"Nine of the 10 warmest years since 1880 have occurred since the year 2000," reports NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The first years of the new millennium experienced "sustained higher temperatures than in any decade during the 20th century." Goddard, which monitors global surface temperatures, compiled the findings into an animation showing global temperature trends since 1885.     The animated map charts differences from the average temperature recorded during a baseline period of 1951-1980. Dark Red zones are two degrees Celsius warmer than the baseline; dark blue are two degrees colder. You can download a copy of the animation here. The average incremental...

31 December, 2012

Right-wing blogger and Maclean's columnist Colby Cosh professes consternation at his discovery that running a hunger strike from a makeshift teepee in the middle of the Ottawa River involves actual out-of-pocket expenses, for which supporters of the striker might solicit actual contributions. Pressing his dudgeon pedal to the metal, Cosh waxes indignant at Chief Theresa Spence for "distort[ing] the perceived integrity" of "the most morally serious activity a protester can undertake." Oh, the humanity! Cosh concludes his thinly veiled ad hominem attack by speculating that Spence's "demands aren’t in earnest and the whole thing is no more than a publicity ploy." Well thank goodness for...

29 December, 2012

Two reader responses to the angry rant from a utility customer who objected to receiving generic holiday greetings at Christmastime. Jeffrey Shallit writes: This guy represents everything that is bad about Christian North America. He doesn't understand freedom of religion; he feels so threatened by non-Christians he wants to resort to violence; and he assumes everyone who is Canadian is necessarily Christian (forget about all those damned, Jews, I suppose, not to mention native Canadians who might follow traditional native religions). Although not Jewish myself, I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia that was predominantly Jewish. Many lost members of their family...

29 December, 2012

Shortly before Christmas, a company I work with sent out a message to its customers advising them of shorter holiday hours for telephone customer service and technical support. Imbued with the spirit of Jesus, a customer in Cumberland County saw fit to reply: I am sure that your boss has ordered compliance with the goddam politically correct and inoffensive crowd that is prevalent these days, but it is Merry Christmas or Happy Christmas in your correspondence with me, otherwise don’t bother. I once threatened that the next person that bowed and cowered to the middle East and Asian immigrants’ demands, and wished...

26 December, 2012

In response to last night's post about the surprising drugs-and-arms bust on Boularderie, John Percy, leader of the Green Party of Nova Scotia, writes: [T]he war on drugs...

20 December, 2012

As you have no doubt heard, police busted a house at Southside Boularderie Island yesterday, just a few miles down the road from Contrarian HQ. They found an eyebrow-raising array of firearms, along with cocaine, ecstasy, steroids, and my personal favorite, pot. An RCMP news release cataloged the seized items in a handy bulleted list. The release also included this statement from Inspector John Ryan: Yesterday's seizure reinforces the clear link between drugs and violence. Wrong. Yesterday's seizure reinforces the clear link between prohibition and violence. Eliminate the prohibition on drugs, and you'll eliminate the artificial prices that enrich and encourage gun-toting thugs. Overnight. Al Capone taught our grandparents this...

20 December, 2012

One would like to think of human history as an unbroken march toward enlightenment in which superstition and magical beliefs are gradually discarded in favor of rational thought and evidence-based decisions. One would like to, but then one remembers the media's obsession with Mayan doomsday predictions never actually predicted by actual Mayans, and the scandalous failure of most Nova Scotia health care workers to get the 'flu vaccine (thus depriving themselves, their families, and their patients of the most effective life-saving advance in medical history), and today's numerological media trope-de-jour: the fact that today's (arbitrary) date can be rendered as 12-12-12. So...

12 December, 2012

Cartoonist Kate Beaton has momentarily lapsed into prose, with a story about the Canso Causeway in a new Alberta-based literary magazine called, fittingly, Eighteen Bridges. I once watched a travel show where Billy Connolly, the Scottish entertainer, journeyed across Canada. In Halifax, he expressed a distaste for the whooshing tartans, skirling pipes, and other superficial expressions of Scottishness, which he deemed tawdry and inauthentic. It was disheartening, because if he really wanted authenticity, he could have just called me up. I would have recited one of those tragic old Gaelic songs that have been a Cape Breton staple ever since Authentic Scottish...

11 December, 2012

Any idea what this is: Or this? How about this? It's an interactive map (sadly not embeddable), produced by the Bombsight Project, showing every documented bomb strike in the London blitz between October 7, 1940, and June 6, 1941. The project is a joint effort by the University of Portsmouth, the UK National Archhives, and a charity called JISC. On the actual map (but not the screenshots above), viewers can zoom in on a particular dot, then right click for the details: Now let's see the map for Dresden....

10 December, 2012

"Will it hurt your Celtic Colours," asks Sydney-born slide-guitarist John Campbelljohn, with more than a hint of sourness, "If I paint them blue sometimes?” Rev. Greg MacLeod has long argued that the genre we think of as Cape Breton music is not simply warmed over Celtic, but an amalgam of styles rooted in Scotland but also reflecting the Central European, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, and Jewish immigrants who flocked here in the early 20th Century, when the opening of the steel plant triggered a coal mining boom. Here's the latest entry in the Not-Just-Celtic roster, courtesy of a three young Capers, Kyle Mischiek,...

10 December, 2012
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