Who can resist this? Last night, Blue Jay right fielder Jose Bautista robbed Kansas City Royals' designated hitter Billy Butler of a single, by throwing him out at first on a sharply hit one-hopper to right. (If the animated gifs don't load in the e-mail version, you can see them here.) About a third of the way to first, Butler puts his head down and digs, as the realization dawns he might be in trouble: Also note Bautista's somersault from the momentum of his throw. A Baseball Prospectus article I can no longer find catalogs recent plays* in which a right-fielder zapped a batter at first, but pooh-poohs the phenomenon on grounds...

30 May, 2014

Well, whoop-dee-do! The Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board has granted a charter bus company permission to use five additional buses when servicing cruise ships that visit Sydney. This UARB decision required: Notice in two daily newspapers and the Nova Scotia Gazette A detailed application by the charter company A two-day hearing in the UARB's Halifax office, 400 km from Sydney The time and attention of three UARB commissioners, a UARB lawyer, and a lawyer for the bus company Testimony by the Sydney Ports Corporation, the Halifax Port Authority; Destination Halifax; the Tourism Industry Association of Nova Scotia, the Halifax Chamber of Commerce; and the Sydney & Area Chamber of Commerce. A further...

30 May, 2014

It's the perfect marriage of self-righteousness, misanthropy, and medical quackery. People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, aka PETA, showed its own ethical colours this week by promoting veganism with a discredited ad that falsely links milk consumption to autism. In reality, there is no link. But why scruple to exploit the distress of parents coping with autism, when a truly important cause, like ending cow milking, is at stake? There is no credible scientific evidence that milk products play any role in autism. Forbes debunks the PETA ad here. The website ScienceBasedMedicine debunks it here. Wired debunks it here. WrongPlanet.net debunks it here. The London Telegraph debunks it here. All this matters little to the charlatans at PETA....

28 May, 2014

I thought my friend the annoyed media critic was going to have a stroke when she heard CBC host Linden MacIntyre was retiring for the good of the children. This Linden MacIntyre story is gag-inducing. MacIntyre should have left five years ago if he wanted to help younger journalists. Seriously. What Spin. He's 70. Wonder how many full days he was putting in for his salary (which he wouldn't disclose, of course). Apparently 130 young journalists can be hired now. Yippee! The country's 20- and 30-somethings are all underemployed because of the glut of boomers sitting at the top, waiting for the their savings to rebound from...

28 May, 2014

I walked straight into this one. In yesterday's post, I derided those who see every tragic event as an invitation to hobby horse dressage, then pivoted to endorse the anti-gun, anti-craven politician cri de coeur by the father of a Santa Barbara victim. Reader: You should have followed the advice of your own post and resisted the blaming of a crazy person on a hobby horse of your liking. Contrarian: Touche! But at least my hobby horse is rationally connected to the killing spree. Reader: As rationally connected as the knife that he killed the first three people with, and the car he drove around with. Hobby horses never die! ...

28 May, 2014

I've done my best to avoid ingesting details of the Santa Barbara killings, but thanks to Dave Pell, one of my favourite Internet gem aggregators, I did see Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday's loopy suggestion that, "a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl" might be a factor. (Put down Apatow—and Seth Rogen, also implicated by Hornaday—as unamused.) Pell's comment seems apt: "Whenever a sociopath does something horrific, there is a race to explain how that singular act is representative of a broader societal trend. But what if it's just representative of extreme...

27 May, 2014

When the Scottish writer and comedian Lynn Ferguson was 37, she got pregnant, and there ensued an battle of wills with staff of the hospital where she was to give birth. She told the story recently on The Moth Storytelling Hour. Almost as soon as everybody agreed that I was technically in the family way, they decided that I should have an amniocentesis. An amniocentesis is, like, an invasive test. They put a needle into the fluid here—the amniotic fluid—and it can tell you whether the baby has Down Syndrome or not. But there's also a one percent risk that it will cause...

26 May, 2014

We interrupt the annual Canadian orgy of hockey obsession to note the fleeting strangeness of the Major League Baseball American League East Division standings:* There are a number of curiosities here. All five teams in the division are on losing streaks (although, in the case of the Yankees and the Blue Jays, the "streaks" are only one game long). Only the Blue Jays have a positive run differential (DIFF: more runs scored by than scored against). Though they are in third place, barely above .500, the Blue Jays are given the best chance of making the playoffs (POFF: a projection supplied...

19 May, 2014

Now this is strange: When margarine consumption in the US began a steady decline at the turn of the century, the divorce rate in Maine fell in lock-step: Oh, but wait, correlation is not causation! The apparent connection between inferior butter substitutes and marriage breakups in the Pine Tree State is a mere co-incidence. Harvard Law student Tyler Vigen is collecting, and graphing, statistical sets that appear to track one other closely, but have no real world connection. (Probably.) "The charts on this site aren't meant to imply causation, nor are they meant to create a distrust for research or even correlative data," Vigen writes. "Rather,...

13 May, 2014

Last month, Loons began their annual return to breeding sites along Nova Scotia's freshwater lakes and ponds. Friday morning, Joshua Barss Donham captured this video of a loon feasting on flounder in the Northwest Arm of Halifax Harbour, just metres away from traffic on Quinpool Road and the Armdale Rotary. [Click the [  ] icon at the bottom right to view full screen.] "How long does it take a loon to tenderize and swallow a flounder?" asks Joshua. "About two minutes, 11 seconds—that's how long." Over the space of 20 minutes, Joshua watched this bird dive after, catch, and swallow three flounder. "Twice,...

04 May, 2014
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