A reader writes: That was a very heartfelt letter from the former client of Talbot House and he definitely has hit the nail on the head. I work in health care and have seen just what he speaks of. It is a testament to Fr Abbass and the staff and programs at Talbot House, and needs to be acknowledged. We tend to put numbers and policy ahead of compassion, care, and genuine concern for the client. I am so impressed with this letter and how this person has turned his life around; to hear him express exactly the "way it is," and...

24 April, 2012

Richard Stevenson, one of the province’s top water and sewer engineers, spends a lot of time thinking about how the province can cope with its crumbling municipal infrastructure. He has come to the conclusion HRM’s stringent regulations governing development actually work against the stated goals of the city’s planning department. HRM espouses a policy of increasing the density of the urban core, but its own planning regulations result in lower population densities. R-1 single family zoning limits population density to 20 persons per acre, or 45 persons per hectare (to protect us against barrio-like overcrowding, I presume). The city also requires that we...

24 April, 2012

Our friend in Fredericton writes: This morning my street was  crawling with Jehovah’s Witnesses: at least a half dozen pairs of women, making their way from house to house, all neatly attired in skirts of a certain style. Before long, two Witnesses landed on my doorstep, introduced themselves as Queenie and Muriel, and handed over copies of The Watchtower and Awake! I’m well-known as a magazine addict, so after getting through the most pressing work of the day, I paused to flip through these publications. I was shocked to notice the circulation numbers: 42,182,000 copies in 194 languages for each issue of...

24 April, 2012

A recovering addict who asked not to be identified has sent Contrarian a 1,200-word analysis of the dispute that shut down Talbot house, the recovery center he credits with saving his life after many rounds of government-run therapy failed him. His account is noteworthy, not only as a moving testimony from inside Talbot House, but also because it suggests the real reason for the provincial government's hostility to the recovery centre. The unspoken issue, which the Department of Community Services report failed even to mention, is the refusal of Fr. Paul Abbass and his predecessors to support methadone treatment. The drug is a mainstay...

24 April, 2012

Contrarian reader Andrew Douglas makes the obvious point that there are a lot more Major League Baseball games nowadays than there were in the first six decades of the 20th Century, and they play a slightly longer season. That can account for some—but probably not all—of the recent flurry of these exceptionally rare events that I remarked on yesterday. From 1901 through 1960, with minor variations, 16 teams played 154 games per season, for a total of 1,232 games per year (16 x 154 ÷ 2). In 1961, the season was lengthened to 162 games, an increase of about five percent. Baseball...

23 April, 2012

Philip Humber of the Chicago White Sox pitched a perfect game against the Seattle Mariners yesterday. He faced only 27 batters, and got them all out. It's an exceedingly rare feat—Humber's was only the 19th in modern Major League Baseball history—but not as rare as it used to be. Or is it? (Click on the chart to view a full-sized version.) In the first 60 years after the turn of the 20th Century, only four major-leaguers  managed to pitch perfect games; 15 have done it in the 62 years since. It sure looks as if pitching a perfect game got easier around 1980,...

22 April, 2012

Julie Lyons of Halifax marked the first anniversary of her life-saving heart transplant this week, just in time for Monday's kickoff of National Organ and Tissue Donor Awareness Week. Two years ago, Julie's congenital heart disease grew so severe she needed a Left Ventricular Assist Device, a mechanical pump implanted in her heart, and powered by a 10-pound pack of batteries that had to be changed every four hours. Last April, the pump became infected. Overnight, Julie shot to the top of the national heart transplant list. She had only days to live. Today, Julie has resumed her passion for gardening, she skated...

21 April, 2012

Answer: It takes a big pair of balls. The video was taken somewhere on the InterCoastal Waterway around 2007. See a longer version here, and another vantage point here. The original poster explains that the balls, each containing a tonne of water, are swung out with an initial turn of the boat to port or starboard. At that point, the boat tends to continue heeling on its own, but the degree of list can be controlled by extending the line holding each bag, using a winch in the cockpit. H/T: Eliot Frosst...

19 April, 2012

In response to this post, Stan Jones of Yarmouth writes: You said: "I truly believe Darrell Dexter and Denise Peterson-Rafuse are better people than they have shown themselves to be in the last three days." You are wrong. Actually, I think I'm right, but neither politician is giving me much ammunition to make the case for them. They should apologize to Abbass and the Talbot board, remove Lathem and her supervisors from any future involvement with the recovery centre, and name a knowledgable, skeptical authority to take a long, hard look at this badly run department....

18 April, 2012

I have a flood of reader mail on the scandal enveloping the Department of Community Service—too much to publish more than a sample for now. I do hope readers are not tiring of this subject. Officials of the department committed serious errors with terrible consequences—for the priest whose character they so carelessly assassinated; for the volunteer members of a board serving the community in good faith; and for the addicted men in treatment at Talbot House, who could be there now had the department's cavalier actions not forced the closure of this community-built institution. For decades, the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party...

18 April, 2012
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