacks lived...

16 June, 2010

I'm new to blogging and still feeling my way around the courtesies and protocols of the genre. When I post an item I found somewhere else, I usually credit and link to the source where I encountered it — a figurative tip of the hat. Sometimes I dig deeper and link to the original source material, and sometimes to both ("hat tip [originator] via [mysource]"). These links are courteous to my comrades in the ether, and provide a richer experience for the reader. Traditional news organizations sometimes complain that the whole blog world is an endless exercise in ripping off their...

03 June, 2010

No sensible person would go see Sex in the City -2 after reading (or even hearing about) the appalling reviews. But one good thing has come out of it: this delicious review, by Lindy West in Seattle alternative paper, The Stranger. The lead: We've been thinking it for two long years. All of us. Gnawing our cheeks at night, clutching at sweaty sheets, our faces hollow and gray, our once-bright eyes dimmed by the pain of too many questions. Sometimes we cry out, en masse, to a faceless god and a cold, indifferent universe that holds its secrets close. What...

01 June, 2010

The stupidest thing the late, lamented Halifax Daily News ever did was to fire weekly columnist Jane Kansas over sloppy attribution of an Internet joke. Busybodies elevated the offense to plagiarism, requiring capital expiation — the irony of firing Nova Scotia's most original writer for unoriginality lost on all concerned. Currently on Sabbatical from Halifax, Kansas is travelling on foot from Helena, Montana, to Medicine Hat, Alberta (a 543 kilometer side-trek to visit a friend), thence from Western North Dakota to Toronto (which Google maps calculates at 2082.5 km.). Kansas likes a challenge. Along the way, she files occasional dispatches to...

29 May, 2010

In 1230, French Cardinal Hugues de Saint-Cher (and 500 of his colleagues) completed the first search engine. The Washington Post's Brian Palmer has a neat piece on the evolution of search tools since. Money quote: Brin and Page's billion-dollar realization was that users would rather see a reputable page that matched their query reasonably well than an obscure page that matched perfectly. These innovations remain the backbone of today's search engines, from Google and Yahoo to Bing and others. But the Web is changing at a staggering pace. The 1994 index for Lycos, one of the Web's first search engines, had only...

29 May, 2010

[Update below] Peter Spurway, who was director of communications for Premier John Hamm, writes: I have no knowledge of what Dan may or may not have done around the Herald story. That said, if he had simply declared who he was in the comment he posted in response to the story, all of this would have been avoided. (And whether his online comment qualified as an email to the newspaper is hair-splitting.) By not posting his real name and interest in the story, Dan failed to be sufficiently transparent, in my view. [Update] Defeated Liberal byelection candidate Miles Tompkins writes: Amazing what one can miss...

26 May, 2010

Sharon Fraser is a Halifax journalist, women's rights advocate, and the wife of Dan O'Connor, the chief of staff to Premier Dexter embroiled in a controversy over inaccurate reporting by the Chronicle-Herald over the weekend. She describes the events at the heart of the Herald's misreporting: I have no desire to keep this going eternally but I wrote this summary this morning and thought you might be interested. Here's what happened: On Friday, the Herald published a front-page story reducing an important government initiative and its announcement to the amount of money that was spent over several months in its preparation.  The headline...

25 May, 2010

Contrarian reader and consulting engineer Jeffrey Pinhey considers the pros and cons of using consultants, and the media's treatment of the Dexter government: So you are just getting around to the realization that the media are not going to be pro-NDP anything unless they are in opposition? I am no member of any of these "parties" (my parties are a lot more fun) but it sure seems obvious that the Herald is holding Darrell Dexter to a higher set of expectations that any other Premier has been in some time, even to the point of somehow twisting things to...

24 May, 2010
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