Kudos to Andrew Cochran, Maritimes Regional Director of the CBC, for agreeing to debate the network's hyperventilated coverage of routine weather events. We hashed it out in an extended session this morning on CBC Cape Breton's Information Morning program. Longtime Contrarian readers know I think Nova Scotia has lost all perspective about weather, working ourselves into a lather over events we would have taken in stride 30 years ago. The CBC is one link in this chain of timorousness. Environment Canada, which issues daily "statements,"  "advisories," and "warnings" about routine weather inconveniences, is another. School officials arbitrarily grant paid holidays to hundreds of...

28 February, 2013

Last Friday, in one of its periodic displays of  nerdy humor, Google displaced its usual search page logo with an animated gif celebrating Earth's non-collision with Asteroid 2012 DA14, a 50-meter-wide rock that passed within 28,000 meters of our planet—closer than a geostationary communications satellite. Trouble is, another, much smaller meteor chose the same day to collide with Earth, exploding over the Siberian town of Chelyabinsk Oblast with the force of a half megaton nuclear weapon, and injuring 1,500 people below, mostly from flying glass. Google quickly yanked the animation. "Out of respect for those injured in the extraordinary meteor shower in...

18 February, 2013

Almost exactly a year after precipitous--and as it turned out, groundless--complaints by the Nova Scotia Department of Community Services forced the closure of Cape Breton's only residential addiction recovery centre, Talbot House will get its funding back this week. Health and Wellness Minister David Wilson will deliver the news in Cape Breton Friday, a weekday traditionally chosen for announcements governments would prefer to inter quietly. Wilson became the minister responsible for recovery centres last September, when Premier Darrell Dexter, fed up with the continual barrage of negative stories about DCS mistreatment of Talbot, stripped that department of the file and handed...

04 February, 2013

I thought I'd witnessed an impressive milestone in the annals of retail marketing Sunday when I came upon a BestBuy vending machine in Halifax's Stanfield Airport that dispenses iPads. Two hours later, in the Icelandair departure lounge at Boston's Logan Airport, Brookstone trumped BestBuy with its display of personal helicopter drones. For US$299, you can have your own Parrot AR Drone Quadricopter, equipped with two HD video cameras (one facing front and the other pointing earthward), all controlled by an app on your iPhone or iPad. Steve from the Brookstone store gave Balgovind Pande and me a demo: [Video link] Parrot claims battery life sufficient for...

28 January, 2013

A Contrarian reader recently added Pope Benedict XVI's new Twitter account to his Twitter feed. Whenever a user follows someone new, Twitter responds by suggesting a similar person they might also like to follow. Who is similar to His Holiness? Why Charlie Sheen, of course.   Ah the wonders of social technology. Twitter doesn't say exactly which qualities the pontiff and the thespian share. Surely not substance abuse or cohabitation with porn stars. Problems with anger management could be a possibility, but our money is on having children removed from your care for their own protection. H/T: SBD...

25 January, 2013

If you happen to be in Cape Breton Friday, the Cape Breton University Art Gallery will be hosting a public reception from 6 to 8 p.m. to kick off what promises to be intriguing art exhibit. In place of the gallery's traditional annual student-faculty show, ProlitariART is open to submissions from all comers. Here are two preview samples. First, a detail from a work by peripatetic Coxheath photographer Ashley Harding, called Doors of Rome: Second, a pen-and-ink drawing by l'Arche Cape Breton resident Gordon Mills, whose infectiously quirky art work has attracted a legion of fans in Inverness County: ...

23 January, 2013

...and doesn't like what it sees: [Video Link] Yoram Bauman, an environmental economist at the University of Washington, does double duty as a stand-up comic. He spoke to a convention of the American Economic Association this month in San Diego. H/T: Richard Stephenson...

23 January, 2013

At Barak Obama's second inauguration yesterday, American Idol star Kelly Clarkson added a poignant chapter to the storied annals of America's least offensive patriotic anthem, My Country 'Tis of Thee. Seventy-four years ago, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let Marian Anderson perform at the association's Constitution Hall in Washington because the celebrated contralto was African-American. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her DAR membership in protest, and weeks of controversy ensued. On April 9, 1939, 75,000 people turned out to hear Anderson sing at an outdoor Easter Sunday recital on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Interior Secretary...

21 January, 2013
Show more
Loading...