When Paul Watson, the Canadian who heads the Sea Shepherd Society, attempted to disrupt a traditional pilot whale harvest on the Faroe Islands last year, canny local fishermen postponed the event until no whales appeared until after the HMS Brigit Bardot weighed anchor and departed the tiny country's waters. (See further update here.) This deprived Watson of gory footage for a TV series celebrating his latest charismatic crusade. Still, when the four-part series aired on US cable channels this spring, Faroese government officials braced for a backlash. What they got was something quite different: a flood of tourism inquiries. The documentary's B-roll footage of the...

08 July, 2012

Rule 1 for Copy Editors: Pay attention to the photo your slapping in next to that headline, and vice versa. A friend who logged more than a few nights on the rim writes: It's hell laying out a tabloid front, eh? Especially when half of it is sent to you from T.O. I note that Canada is becoming a world leader in random gruesome crimes. As you know, this is a leading indicator that the Harperite vision of Canada is progressing well. Note that this is the Winnipeg version of Metro, not the Halifax edition....

19 June, 2012

Scott Milsom, reporter, editor, communist, chain smoker, Red Sox fanatic, wordsmith, author, and one of the nicest guys I ever knew, died this morning from cancer of the lungs. From 1988 to 1996, Scott edited New Maritimes, an ambitious quarterly journal about the struggles and triumphs of working people in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI. When a policy change at the Canada Council killed the magazine, Scott went on to publish and edit the Coastal Community News, which featured beautifully written profiles of the villages and hamlets that dot our coastline. Scott was a dedicated leftist. Although he decamped from the...

14 June, 2012

Early in 1229, Johannes Myronas, a monk working in Jerusalem, wrote a prayer book. He constructed the book on parchment he recycled from several documents, including a manuscript by the Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC). Myronas erased Archimedes' words, separated the pages of his manuscript, cut the pages in half, turned them sideways, shuffled them, and transcribed his own prayers onto them. In the years since, the prayer book was drizzled with wax and repaired with various types of glue. Some its pages were covered again with forged paintings. In this way, a unique work by one of humankind's seminal...

29 May, 2012

What exactly is this message, displayed on the London Underground? Is it a come-on from a tonier paper--The Times, perhaps? A pitch to get off dead-tree communications altogether, and follow The Guardian online? No, as the fine print makes clear, it's a plea from the Mayor of London and Transport for London to avoid subway clutter by disposing of your reading matter in an appropriate recycling receptacle: Newspapers left on the Tube can jam doors and cause delays to your journey. Take your newspaper with you or put it in the bin to to be recycled.  ...

29 May, 2012

Dave Carroll has a publicist. I'm going to say that again. Son of Maxwell Dave Carroll, the Nova Scotia folksinger who needed only $150 and some creative friends to turn a beef with a US airline into a mortifying (to the airline) viral video that drew nearly 12 million pageviews, now has his own publicist. Eliza Levy is a pleasant sounding young "assistant to the publicity team" at Media Connect, a division of Finn Partners of New York. She's handling PR for Carroll's newly published book, United Breaks Guitars: The Power of One Voice in the Age of Social Media, and his...

18 May, 2012

The surprisingly (to me) young audience that gathered Thursday night at Empire's Park Lane Cinema in Halifax to see a simulcast of the American Public Radio program This American Life. The slightly older audience that gathered for the actual show at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York City: Given the affection for radio among Canada's chattering classes, I'm surprised at how many Nova Scotians have never heard of This American Life, a superb one-hour program produced each week at WBEZ in Chicago. A typical episode features a collection  documentaries, essays, readings, memoirs, and found footage loosely grouped around a single...

11 May, 2012

Our friend in Fredericton writes: This morning my street was  crawling with Jehovah’s Witnesses: at least a half dozen pairs of women, making their way from house to house, all neatly attired in skirts of a certain style. Before long, two Witnesses landed on my doorstep, introduced themselves as Queenie and Muriel, and handed over copies of The Watchtower and Awake! I’m well-known as a magazine addict, so after getting through the most pressing work of the day, I paused to flip through these publications. I was shocked to notice the circulation numbers: 42,182,000 copies in 194 languages for each issue of...

24 April, 2012

I don't mean to be overly cranky with my former colleagues in the political journalism racket, but I could do with a little less psychoanalysis and a little more content in reports from the Nova Scotia House of Assembly. CBC legislature reporter Jean Laroche's weekly debrief this morning  was long on the former and light on the latter. Premier Dexter, he explained, normally doesn't have a short fuse, but the Chignecto-Central Regional School Board's threat to decimate library staff caused him to blow his stack. The debate, opined Laroche, had an unusual, intensely personal character. Really? None of the clips Laroche played showed anything...

13 April, 2012

On Sunday, I questioned the sudden closure of the Talbot House Recovery Centre, and the treatment accorded it's executive director, Fr. Paul Abbass, after a victim's rights activist apparently passed along an unspecified third- or fourth-party complaint about Abbass to the Department of Community Services. A sample of the responses follows, but please also see this clarification of my original post. A reader writes: I am a former resident of Talbot house and I am convinced the experience saved my life. At no time during my therapy did I witness any impropriety on the part of Paul Abbass or any staff member. Talbot...

03 April, 2012
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