Data journalism doesn't have to be complicated. The front page of this morning's St. Louis Post Dispatch compares the percentage of African Americans in 31 Missouri municipalities with the percentage in their respective police forces: H/T: AS...
Employees of Seaside Communications,* the Cape Breton company that built what is thought to be the world's largest fixed wireless Internet system,** took the bucket challenge yesterday in support of fellow employee Darryl Bach, an IT systems administrator who has been living with ALS since 2011. Seaside videographer Jason LeFrense, whose videos about the late Ryan Gillis and the Weird Bread Troupe have won wide praise, put together this account of Bach's life with the illness, and the friends and co-workers who gathered to cheer him on yesterday. It's Darryl who makes the video so compelling, avoiding slogans but instead giving a matter-of-fact account of what the disease is like, how it came...
Halifax filmmaker Andrea Dorfman made Lost and Found, the short movie below about Halifax artist and writer Jane Kansas, in 2008. I somehow missed it until this morning, when someone posted it on Facebook. That's timely, because Kansas's one-woman exhibit, "Kansas: Fifty Year Retrospective," opens tonight (Aug. 23) at (((Parentheses))) Gallery, 2168 Gottingen St. The exhibit is sure to be head-shakingly funny, arresting, insightful, and touching. Kansas is one of the most original and talented artists in Nova Scotia. When I featured excerpts from the travel blog of her solo walk across the continental US on Contrarian.ca (here and here), I wrote: What Nova Scotia...
Clay Shirky thinks so. He cites this graph: Journalists have been infantilized throughout the last decade, kept in a state of relative ignorance about the firms that employ them. A friend tells a story of reporters being asked the paid print circulation of their own publication. Their guesses ranged from 150,000 to 300,000; the actual figure was 35,000. If a reporter was that uninformed about a business he was covering, he’d be taken off the story...
Four days ago, burglars broke into LaHave folksinger Darren Arsenault's house and made off with a clutch of treasured vintage instruments: an early 1960s gibson long neck banjo; a handmade Gilles acoustic guitar with a redwood top, butternut back and sides; a black Baritone guitar, and some recording gear. Arsenault posted this message on his Facebook page: As of today, when Arsenault posted the update below, 561 Facebook members had shared the message on their Facebook pages. Whatever else you might say about social networks, they seem to be pretty effective at inspiring the return of stolen musical instruments....
If you've ever wondered what Alexander Calder's work might look like in a strip club, check out the Great Art in Ugly Rooms Tumblr Blog: H/T: Sorry, can't recall who or what led me to this gem....
Yesterday I wondered why small town police forces in the US thought they needed mine-resistant armoured vehicles. This morning I marvelled that Keene NH, pop. 23,409, had asked for and received a Lenco Bearcat (Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck) to protect its annual pumpkin festival from potential terrorist attacks. In an update this afternoon, I discovered that Ottawa Police have a Lenco Bearcat of their own. Now thanks to an alert Contrarian reader with Pictou County roots, I know New Glasgow Regional Police have obtained a Canadian Forces surplus Cougar Light Armoured Vehicle. That's it pictured above, with Emergency Response Team members from New Glasgow, Stellarton and Westville. (The...
Yesterday I asked what use a small town police department could possibly have for one of the mine-resistant armoured vehicles US Homeland Security has been handing out like candied apples at a Halloween dance. Thanks to Contrarian reader Ryan Van Horne for pointing our that comedian John Oliver already supplied the answer on his Sunday HBO show, Last Week Tonight: http://youtu.be/KUdHIatS36A?t=6m48s When applying for one of the vehicles, the town of Keene NH said, "the terrorism threat is far reaching and often unforeseen," and cited the need to keep its annual Pumpkin Festival safe from terrorists. Not since Whittaker Chambers led investigators from the House Un-American Activities...
In case you missed it, the New York Times provided this startling interactive graphic showing the amount of surplus military equipment US Armed Forces have supplied to local police departments, county by county, since 9/11 unleashed runaway militarization of civilian authority in the United States and elsewhere: Once you click through to the New York Times, you can filter the map for types of weaponry, or hover your cursor over any of the 3,007 counties in the US to see exactly what gear police in that jurisdiction obtained. Some of this is mindbogglingly inexplicable. I'm unaware of anyone—right, left, libertarian, vegetarian, Quaker, or Muslim—setting land mines in Centerburg or Plainville. So what exactly...
In the annals of musical eccentricity, one of the unlikeliest characters has to be Johan "Bottleneck John" Eliasson, 43, a blues musician from Lit, Sweden, pop. 1040. I've been following Eliasson for years, because he shares my fondness for blues music and antique mechanical contrivances—old tractors, make-n-breaks, hot bulb engines, and hydraulic rams. He's a sucker for vintage instruments, and he loves turning old machines into impromptu rhythm sections. Here, in a clip he released yesterday, Eliasson plays a steel-bodied, 12-string Dobro and a ~50-year-old Volvo tractor. (Note how, at the 1:50 mark, he brings the tempo down by means of the tractor's steering-shaft-mounted throttle.) In this clip, from December...