Salon's Glenn Greenwald points out that last week's flood of Steve Jobs hagiographies mostly tiptoed around one inconvenient facet of the Great Man: he took LSD. He not only took it, he regarded having taken it as one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. Greenwald: Unlike many people who have enjoyed success, Jobs is not saying that he was able to succeed despite his illegal drug use; he’s saying his success is in part — in substantial part — because of those illegal drugs (he added that Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once”). An excellent...

09 October, 2011

When people learn that my son Silas and his wife Jenn Power adopted a pair of identical twins with Down Syndrome, they often say one of two things: "I could never do that," or "You must be saints." I love Silas and Jenn beyond measure, and admire them hugely, but I can attest they are not saints. The explanation for their decision to adopt Josh and Jacob lies elsewhere. As members of the L'Arche Community in Iron Mines, Orangedale, and Mabou, Cape Breton, Silas and Jenn have lots of experience working and living with developmentally disabled people. It's what they like doing,...

08 October, 2011

A report last week in the prestigious scientific journal Nature revealed that the hole in the ozone layer over the Arctic was the largest ever recorded—comparable for the first time to the man-induced hole that appears every year in the ozone layer over the Antarctic. But when reporters asked Canadian scientist  David Tarasick, who was involved in the study, to explain its findings, Environment Canada refused to let him speak. [caption id="attachment_8689" align="alignright" width="150" caption="David Tarasick, muzzled by Environment Canada"][/caption] Environment Canada scientist David Tarasick, whose team played a key role in the report published Sunday in the journal Nature, is not being...

08 October, 2011

The most unusual Steve Jobs obituary this week might be the one that appeared in PDN Pulse, the blog of Photo District News. Jobs, it seems, was a legendarily truculent photo subject. PDN Pulse recounted some of the legends. “It was the joke among photographers. He was like the nightmare subject,” said San Francisco photographer William Mercer McLeod, who photographed Jobs five times. In 1986, Fortune magazine hired Doug Menuez to shoot a portrait of Jobs for the magazine's cover. Menuez wanted to photograph him in the NeXT offices, on a staircase Jobs had commissioned from architect I.M Pei. Jobs arrived, looked...

08 October, 2011

A Cape Breton and Central Nova Freight makes its way across the Canso Causeway during that no'reaster last Wednesday, pictured here earlier in this video. H/T: Bob MacEachern of 101.5 The Hawk via Charlie Phillips...

08 October, 2011

Hint: It's closer than you think. Jon Stewart reveals that Halifax is the real promised land. Best quote: What's wrong with you two? You can't even get along in Nova Scotia. It's the most polite part of Canada. Watch it quick before the Comedy Channel yanks it from YouTube. H/T: Andy Weissman...

06 October, 2011

Radio station 101.5 The Hawk posted this video of a trip back and forth across the Canso Causeway mid-afternoon Wednesday, at the height of the nor'easter that ripped through Cape Breton. Officials later closed the causeway for a period. H/T: 101.5 The Hawk via Cathy Gallagher. ...

06 October, 2011

An anonymous cartoonist strikes a blow for virtuous punctuation: When will newspaper style guides wake up to its obvious superiority? H/T Lee Amme Gillan via David Rodenhiser. This has been cropping up on the net since mid-September. If anyone can devine the artist's identity, I'll update....

06 October, 2011

Early last month, Contrarian revealed that Nova Scotia's Chief Electoral Officer had deliberately made her latest report of political donations harder to use by publishing them in an image-based PDF format whose text could neither be searched nor copied and pasted into another document. With help from hacker-readers, Contrarian republished the data in the searchable, text-grab-friendly format McCulloch used for previous years' reports. I'm not done with this topic. Several generous readers have converted the open PDF file we published into an Excel database file, thus enabling much broader use of the interesting political data it contains. I will post that Excel CSV...

03 October, 2011
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