In response to those photos of maintenance problems and housekeeping deficiencies at the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax, a prominent retired Nova Scotian writes: The filth at the VGH is nothing new. My husband suffered a heart attack in 1995...
Last week on his Facebook page, retired journalist, restauranteur restaurateur, and civil servant Bill Turpin published photos of dirt and decay inside the troubled Victoria General Hospital. I reproduced a sample here. A loyal Contrarian reader whom I'll call "E" offers this telling addendum, snapped today in a cancer treatment room on the VG's 11th floor: And the closeup: E reports the mouse trap has not budged from the location where she first observed it in December. Not unreasonably, she asks: How do you catch a mouse with no bait? How do you wash the floor without moving the trap? The last point appears to be moot where the VG is concerned....
I drove up to the ordering kiosk, ignored the robot voice urging me to go ahead with my order, and waited for a human to come on the line. "Welcome to McDonald's. May I take your order?" "I'll have a cheeseburger meal with iced tea for a beverage, please." "Will there be anything else?" "No, that's it." "Your order comes to $7.05. Drive through to the second window, please." I think of the cheeseburger as the cheapest non-pastry item you can get at McD's, the thing to order when you just want a snack. How did it get to $7.05, I wondered. But then, I'm old enough...
Here's a Facebook post from CTV news that came across my feed shortly before noon. Two friends, both Nova Scotians, shared it, and within an hour, 1,000 other Facebook users had done so. It warns of a "major storm system coming to...
Consider a few great moments in insult: Abuse vendor to man seeking an argument in Monty Python's Flying Circus: "Don't give me that, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings! Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type makes me puke, you vacuous toffee-nosed malodorous pervert!" John McEnroe to a Wimbledon spectator: "What problems do you have, apart from being blind, unemployed, and a moron?" Sir Winston Churchill, when disturbed in his toilet by a call from the Lord Privy Seal: "Tell him I can only deal with one shit at a time." David Lloyd George on the Liberal home secretary: “When they circumcised Herbert Samuel, they threw...
A nicely camouflaged Purple Sandpiper resting on a rock along the shoreline of Point Pleasant Park in Halifax earlier this winter: Purple Sandpipers breed in the high Arctic and spend their winters along the Atlantic coast from the Newfoundland's South Coast to North Carolina. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology reports they have the northernmost breeding ground of any shorebird. We are their sunny south. Click on the image for a larger version. They love rocks, says photographer Joshua Barss Donham. I've never seen a Purple Sandpiper when that wasn't on a rock. There is always a small flock at Point Pleasant Park, varying in...
Gordon Mills of Iron Mines is one of my favourite Nova Scotia artists. His depiction of The Last Supper went on display Friday night at Cape Breton University Art Gallery's 5th annual ProletariART show, which runs through April 1. Click the image to view a larger version....
A native band, an environmental group, two fishermen's organizations, and a residents' association say they will appeal a provincial decision to let Alton Gas build a natural gas storage facility in an underground salt dome between Stewiacke and Shubenacadie. The province had halted the project in 2014 after a dissident native group protested it had not been adequately consulted. Last month, after a year-and-a-half delay, the Nova Scotia Department of Environment deemed the project safe and said Alton had fulfilled its obligation to consult. As often happens in environmental protests, opposing groups have raised a variety of objections, some plausible, some seemingly trivial. The...
Robert Caro is one of my favourite authors. He's working on the last part of his five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, an exhaustive, spellbinding account of a strange but masterful politician. The project has taken 42 years so far. Before that, Caro wrote Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses, the polarizing, all-powerful mid-20th century master builder of the metropolitan New York area, whose influence on urban planning spread design mistakes across the continent. We are only beginning to come to terms with the consequences. The Gothamist, a New York City blog, has a fascinating interview with Caro in which he describes his tortured transition from newspaper reporter...