Writing in the Kings County Register/Advertiser, Ed Coleman puzzles over the correct name for Scott's Bay,  aka Scots Bay, a 350-year-old community on the Blomidon Peninsula, of which Wikipedia writes, "The debate on how to spell the name of this little seaside village is as old as the community." Per Coleman: Historically, Scots Bay must be correct as the name for the community. But to be fair and offer a bit of evidence to the contrary, the official highway map produced by the Department of Highways in 1935 has Scotsman Bay in bold type as the community name. The department’s map for 1944 has...

23 January, 2015

In internet-speak, it's known as a "meme"—an allegedly funny image, video, or text that spreads rapidly through social media. A familiar sub-genre is a photo in which an unknowing subject is inadvertently juxtaposed with a sign giving rise to risqué double entendre. When the Disciplinary Committee of the Dalhousie Dental School was casting about for something—anything—it could cite as retroactive justification for suspending the male student who blew the whistle on the obnoxious Facebook group Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen, it discovered that Ryan Millet had once clicked the "like" button beneath such an image on the DDS15 group. Here's the photo: It's not exactly uproarious, but it is exceedingly tame by...

21 January, 2015

Daily weather—specifically, daily fluctuations in temperature—tends to mask the gradual process of climate change. You may not have noticed 2014 was the hottest year in the history of our planet until you heard it on the news. Tom Randall and Blacki Migliozzi of Bloomberg News devised a deceptively simple graph to animate the accelerating rise in global temperatures over the last 135 years. The screen-capture below offers a static snapshot of the moving picture, but you should really go look at the real thing. Starting in 1880, the animation draws a single line showing the monthly temperatures for each year in succession, overlaying the next year's line atop the first, and so on,...

19 January, 2015

A Nova Scotia man whose brother's family lives in Dallas, Texas, recounts this recent conversation the brother had with his daughter, a student in Grade Three: Father: We don't use the word "retarded" to describe people with developmental disabilities. Daughter: But Daddy, it's in my school book....

15 January, 2015

[NB: The following post contains language not intended for canine ears. Dog-ownerly discretion is advised.] From an ad posted in the "Services-Pets" section of Seattle's Craigslist: HEY RICH-ASS DOG OWNERS: Are you at the office 23 hours a day in a coke-fueled effort to squeeze every last penny out of your 20's and 30's? Are you going out of town with your post-divorce trophy-girlfriend to visit your slave ship collection in the Barbados? I AM YOUR DOG-WALKER I am the most radical, bitching, mind blowing dog- walking experience in all of Seattle. All dogs are STOKED when I'm around, regardless of breed or sex. Your dog...

15 January, 2015

[caption id="attachment_14762" align="alignwrap" width="550"] No sex please. We're university students.[/caption] A legal lynching took place Thursday at the hands of the media, Glen Canning, and the Mount Saint Vincent University administration. They and we should all feel a bit dirty. Michael Kydd, a part-time instructor at Mount Saint Vincent University, was suspended, then resigned, after he was found to have had a brief sexual relationship with a student. The student was 38 years old, Kydd is 40. The course was a distance education offering, the sex consensual. The woman says they were both going through a difficult patch—Kydd was separated from his wife and seeking a divorce—when they found comfort...

08 January, 2015

Yesterday I criticized Irwin Fefergrad, registrar of the Royal Ontario College of Dental Surgeons, for conducting a media blitz in which he passed premature judgment on the Dalhousie Dental School crisis, and chided the school administration for good measure. A reader with long and deep experience in government responded on Facebook: It has been quite a while since I looked at Administrative Law so I could be off base here. But I suspect Fefergrad has actually complicated his ability to protect the people of Ontario — and you are correct he has not yet been called upon to protect them from Dal's class of '15. Regulators' actions were...

08 January, 2015

As everyone knows by now, Dalhousie University is in crisis over a series of repulsive Facebook posts by certain male students in the fourth year of its dentistry program. The students' actions have provoked nearly universal anger and condemnation. Dalhousie President Richard Florizone is charged with sorting out the mess. His decision to proceed deliberately, in particular his support for a restorative justice process as opposed to a purely punitive one, has been criticized by many, supported by some. Florizone has been firm that any punishment, "must follow a just process—a process which is consistent with the law, with university policies, and which upholds...

07 January, 2015

Bruce Wark is concerned about "the total costs of our car culture." I feel that deaths and injuries are a subset of those costs. I also feel that your argument with Tim [Bousquet] is rather narrow and that when it comes to overall transportation policy, you’re probably both on the same side. [See previous instalments here and here, on Halifax Examiner, here and here, and on twitter ad nauseam.]  Although there have been improvements in fatality and injury rates, there is still a lot of suffering associated with car crashes. The Hamm government made things worse with those absurd changes to auto insurance...

05 January, 2015
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