As the final chord of "Paint it Black," opening number in the Rolling Stones' 2006 Halifax Commons concert, faded into the distance, Mick Jagger thanked the crowd for coming out despite foul weather. "We hear there's even a group that came all the way from Newfoundland," he said. The remarkable thing is that Jagger, the consummate professional, took the trouble to pronounce the name of Canada's 10th province correctly. So after 60 years as heir to the throne, is it too much to ask the presumed future King of Canada to show the same care and respect? [Update] Contrarian readers have leapt to...

03 November, 2009

Pop anthropologist Wade Davis, the first of whose CBC Radio Massey lectures¹ just ended in the Atlantic time zone, obviously has a lot of knowledge to impart about the Earth's diverse human cultures. So why did her  waste a good half of the opening talk shooting racist fish in a 19th Century barrel? Davis's point was that the errant 19th Century "science" of physical anthropology dripped with colonial arrogance, but the thinly disguised subtext seemed to be Davis's own moral superiority to these imperial prigs. The effect was both distasteful and boring, like listening a 21st Century astrophysicist satirize the Ptolemaic...

02 November, 2009

There's a blog for everyone, including hapless weekly newspaper photographers who must sally forth in pursuit of "miserable people pointing at dog turds." Hat tip: Susan Delacourt....

02 November, 2009

In response to this morning's post about mandated choice in organ donation progams, Contrarian reader JB points out this TED talk by Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, about counter-intuitive aspects of human decision making. The discussion of organ donation starts at the five minute mark, but the whole talk is fascinating....

02 November, 2009

Britain's 500-year-old Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons has thrown its weight behind a new approach to the shortage of organs for lifesaving transplants: make people decide whether they want to be donors. Health professionals involved in organ and tissue donation have long been aware of a maddening statistic: Although about 90 percent of adults express willingness to be organ and tissue donors, only about half get around to signing the consent form (which appears on on the health card renewal application in Nova Scotia). Without a signed card, it's harder to get distraught relatives to agree to donation in the...

02 November, 2009

British scientists are up in arms about the Labour government's sacking of Dr. David Nutt as head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs after he refused to toe the government's strident line against marijuana and ecstasy. On Friday, Home Secretary Alan Johnson dismissed Nutt, head of the Psychopharmacology Unit in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Bristol, after the Centre for Crime and Justice at King’s College London published a paper containing criticisms he had made of the Brown government’s drug policies in a lecture last July. In the talk, Nutt said ecstasy...

01 November, 2009

Atlantic Superstore, Quinpool Centre, Halifax, 31 October 2009. Bah!...

31 October, 2009

To the dismay of insomniacs and shift workers across the country, CBC Radio One has quietly dropped an unassuming but prized corner of its schedule: the carousel of highlights from public broadcasters around the world that ran from 1 to 5:30 am. CBC Radio Overnight offered listeners welcome—and rare—insight into the perspective on other countries on world news. A  few remnants remain, including a half hour of the BBC at 4 am, and something called The World, at 1 am. Contrarian counts this a big loss....

31 October, 2009

Contrarian reader Cliff White writes: I'm in Quebec at the moment and, as you can imagine, the deal with New Brunswick is playing very well here.  I can't see how this won't turn out to be a very bad deal for New Brunswick in the long term, similar to, but eventually worse then, the one Newfoundland agreed to under Smallwood. At the time Smallwood signed the Churchill Falls deal, it looked pretty good, given the cost of energy at the time.  The problem arose when energy prices went up dramatically and Quebec refused to renegotiate. The length of the agreement meant that...

30 October, 2009

As Contrarian has noted, the Hydro Quebec-NB Power deal poses huge for problems Nova Scotia. What's more surprising is how shabby the deal seems to be for New Brunswick: NB sheds $4.8 billion in debt, but also loses critical long-term strategic assets, including its transmission grid and a potentially lucrative energy portal into the insatiable New England electricity market. NB remains saddled with the ballooning costs for refurbishing the aging Pt. Lepreau power plant, but Quebec Hydro gets the plant. NB does get some relief in the cost of replacement energy while Lepreau is offline. NB remains stuck with NB Power's thermal stinkers—one...

30 October, 2009
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