Allison Sparling,* the young Halifax activist who (with Evey Hornbeck and Katherine Taylor) deliciously put the boots to a repulsive crew of travelling anti-abortion protesters from Upper Canada, is herself moving to Upper Canada. In a blog post, she offers a personal check-list of things Halifax should fix to retain youth: Transit. Every other bus trip makes you feel like you would be better sawing off an arm with a spoon. The transit system here is so bad for a city of it’s size it almost feels like an insult. Recently, my partner and I decided to try to buy a tablet as a...

16 December, 2015

Taken Friday night by Dr.Drone, a Dartmouth-based drone sales and repair firm with a very cool Instagram feed. Sparkling in the left foreground are Halifax's excellent new roundabouts,* with Cogswell St. along the bottom of the photo. Bedford Basin is at the top of the frame, with the two harbour bridges, the shipyard, and the Northwood Centre prominent along the right side. [UPDATE] Contrarian reader Jonah Sabean points out the striking contrast between streets lit with halogen bulbs (orange) and those lit with LEDs (bluish white). As a matter of economic development policy and energy conservation, the LEDs, manufactured by a heavily...

13 December, 2015

A spectacularly profane passerby captured vivid video of the suspicious fire that destroyed a building under construction on Maitland Street, Halifax, early Monday morning. This footage captures the first moments of the fire. The sound of approaching sirens doesn't come until nearly two minutes in. At 2:20 the fire appears to go through what firefighters call "flashover," and at 2:40, the first truck appears (at least as seen from the phone-toting videographer's vantage). When Halifax Fire division commander Brad Connors said the three-storey building was "fully involved" when his crews arrived, he wasn't kidding. It's a sobering reminder of how little time you have to get to safety in...

09 December, 2015

[caption id="attachment_15485" align="alignwrap" width="600"] "Pookie," out on a tick-gathering mission. (Not exactly as illustrated.)[/caption] A discerning Toronto friend, a woman with exceptional research skills, recently discovered a tick on her pet cat, "Pookie*." After taking Pookie to a vet, she posted the following PSA on Facebook. Make sure to check your pets—both cats and dogs—for ticks! [Pookie] uses monthly, topical anti-flea medication, but it does not have any effect on other parasites. In Ontario, the tick population is, apparently, especially high this year and [Pookie]  had one on her neck. I'm hoping her blood tests come back clean and that she's happy...

23 November, 2015

If you are near Halifax this week, consider taking in the 10th annual (well, almost annual) Sable Island Update organized by the naturalist and longtime Sable resident Zoe Lucas. After a year's hiatus, Lucas returns to Saint Mary's University this Wednesday evening with what looks to be a great lineup of illustrated talks on the most beguiling real estate in Nova Scotia. Parks Canada Senior Archaeologist Charles Burke will present the results of the first-ever archaeological survey of human artifacts on the island, including its notorious shipwrecks and sporadic attempts at human settlement dating back to the 16th century. Burke will...

22 November, 2015

Department of Modification and Rectification, Maclean's Magazine edition: For the record, Leslie has 10 fingers; Statler and Waldorf have a combined total of 16....

21 November, 2015

Halifax Mayor Ron Wallace Edmund Morris Mike Savage was on CBC Radio Wednesday, taking calls about small business property taxes when Liz Crocker, owner of Woozles Childrens Bookstore, the yellow building pictured above, rang up with a complaint. Like Savage, Crocker is a life-long Liberal, and she's strategic enough to be polite when lobbying a politician. But you could tell she was annoyed at various burdens the city places on small business. "When I got my tax bill this year, I was surprised to see an 'encroachment fee' for the wheelchair ramp I installed." Believe it or not, this is standard operating procedure...

20 November, 2015

Thanks to two Contrarian readers called Richard for pointing out that, while that the words corda de varal may mean “let’s reach into the core” in Turkish, they mean “clothesline rope” in Portuguese. From there it took but a few Google searches to locate the workshop that produced ingenious contraptions for recycling plastic soda bottles into twine and brooms featured here yesterday in Jaru, Brazil, a small city in the western Amazon state of Rondônia. The maker is Alceu Rocha, better known to his Jaru neighbours as “Gyro Gearloose.” From the Hackaday website: Not a word of English is spoken in the video,...

20 November, 2015

A bit of clever, grass-roots engineering borne of necessity: The source of this video, which is getting lots of traction on Facebook, is unclear. Posted on YouTube by Moez Hassen, it was re-posted to Facebook by Radio Gaza, although it's not clear the makeshift recycling facility is located in the Palestinian exclave. Toward the end, it bears the stamp of Yok Böyle Birsey, a whimsical Turkish website which translates as "no such thing." The package of twine shown at the end bears the label corda de varal, which is Turkish for something akin to, "Let's reach into the core." Portuguese for "clothesline rope." My...

18 November, 2015

A wise friend wondered on Facebook whether it was prudent for President François Hollande to visit the Bataclan concert hall so soon after the shooting stopped. It's good he went. The sooner people behave normally after an attack like this, the better. The threat was almost certainly over once the shooting stopped. Usually, in the hours, days, and weeks afterwards, we pretend we are in much greater danger than we are. The strange modern compulsion to form an empathetic connection with ghastly news events swings into action. We wring our hands and declare, "Everything has changed." We cede yet more power to...

14 November, 2015
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