[Editor's Note: In a scrum with reporters late in his fourth, scandal-plagued term as Premier of Nova Scotia, John Buchanan famously defended one Cherry Ferguson, a favoured civil servant who'd been discovered to be holding down three senior provincial government jobs. His exact words are lost to history, but they ran along these lines: "She doesn't have three jobs. She's Deputy Clerk of the House, Chief Electoral Officer, and a lawyer for the Workers' Compensation Board. That's not three jobs." To honour this great moment in political communication, Contrarian  from time to time presents the Cherry Ferguson Award to an official who can stare...

11 September, 2013

The blobfish, highlighted in a New York Times slide show on ugly animals, is "practically all face — a pale, gelatinous deep-sea creature whose large-lipped, sad-sack expression seems to be melting toward the floor." An accompanying article explores the underpinnings of our aesthetic recoil: [C]omparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves. Wildlife biologists are far from immune to prejudice against the unbeautiful. [R]researchers found 1,855 papers about...

10 August, 2010