[Updated below.] An adventure-vacationer has drawn Internet notice with his first-person account of surviving a shark attack while spear fishing in the Exuma Cays, a district of the Bahamas. Surviving to tell the story obliges me to do so José Mollá's New Age musings about the greater meaning of the episode conclude with this: Seeing a fin in the water is not nearly as alarming as not seeing that we spend our lives worrying about what’s irrelevant. I’m convinced that the shark didn’t come to take a piece of me but instead to leave me with something. A kind of wisdom that I...

07 November, 2010

Canadians tend not to think of Prime Minister Stephen Harper as a funny guy, but check out this anecdote from George W. Bush's presidential memoir, recounted in Maureen Dowd's New York Times column this morning: He writes of a visit to Russia, when Putin showed him his black Labrador, Koni. “Bigger, stronger, and faster than Barney,” Putin bragged. Later, when W. recounted this to Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, Harper drolly noted, “You’re lucky he only showed you his dog.”...

07 November, 2010

Yesterday, I posted about the pitfalls facing a minister who receives an official complaint from a well-known political ally, and critiqued Community Services Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse for her navigation of these tricky waters. Reader Mark Austin offers a broader assessment of the minister: While you are right on your scoring of Minister Peterson-Rafuse on her recent public foray, I think you have to award her a few points for being willing to communicate off the cuff. She strikes me as sincere and earnest. I would give her back one point for that. So, 1-1. Last week, at the Taking...

01 November, 2010

In 1909, Henry Ford said buyers could have any color Model T they wanted, "as long as it's black." One hundred and one years later, Apple, too, seems unable to produce an iPhone 4 in any color but black. Here's why: [This video uses Flash, so Apple iWhatever users click here.] Source: JLE...

01 November, 2010

Being a cabinet minister requires adroit balancing skills. On one hand, a minister sometimes performs duties that border on the judicial, and must do so impartially. On the other, a minister has political responsibilities to the governing party and its allies. To judge from her public comments about an impending investigation into allegations of abuse at group homes operated by the Colchester Residential Services Society, Community Services Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse has an imperfect grasp of both roles. The Nova Scotia Government and General Employees Union complained that managers of the Colchester homes had failed to react, or failed to react quickly enough, to...

31 October, 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
Reader Ritchie Simpson challenges me to consult a mathematician on my assertion that "one should always be sceptical of surveys that show heterosexual men had more partners, on average, than women, since this is a mathematical impossibility."
While I do not fundamentally disagree with your observation about "heterosexual men," I am dubious about your math.
My go-to guy on matters arithmetic is retired Cape Breton University professor Doug Grant, now living in exile in Kitchener. His response after the jump.
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
Show more
Loading...