Contrarian reader Dave Atkinson writes: Both you and Bill Turpin used the word "fulsomely" to describe an apology. I assume you both know what you're doing. How droll. Bill and I probably knew once, but we, or at least I, forgot. William Safire rises from the dead to remind us. (As a bonus, he throws in "noisome" and "enormity.") [Update] Bill T. didn't forget after all: Sheesh! I've been lectured by Harry Flemming on the use of fulsome, so I chose it with care to describe The Coast's apology, and did so because of its ambiguity. It's nice that Dave Atkinson picked up on it, but...

20 April, 2010

I'm about as un-Catholic as they come. I grew up in Massachusetts, where the Roman clergy formed a reactionary vanguard scorned by my family and friends. The magical beliefs at the core of Christian dogma strike me as risible, and I've been known to bedevil Catholic friends by making sport of them. Not much fun in that these days, so palpable is the pain and frustration among Catholic laity over Pope Benedict XVI's Nixonian defense of the sex abuse cover-up scandal enveloping his papacy and the church. No one can take pleasure in their present grief.  Like other non-Catholics I suspect,...

20 April, 2010

The folks at Informationisbeautiful.net got their numbers wrong by a factor of, er, 10. The amount of CO2 emitted by the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano was not 15,000 tons of CO2 per day, but 150,000. To their credit, they owned up to the mistake, apologized fulsomely, and published a revised graphic: Although the planes vs. volcano equation is more of a saw-off than it first appeared, the eruption still looks like a net gain for the atmosphere (or it was until flights resumed today). This is a useful reminder of the adage,  garbage in, garbage out — especially important when it comes to vivid...

20 April, 2010

Two readers see The Coast's failure to lift a finger in defense of its reader-posters not as an unwelcome blow to free expression but as an overdue comeuppance for the well-known excesses of anonymous Internet posting. Bill Turpin writes: The Coast's greatest failure to its readers was in allowing anonymous posts in the first place. It's The Coast, not Samizdat, and this is Canada, not the former Soviet Union. You're free to write what you want in this country, subject to defamation laws which, while imperfect, are not odious. There is no need to hide behind an alias. But when you do,...

19 April, 2010

Chris Milk, who has directed videos for Kanye West, U2, Courtney Love, and Barack Obama, is assembling a few thousand volunteers to complete an animated music video for Ain't No Grave, title track of the last album Johnny Cash recorded. The Johnny Cash Project invites participants to use custom drawing tools to create the 1,368 frames in the 2 minute, 51 second, video. Since more than one artist will end up submitting artwork for each frame, the video will look different each time it's played. Writes Milk: Strung together and relayed in sequence, your art, paired with Johnny’s haunting song, will become...

19 April, 2010

The former idealists who built The Coast into a substantial Halifax institution let down their readers and their craft today by failing to contest an order to help identify people who posted controversial opinions on their website. Madam Justice Heather Robertson granted an application by HRM Fire Chief Bill Mosher and Deputy Chief Stephen Thurber, who say the posters made allegations of racism, cronyism and incompetence against them. I want to stress that Contrarian has not read the comments in question, or the article that provoked them, and I have no opinion as to the merits of the dispute. But...

14 April, 2010

The Brain Repair Centre at the QEII Health Sciences Centre took a magnetic resonance image of Contrarian's brain today, as part of a study on memory loss in people with Alzheimer's disease. The researchers assured me I was there solely as a control! While the machine buzzed, clicked, and roared, the kindly technicians played CBC radio through my headphones. This is what Contrarian's brain looks like while listening to Costas Halavrezos....

12 April, 2010

A CBC interviewer once asked Winnipeg lawyer Jack London, who often commented on legal issues, what qualities make a good judge. "Politeness" topped London's list. This struck me as apt. People who wield great authority should have the grace to do so without lording their stature over those whose lives they will rule upon. In this morning's New York Times,  Jeffrey L. Fisher, a Stanford law professor who once clerked for soon-to-retire US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, recalls Stevens’s trademark courteousness: During William Rehnquist’s tenure as chief justice, a lawyer was arguing in the court for the first...

11 April, 2010
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