Ashley McKenzie and Nelson MacDonald need help finishing their latest movie about New Waterford. Their first two shorts, "Rhonda's Party" (2010) and "When You Sleep" (2012), achieved exceptional success, screening to widespread praise at the Toronto International Film Festival and Cannes, as well as at festivals in Montreal, Stockholm, Whistler, and St. John's. Along the way, they picked up half a dozen industry awards, including the top prize in CBC's Short Film Faceoff. Despite these early triumphs, the pair have had to turn to crowdsourcing to raise the last few dollars needed to finish post-production on their latest film, "Stray," the...

05 June, 2013

When the Rollings Stones played the Halifax Commons in September, 2006, Mick Jagger impressed the crowd by using the term "Haligonian," and even pronouncing "Newfoundland" correctly. Forty years into his career, the rock superstar still had the professionalism to get every local concert detail exactly right. I have never seen an effort to sprinkle a touring show with meaningful local references to match what Old Crow Medicine Show frontman Ketch Secor displayed last night at the Nashville-based, alt-bluegrass band's Membertou show in Sydney. "It's intimidating to play the violin in a city that has a 60-foot-high statue of one," Secor told the...

04 June, 2013

Here she is, speaking obvious but rarely heard truths about specialist teaching qualifications and the education system as a vast babysitting service, in a March (?), 2012, conversation with the CBC's Amy Smith: [Video link]...

03 June, 2013

A committee meeting at Province House this week has the potential to correct a logstanding injustice in the way Nova Scotia is governed. At the behest of the James McGregor Stewart Society, a disability rights organization, the House of Assembly Management Commission will consider requiring constituency offices to be fully accessible before MLAs can claim reimbursement of office expenses. You might expect this to go without saying in 2013, but it doesn't. Many MLAs' offices are only partly, if at all, accessible. They may have a level entry or a satisfactory wheelchair ramp, but lack a paved parking lot or an accessible...

28 May, 2013

Hard rock, not coal: 160 feet under New York City, workers are building seven miles of tunnels to connect Grand Central Station with the Long Island Railway, on the other side of the East River. [Video link] Photos and a fuller account of the project from Wired here....

28 May, 2013

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that New York City has become the first major municipality to adopt the new active symbol of accessibility, which Contrarian first wrote about in September, 2011. The result of a collaboration between Sara Hendren, graduate student at the Harvard School of Design, and Brian Glenney, philosophy professor at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, the revised icon recasts the passive, static International Symbol of Accessibility (demeaningly known as the "handicapped sign"), investing it with vigor and a sense of motion. The Chronicle reports: New York, in a move that could spark similar updates worldwide, has now agreed to use...

24 May, 2013

It's natural for Auditor General Jacques Lapointe to believe all his recommendations should be implemented, and implemented promptly. Nova Scotia journalists certainly seem to have accepted that view, but is it necessarily so? In his latest report, and in the three press statements he released today to promote it, M. Lapointe complains that only 41 percent of his 2010 recommendations have been implemented to his satisfaction, and only 71 to 79 percent of the recommendations in his reports from 2007, 2008, and 2009. (He didn't add the "to his satisfaction" qualifier, but it's worth noting, since Premier Darrell Dexter complained that...

22 May, 2013

In case you missed it, CNN reporter Wolf Blitzer's attempt to enforce the journalistic requirement that survivors of natural disasters must thank God for the miracle of their escape (while avoiding mention of God's responsibility for the deaths and injuries of those who did not) backfired in Moore, Oklahoma, today yesterday, when survivor Rebecca Vitsmun politely declined to follow the script. [video link] Vitsmun had planned to ride out the tornado with her 19-month-old son Anders by huddling in the bathtub of their home, but 10 minutes before the storm hit, she panicked and fled with with the boy in the family...

22 May, 2013

In the closing moments of an excellent At Issues panel on CBC's The National last night, National Post columnist Andrew Coyne explained why traditional Question Period theatrics are so feckless when a real scandal envelopes government. [If the Opposition] would slow down and ask short simple questions, rather these kind of multiple-part grandstanding theatrics, but they don't seem to be capable of that. What sort of short questions, host Peter Mansbridge asked. [S]imple questions of fact that put ministers on the record, where you can then compare what they say on the record with what they say later. It's more in the nature...

22 May, 2013
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