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

Lauren Oostveen, Nova Scotia's tweeting archivist, today unearthed a clipping from The 4th Estate, Halifax's one-time alternative weekly, about a vampire conflab that took place at Dalhouse 39 years ago this month. The 4th Estate story is good, but the yarn Oostveen dug up to go with it is even better. Organized by English Professor Devendra P. Varma, a renowned Dracula-lit buff, the goth-before-its-time conference boasted "the largest gathering of vampire experts ever presented in Canada," and featured a screening of the classic 1931 movie Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. The Himalayan-born Varma, who died in 1994, was apparently quite a character. According to Oostveen,...

11 January, 2012

What's that ghostly visage cruising over Halifax on an overcast Fourth of July, 1936. Hint: take a closer look at the logo emblazoned on the airship's tail. It's Luftschiff Zeppelin #129, better known as the Hindenburg, on a transatlantic flight just 10 months before its catastrophic docking at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. The photo is one of many fascinating images on a Nova Scotia Archives web display called An East Coast Port: Halifax in Wartime, 1939-1945. The Hindenburg overflew the city at about 1000 feet, causing the Halifax Herald to fret two days later over the possibility “those aboard the Hindenburg were...

23 December, 2011