In his remarks at Irving's funeral, Dr. Richard Goldbloom, the celebrated Halifax pediatrician who is Irving's brother-in-law, re-told a story Irving liked to tell on himself. In the late-90s, the Canadian International Demining Corps, Irving's mine-removal charity, developed a center to train Mozambicans in the techniques of mine removal. Once up and running, the center was to be turned over to state government. The facility lay deep in the jungle. Irving flew in for the transfer ceremony, together with the state governor and the Mozambican Minister of Land Mine Removal. Upon landing, the government officials and their aides gathered into a tight...

26 September, 2010

That was the manifesto of my favorite Yippe, Abby Hoffman. Now you can steal it online....

12 September, 2010

A New York Times article explains something that has long puzzled me: why are institutions where security really matters so lax about passwords, while the corner store requires long, ever-changing, combinations of  upper and lower case, alphanumeric and non-alphanumeric characters? Why are my credit union and my bank satisfied with a four-digit numeric PIN, which they never make me change? The answer, according to a number of security experts interviewed by the Times, is that passwords don't need to be strong or constantly changed. Worse, "[O]nerous requirements for passwords have given us a false sense of protection against potential attacks. In fact,...

12 September, 2010

[caption id="attachment_6492" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Tanya Davis"][/caption] Sandbar Music of Charlottetown, PEI, has released a soundtrack MP3 of  the hit YouTube video, How To Be Alone. Tanya Davis wrote and performed the poetry and music at the heart of the piece; Andrea Dorfman directed the film, which had been viewed just over 600 times when featured here July 30. (Find a partial account of its viral progress toward the current 1.4 million hits here.) It's plain that, aside from one crankypants Globe and Mail reviewer, lots of people want to hear music and poetry like Davis's, and see moving pictures like Dorfman's. The traditional distribution...

08 September, 2010

Until its cave-in to Verizon last month, Google was the most prominent corporate advocate of net neutrality—but only for others, not for itself. Recently, Google has applied self-serving filters to its search results in a manner reminiscent of, say, China. Late in July, Google searches began filtering out any results for the website bestofyoutube.com, an aggregator of videos from the Google-owned video site. I can understand why Google might have a problem with bestofyoutube, which, it could be argued, infringes Google's intellectual property by poaching YouTube content. Mind you, it would be a brazen case for Google to make, given that YouTube itself...

08 September, 2010

Contrarian reader JS writes: Most if not all news accounts of such accidents provide no information about the factors involved. From your account it is clear that  a) slowing down during bad conditions; b) having proper approved child safety restraints; and c) operating a vehicle with a good safety rating are the right ingredients for safe driving with a family.  This account is far more valuable to the world in general than a news report that simply says a head-on collision sent five to hospital with non life-threatening injuries and the driver of a second vehicle was killed. I am a motorcyclist,...

01 September, 2010

The five occupants of this 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan — my son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren — survived a head-on collision on the TransCanada Highway Thursday evening. I offer the following details in hopes that other families will find it helpful to understand the factors that decisively improved their chances of survival. Shortly before 5 p.m, August 26, my family was westbound on Route 105 in Lexington, Nova Scotia, just north of the Canso Causeway, when a severe rain squall hit the area. Daughter-in-law Jenn had just slowed down when an eastbound car apparently hydroplaned and spun across the centerline into...

31 August, 2010

Oh the drama of it all! (Click here if the video doesn't appear.) Hat tip: Doug MacKay...

19 August, 2010

Where possible, I like to embed videos in Contrarian, to save readers the trouble of clicking through to them,  while including the links for those who prefer to view them at source. Lately, however, most of the embedded videos are disappearing from the emails a few hundred of you use to read Contrarian [see link (1) at right.] At first I assumed this was an artifact of Steve Jobs's hatred of Adobe Flash, causing the embedded videos to disappear chiefly on iPads and iPhones. But, no, of late they have failed to show up in my regular email program. Is this true...

17 August, 2010

Google wasn't always a carrier-humping, net-neutrality, surrender money, and TechCrunch has video to prove it: For those who don't follow tech news, Google pulled a stunning about-face on net-neutrality this week, teaming up with Verizon, the very company it pilloried on the issue, in an agreement to abandon the concept of neutrality for fast-growing wireless portions of the Internet, and for whatever new transmission technologies happen along in future. The do-no-evil company's reversal stunned the tech world. Unabashed Google admirer Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do, called it a Munich Agreement, a description Josh Marshall of TPM Media said was "a...

15 August, 2010
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