Join friends of Carol Kennedy, the beloved Cape Breton photographer who is grappling with cancer, for a musical and artistic celebration of hope on the Solstice. Some of Cape Breton's finest artisans and musicians will gather at Cape Breton University's Boardmore Playhouse for a benefit concert and silent auction. Tickets are $25 at the Bean There Cafe in Baddeck, Capitol Drugs in Sydney Mines, and the Cape Breton Curiosity Shop, Sydney. The auction begins at 6 p.m. ...

19 June, 2012

Scott Milsom, reporter, editor, communist, chain smoker, Red Sox fanatic, wordsmith, author, and one of the nicest guys I ever knew, died this morning from cancer of the lungs. From 1988 to 1996, Scott edited New Maritimes, an ambitious quarterly journal about the struggles and triumphs of working people in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI. When a policy change at the Canada Council killed the magazine, Scott went on to publish and edit the Coastal Community News, which featured beautifully written profiles of the villages and hamlets that dot our coastline. Scott was a dedicated leftist. Although he decamped from the...

14 June, 2012

Contrary to expectations expressed here Monday, today's meeting between Community Services Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse and the Directors of Talbot House brought the two sides closer together, and may lead to the reopening of Talbot House under the leadership of a vindicated Fr. Paul Abbass. Peterson-Rafuse, persistently criticized here over the last two months, took a crucial step back from the brink. For now at least, she has cancelled her department's plan to issue a tender for the addiction recovery services formerly provided by Talbot House. The two sides will negotiate terms for Talbot's reopening with government funding. The Cape Breton Post's...

12 June, 2012

Community Services Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse will finally sit down with the Talbot House board of directors Tuesday, but only after her department's shrewd mandarins have pre-empted any actual purpose the meeting might serve. The Talbot board asked for the session months ago, seeking a peaceful resolution to her department's reckless assaults on the half-century-old, community-built addiction recovery center. Peterson-Rafuse readily agreed to the meeting in principle, then bobbed, weaved, and stalled until her officials rendered it meaningless. First she couldn't meet because the legislature was sitting. Then she postponed again, just long enough for the department to announce the RFP* it hopes...

12 June, 2012

In Who Killed American Unions, on the Atlantic's website, Derek Thompson speculates about a connection between technological change and the rise and fall of union membership, which has shrunk to just 12 percent of the US workforce. I was struck by this graph, comparing the rate of union membership with the middle class share of aggregare income: Writes Thompson: The apogee of the unions was also the apogee of the middle class, when it commanded more than half of total income. As the union membership rate dropped, middle class share of income fell, too....

09 June, 2012

I’ve been trying to figure out why Jacque LaPointe sets my teeth on edge. I’d normally expect to like an aggressive Auditor General, but lately, Lapointe has become too much of a showboat. His demeanor changed after the MLAs’ expense scandal, when he seemed to transmogrify from reasoned second opiner to God’s Gift of Good Governance. Lapointe’s latest report to the legislature included a summary of how the 481 recommendations he made between 2005 and 2009 have fared: The overall implementation rate of our performance audit recommendations is inadequate. Only 63% of the recommendations in our 2005 to 2009 reports were implemented...

07 June, 2012

The master and his pupil picked up some Sushi at Sobey's, and sat in the park to eat it. "Why does supermarket sushi always come with this green spiky sheet?" the pupil asked. "Baran is the leaf of the aspidistra plant," replied the master. "It separates the eel from the avocado, and exudes phytoncides to preserve freshness." "But it's plastic," protested the student. "Yes," said the master. "Just as your iPod Nano is no longer vinyl."...

07 June, 2012

Oceans2012, a coalition lobbying to ensure that the 2012 reform of the European Union Common Fisheries Policy "stops overfishing, ends destructive fishing practices and delivers fair and equitable use of healthy fish stocks," has produced a slick video to back up its campaign: [video link] Some factoids: Typically, shrimp trawlers throw 80 to 90 percent of the marine creatures caught back overboard. This means that for one kilo of shrimp, up to nine kilos of other marine wildlife is caught and wasted...

06 June, 2012

Brendan Chilcutt has created the Museum of Endangered Sounds, where you can revisit technological sounds of yesteryear: PacMan, a dot matrix printer, a dial telephone, and a 56K modem connecting over a phone line. It was that last example that caught the fancy of Atlantic Technology columnist Alexis Madrigal: Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It's the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part...

06 June, 2012
Show more
Loading...