Gordon Mills of Iron Mines is one of my favourite Nova Scotia artists. His depiction of The Last Supper went on display Friday night at Cape Breton University Art Gallery's 5th annual ProletariART show, which runs through April 1. Click the image to view a larger version....
A native band, an environmental group, two fishermen's organizations, and a residents' association say they will appeal a provincial decision to let Alton Gas build a natural gas storage facility in an underground salt dome between Stewiacke and Shubenacadie. The province had halted the project in 2014 after a dissident native group protested it had not been adequately consulted. Last month, after a year-and-a-half delay, the Nova Scotia Department of Environment deemed the project safe and said Alton had fulfilled its obligation to consult. As often happens in environmental protests, opposing groups have raised a variety of objections, some plausible, some seemingly trivial. The...
Robert Caro is one of my favourite authors. He's working on the last part of his five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, an exhaustive, spellbinding account of a strange but masterful politician. The project has taken 42 years so far. Before that, Caro wrote Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses, the polarizing, all-powerful mid-20th century master builder of the metropolitan New York area, whose influence on urban planning spread design mistakes across the continent. We are only beginning to come to terms with the consequences. The Gothamist, a New York City blog, has a fascinating interview with Caro in which he describes his tortured transition from newspaper reporter...
Earlier this month, Bill Turpin spent a week with a patient undergoing surgery at the problem-plagued Victoria General Hospital. He put his cell phone camera to good use. Yesterday he posted 25 images of maintenance failures. Here are seven, together with his acerbic captions: Eye's Down. Think of your blood pressure. Oops! Sorry! Don't look down either. Not bad by comparison. Still, it's a hospital! Soon a patient will be wheeled into this spot. Would you eat at a restaurant that looked like this patient bay? Rest assured any food service health inspector would look askance at it. Third world, you say? Hah! In some third...
DON'T PUT Q-TIPS IN YOUR EAR!!! The statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, gets its annual spring cleaning on April 12, 1995. From The Atlantic, which has more historic photos of the memorial. (Denis Paquin / AP) Update: From the Washington Post: Q-tips are one of the most perplexing things for sale in America. Plenty of consumer products are widely used in ways other than their core function — books for leveling tables, newspapers for keeping fires aflame, seltzer for removing stains, coffee tables for resting legs — but these cotton swabs are distinct. Q-tips are one of the...
For liberals, perhaps the most discomfiting fact about the late Justice Antonin Scalia was his abiding friendship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, his ideological opposite on the court. They shared a passion for opera and an affection for each other. In her chambers, Ginsburg kept a photo of herself and Scalia riding an elephant in India. She claimed she only sat behind Scalia so as to distribute the weigh more evenly upon the elephant. I was keen to read Ginsburg's tribute to her friend, and she did not disappoint. Toward the end of the opera Scalia/Ginsburg, tenor Scalia and soprano Ginsburg sing a duet: “We are different,...
A newly launched website encourages USians alarmed at the prospect of a Trump presidency to consider Cape Breton. Having read Jane Kansas's chilling account of a Donald Trump rally in Florida, and having moved to Cape Breton from Massachusetts during Richard Nixon's presidency, I can get behind this project. Don't wait until Donald Trump is elected president to find somewhere else to live! Start now, that way, on election day, you just hop on a bus to start your new life in Cape Breton, where women can get abortions, Muslim people can roam freely, and the only 'walls' are holding up the roofs...
From her winter home in Tampa, snowbird Jane Kansas made her way to last Friday's Donald Trump Rally at the University of South Florida Sun Dome, seating capacity 10,411. Once inside, Kansas squeezed through the crowd to a concrete standing room area immediately below dais where Trump spoke: Because this is a sports arena the lighting is very white and very bright. Trump’s hair is very yellow. His face is very orange. His teeth are very white. His shirt is very white. His tie is very red. He speaks without notes, with confidence. He does not say anything he does not want to. Except for one...
There's a restaurant in Cape Breton whose signboard has inspired thousands of wry selfies. Its parking lot enjoyed brief fame as the best vantage point from which to view Jesus during his fleeting appearance on the side of a nearby Tim Horton's.* So far as I know, it's the only Nova Scotia eatery to have attained a listing in the Playboy Business Directory. And now, it's the subject of a music video that seeks to capture its unique appeal. [Content Warning: This video contains ribald Cape Breton humour. Mainlanders should view with caution, especially at work.] Video link. Cape Breton musician Alton MacKinnon and...
Over at his This Isn't Journalism blog, Scott Gillard offers some acerbic observations on the NDP leadership vote, which takes place February 28 in Halifax. In no particular order, Gillard is a Glace Bay native, a good friend of mine, an NDP supporter who freely acknowledges the party's flaws, and the proprietor of Boom12, a Halifax design and social media company whose clients include a Liberal MLA. He is one of Contrarian's go-to people for shrewd observations on Nova Scotia politics. "The NDP," he writes, "is caught up in something of an existential crisis both provincially and federally." As [far] the Nova Scotia leadership race is concerned, there are...