This clever three-panel from Tracey Moody ("The Moody Atheist") has been making the rounds on Twitter and Facebook: Most Contrarian readers will get the joke, although some commenters on FB and Twitter did not. The usual explanation is that homeopathic "remedies" are so highly diluted in water, they contain only minuscule quantities of the "active" ingredient—thus, payment in the form of a dollar-bill snippet. In fact, homeopathic "remedies" are so highly diluted, they contain absolutely none of the "active" ingredient—not a single molecule. (See: Avogadro's number.) But without a single molecule, the joke wouldn't work, so we're happy to allow Ms. Moody some comedic license....

07 October, 2014

I made a fleeting reference Tuesday to Sydney-Whitney Pier MLA Gordie Gosse's impromptu speech to the legislature imploring fellow lawmakers to listen to the health care workers protesting outside. Gosse contrasted Premier Stephen McNeil's flight from Province House, behind the tinted windows of a US-style, black SUV, with the courage a previous Liberal premier showed, plunging into a crowd of menacing steelworkers and letting them say their piece. Gosse's speech, made more poignant by his difficulty speaking following intense treatment for mouth cancer by some of the very workers protesting outside, is now available on YouTube. Here's the high point:  I remember back in [1998], there was another...

05 October, 2014

When McClelland and Stewart sent Jane Urquhart a copy of her 1986 debut novel, The Whirlpool, the publisher also slipped in Alistair MacLeod’s second collection of short stories, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun. The two books had been released together under M&S’s “Signature Series” imprint. Urquhart, who recounted the story Friday night during her tribute to Alistair at the Cabot Trail Writer’s Festival in St. Ann’s, was not familiar with MacLeod. After a few days savouring her newfound status as published author, she set about reading Birds. Then she read it again. Then she went out and bought MacLeod’s first...

04 October, 2014

The Twitter feed of the Nova Scotia Archives posted this photo today, with the caption, "Loading supplies at Ciboux Island, ca. 1937." The supplies, one presumes, were bound for the manned lighthouse that once operated there, a facility long since replaced by an automated light tower. Ciboux is the more northerly of the two Bird Islands: long, narrow outcroppings described by steep cliffs, and lying in a straight line off Cape Dauphin in Victoria County. They comprise one of the most important seabird sites in Nova Scotia, and are home to the largest colony of Great Cormorants in North America. Numerous other...

30 September, 2014

Tuesday afternoon, Herald political reporter Michael Gorham's Twitter feed alerted me to Gordie Gosse's impassioned plea for fellow MLAs to talk to the union members protesting outside the legislature, to just hear them out; his pointed recollection of the courage former Liberal MP (and later, premier) Russell MacLellan showed during a union demonstration in the late 1990s, when he twice ignored security and plunged into a menacing crowd of enraged coal miners steelworkers* to face their complaints; his grateful tribute to the health workers who cared for him during his recent battle with throat cancer. Alas, by the time I tuned in to Legislature's live feed, Gosse had finished speaking, and House Leader Michelle Samson...

30 September, 2014

We have assumptions and guesses about why young people leave Nova Scotia, but not a lot of hard data. I think we should conduct exit interviews. When a student picks up a degree from one of our universities or community colleges, but decides to make a life elsewhere, let's find out exactly what factors led to that decision, and what might have turned it around. And not just university students: Exactly what work opportunity would keep a construction worker off the plane to Fort Mac? How many days work at what wage? What other considerations factored in? Writing in The Coast last December, David Fleming, Director of the North End Business Association, reviewed Nova...

20 September, 2014

It's easy to get worked up about environmental threats that directly impact your home or family. The news is full of protests against a gravel pit here, a wind farm there, a paper mill that blows noxious fumes through the middle of town. It's much harder to sustain protest against an environmental threat like climate change that is geographically dispersed, gradual in impact, and masked by natural swings in weather conditions—even though it presents an existential threat to humankind that dwarfs gravel pits, paper mills, and even fracking. The environmental movement has constituents to satisfy and operating budgets to raise, so it expends too much effort on issues...

19 September, 2014

As North Americans watch West Africa's Ebola epidemic with rising fascination and fear, an entirely preventable epidemic is tearing through the second largest US city, attracting little notice. So far, three children have died—all in their first two months of life. Of 8,000 reported cases in California, mostly affecting children, 267 have required treatment in hospital, 58 in intensive care. The illness is highly contagious, and antibiotics have little impact. “A number of them have been...

16 September, 2014

My friend and former Halifax Daily News colleague Shaune MacKinlay, now principal advisor to HRM Mayor John Mike Savage, thought my report of a newly opened Queen St. candy shop that bars entry to people in wheelchairs and discriminates against them in hiring gave short shrift to HRM's recent efforts on accessibility. She pointed to two measures recommended by the Mayor’s Conversation on Healthy, Liveable Communities" (an October 2013 meeting attended by 80 people), and adopted by unanimous vote of council. Along with establishing an orchard and fixing the bike lane at the Halifax end of the MacDonald Bridge, the meeting urged HRM to: Work with Business Improvement Districts to...

15 September, 2014

The Halifax-based Centre for Law and Democracy held a seminar Thursday, billed as an “open discussion” with federal Treasury Board employees where participants could “talk about problems with the current open government processes and how they can be fixed.” When Tim Bousquet of the Halifax Examiner showed up, well, that was the end of the seminar. Bousquet describes astounding (but sadly, unsurprising) incident in today's Morning File: [We] went around the table introducing ourselves...

12 September, 2014
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