To illustrate Adam Gopnik's piece on National Geographic* in last week's New Yorker, photo editor James Pomerantz riffled through hundreds of images from NatGeo's online archive of more than 11 million photos. This week, the New Yorker website reproduced "a handful of particularly intriguing images" from "the photo booty" Pomerantz uncovered. National Geographic being the source, one of the images naturally featured Cape Breton. Can you guess what's being pictured here? The caption: "Men wear the waistcoat of Cape Breton’s famous giant named Mcaskill (sic)."**  Gilbert H. Grosvenor took the photograph. * A subscription is required to read the entire piece. ** I assume the...

23 April, 2013

I have more reader mail on the furore around Rehtaeh Parsons' death and the factors that led to it. Once again, a few preliminary points. Rehtaeh's family and friends are going through an unimaginably horrible experience, one they have handled with grace and courage. The one point that united everyone in this case is sympathy for their ordeal. It bears repeating that, if you or anyone you know are having suicidal thoughts, please call the toll-free Kid’s Help Line at 1-800-668-6868 or the toll-free Suicide Prevention Line at 1-888-429-8167. Also please check out this website, and this list of warning signs. In a post on April 11, I raised...

14 April, 2013

Snap quiz:  What do the following verses have in common? And that's how it went all afternoon, one lizard after another It made me wonder if snow leopards have a taste for joggers as well As is typical, the Pope stayed above the fray and did not comment. Whether such tactics will have a chilling effect remains to be seen. Answer: All four are inadvertent haikus, composed by humans but discovered by machines. The first two come from a Tumblr blog created by New York Times editor Jacob Harris, who adapted some open-source compter code to scan the homepage of the New York Times, looking for snippets of text that conform to the Haiku...

14 April, 2013

What if the cops and prosecutors were right? What if competent RCMP officers carried out a conscientious investigation of allegations that Rehtaeh Parsons was sexually assaulted, and that a pornographic photo of the event had circulated among her acquaintances, before concluding there was no prospect of a conviction in the case? Because we cherish freedom and abhor wrongful convictions, we set a high bar for criminal convictions. Accused persons must always be presumed innocent. To convict them, evidence presented in court must satisfy a judge or jury of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt—not a frivolous or fanciful doubt, or one based on prejudice...

11 April, 2013

Is there anything in all of news and current affairs less edifying and more hypocritical than morning-after analysis of provincial budgets? No matter who is in power, the response of the self-serving talking heads who pop up in the media is always the same: Shame! You decreased (or failed to sufficiently increase) funding for the industry or interest group I represent. Shame! You increased (or failed to sufficiently decrease) taxes on the taxpayer cohort I represent. [caption id="attachment_11587" align="alignright" width="200"] Erjavec[/caption] Spend more (on me)! Lower taxes (on me)! And don't you dare run a deficit! The finger-waggers never acknowledge the tradeoffs required for a...

05 April, 2013

In a prescient book published a quarter century ago, when few people had heard of the internet, Carolyn Marvin, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, catalogued the fear and loathing with which newspapers greeted the advent of the telegraph and the telephone. High on the list of perceived horrors was the inevitable moral degradation of women. Old media are still at it, constantly warning us to be very afraid of the perils lurking in the internet, computers, smart phones, cell phones, etc. The magazine Pacific Standard gamely took note of this handwringing today with an article...

04 April, 2013

Late last week, Halifax musician Robert Speirs fired off an angry email to three broadcast networks: Why did you divulge the names of the men accused of luring? What if they are innocent? Why do you want to try them by media and subject them to public humiliation, [and] so ruin their lives? Why do you display such unjustified hatred to people you do not know? Again, what if they are innocent? Your insistence on revealing the identities of the accused inspires any thinking person to wonder who are the true perverts. Shame on you! Speirs, who signed the note, "Disgusted," was referring to a sting...

03 March, 2013

Contrarian reader Peter Barss waxes philosophical about the primal draw of radio-storms and weather-porn: It 's exciting to sit in our warm, safe living rooms listening to dire warnings of impending weather doom. It's even more of a thrill to turn on our flat screen TVs and watch weather gals and guys get whipped by wind-driven snow as they stand outside yelling into their microphones so they can be heard over the howling "weather bomb." We live in a society that is soft and luxurious. One of the luxuries we indulge is the illusion that if we just do everything right we...

01 March, 2013

Kudos to Andrew Cochran, Maritimes Regional Director of the CBC, for agreeing to debate the network's hyperventilated coverage of routine weather events. We hashed it out in an extended session this morning on CBC Cape Breton's Information Morning program. Longtime Contrarian readers know I think Nova Scotia has lost all perspective about weather, working ourselves into a lather over events we would have taken in stride 30 years ago. The CBC is one link in this chain of timorousness. Environment Canada, which issues daily "statements,"  "advisories," and "warnings" about routine weather inconveniences, is another. School officials arbitrarily grant paid holidays to hundreds of...

28 February, 2013
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