[See update below.] Maybe there are facts i'm unaware of, but barring something that diverges sharply from initial accounts, laying criminal charges against the boy whose horseplay led to the death of his friend and fellow student at Sydney Academy last week, seems harsh and inappropriate. Condolences, of course, to the family and friends of Christopher Walter Chafe. The loss of any child is a horrible thing. For the loss to occur so suddenly and randomly, at 18 years of age, is an awful thing to bear. But if this terrible event resulted from friendly rough-housing gone horribly awry, charges are unwarranted and cruel. As...

22 February, 2015

It's a gorgeous day at Contrarian world headquarters—crisp and sunny with a few fair-weather clouds and not a hint of precipitation. Here's the official version, courtesy of Google: It's the kind of day that puts Vitamin D back in our systems and makes us feel winter isn't such an grim thing after all. Every business on the island is open. And all schools are closed. The Cape Breton-Victoria District School Board, known  for its hair trigger school closure protocols, has been rendered dysfunctional by the death of a high school student last week. The accident was horrific. Two lads were engaged in horseplay when one of them...

20 February, 2015

...Summed up in a single chart: Federal funding for Nova Scotia universities announced today by Justice Minister Peter MacKay on behalf of Science and Technology Minister Ed Holder under the federal Research Support Fund. The fund covers overhead and additional research costs associated with “managing the research funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), such as salaries for staff who provide administrative support, training costs for workplace health and safety, maintenance of libraries and laboratories; and administrative costs associated with obtaining...

18 February, 2015

When word of the foiled Valentine's Day shooting plot emerged, along with police assurances that it was not a terrorist attack, I tweeted: This was tounge-in-cheek, of course, I was happy to have police debunk any terreorist connection, because I thought doing so might curb the Harper Government's penchant for ramping up public fear of violence at every opportunity. I was wrong. As if on cue, Justice Minister Peter MacKay called a news conference to trumpet the events as justification for existing and proposed government surveillance of private citizen communications. In fact, as the police made clear, spying on citizens played no role....

14 February, 2015

Wonder why Quebec feels linguistically isolated? The faint blush of pale green, circled on the map above, represents the French-speaking region of North America on this screenshot of an interactive Google Chrome map of the globe. Blue represents English speakers, Orange Spanish, dark green Portuguese. Polyglot Europe stands off to the northeast. (Why there's a barely visible orange dot near the Alberta-Montana border is beyond me.) The example above is from an open Google-devised platform for geographic data visualization project called The WebGL Globe. It's only a screenshot. To get the full effect, go to the source. Google encourages users to copy the code, add...

02 February, 2015

I first wrote about the sordid background to the Petit-de-Grat manslaughter case here and here. My posts touched off the busiest two days in Contrarian's six-year history, with more than 100,000 visits. It also touched off a letter-writing war between supporters of both men in the deeply divided community. You can read a selection here and here. I received dozens more letters—about four to one in support of Landry—but decided not to run them out of concern the village will need decades to heal without Contrarian making matters worse. In light of Chief Justice Joseph Kennedy's excessive sentence, I will run one more letter, because it illustrates the depths...

30 January, 2015

Defence attorney Luke Craggs had it right when he called Chief Justice Joseph Kennedy's excessive sentence in the Joseph Landry manslaughter case, “the sort of sentence career criminals and gangsters get for manslaughter, not guys who have fished for 52 years and pay their taxes and earned an honest living.” Clearly, Kennedy disagreed with the jury's not-guilty finding on the second-degree murder charge, and sentenced Landry for the verdict he wishes it had returned, not the one it did.  It's a case of judicial jury nullification that brings no credit to the court. This marks the latest failure of the criminal justice system in a case that has its roots in a decades-old reign...

30 January, 2015

[caption id="attachment_14812" align="alignwrap" width="550"] In days of old, when knights were bold, and Ross Ferry was Ross's Ferry. Or was it?[/caption] Last weekend I railed against cartographers, bureaucrats, and linguistic descriptivists for robbing Nova Scotia place names of their rightful apostrophes. A Gaelic-speaking Cape Bretoner writes from New Zealand to suggest an alternative explanation: A lot of Nova Scotia place names originated in Gaelic, which has no apostrophe. My post did acknowledge that my beloved Kempt Head likely never had an apostrophe, even though it was probably named for early settlers with the surname Kempt. Nearby Ross [Ross's, Rosses] Ferry, I argued, almost certainly did initially carry the possessive mark. Not...

27 January, 2015

Earlier this month, morality crusader Glen Canning sought to shame a part-time, sessional instructor at Mount Saint Vincent University by publicly posting an intimate photo the man had shared privately with a lover. Two years ago, someone pulled the same stunt on Emma Holten, a Danish journalist. The impact was humiliating. Holten decided to fight back with the video below, which, it may surprise you to learn, includes a new set of revealing photos she commissioned for the occasion. [Possibly NSFW.] Of her decision to disclose new intimate pictures, Holten explains: I get why some people think this is counterintuitive, but I disagree. Consent is...

23 January, 2015
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