Earlier this month, Bill Turpin spent a week with a patient undergoing surgery at the problem-plagued Victoria General Hospital. He put his cell phone camera to good use. Yesterday he posted 25 images of maintenance failures. Here are seven, together with his acerbic captions: Eye's Down. Think of your blood pressure. Oops! Sorry! Don't look down either. Not bad by comparison. Still, it's a hospital! Soon a patient will be wheeled into this spot. Would you eat at a restaurant that looked like this patient bay? Rest assured any food service health inspector would look askance at it. Third world, you say? Hah! In some third...

17 February, 2016

DON'T PUT Q-TIPS IN YOUR EAR!!! The statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, gets its annual spring cleaning on April 12, 1995. From The Atlantic, which has more historic photos of the memorial. (Denis Paquin / AP) Update: From the Washington Post: Q-tips are one of the most perplexing things for sale in America. Plenty of consumer products are widely used in ways other than their core function — books for leveling tables, newspapers for keeping fires aflame, seltzer for removing stains, coffee tables for resting legs — but these cotton swabs are distinct. Q-tips are one of the...

17 February, 2016

For liberals, perhaps the most discomfiting fact about the late Justice Antonin Scalia was his abiding friendship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, his ideological opposite on the court. They shared a passion for opera and an affection for each other. In her chambers, Ginsburg kept a photo of herself and Scalia riding an elephant in India. She claimed she only sat behind Scalia so as to distribute the weigh more evenly upon the elephant. I was keen to read Ginsburg's tribute to her friend, and she did not disappoint. Toward the end of the opera Scalia/Ginsburg, tenor Scalia and soprano Ginsburg sing a duet: “We are different,...

15 February, 2016

A newly launched website encourages USians alarmed at the prospect of a Trump presidency to consider Cape Breton. Having read Jane Kansas's chilling account of a Donald Trump rally in Florida, and having moved to Cape Breton from Massachusetts during Richard Nixon's presidency, I can get behind this project. Don't wait until Donald Trump is elected president to find somewhere else to live! Start now, that way, on election day, you just hop on a bus to start your new life in Cape Breton, where women can get abortions, Muslim people can roam freely, and the only 'walls' are holding up the roofs...

15 February, 2016

From her winter home in Tampa, snowbird Jane Kansas made her way to last Friday's Donald Trump Rally at the University of South Florida Sun Dome, seating capacity 10,411. Once inside, Kansas squeezed through the crowd to a concrete standing room area immediately below dais where Trump spoke: Because this is a sports arena the lighting is very white and very bright. Trump’s hair is very yellow. His face is very orange. His teeth are very white. His shirt is very white. His tie is very red. He speaks without notes, with confidence. He does not say anything he does not want to. Except for one...

15 February, 2016

There's a restaurant in Cape Breton whose signboard has inspired thousands of wry selfies. Its parking lot enjoyed brief fame as the best vantage point from which to view Jesus during his fleeting appearance on the side of a nearby Tim Horton's.* So far as I know, it's the only Nova Scotia eatery to have attained a listing in the Playboy Business Directory. And now, it's the subject of a music video that seeks to capture its unique appeal. [Content Warning: This video contains ribald Cape Breton humour. Mainlanders should view with caution, especially at work.] Video link. Cape Breton musician Alton MacKinnon and...

15 February, 2016

Over at his This Isn't Journalism blog, Scott Gillard offers some acerbic observations on the NDP leadership vote, which takes place February 28 in Halifax. In no particular order, Gillard is a Glace Bay native, a good friend of mine, an NDP supporter who freely acknowledges the party's flaws, and the proprietor of Boom12, a Halifax design and social media company whose clients include a Liberal MLA. He is one of Contrarian's go-to people for shrewd observations on Nova Scotia politics. "The NDP," he writes, "is caught up in something of an existential crisis both provincially and federally." As [far] the Nova Scotia leadership race is concerned, there are...

14 February, 2016

A common loon snags a green crab at the Halifax waterfront: Let the meal begins. Credit the bird with skilled fishing, and with helping clean up an invasive species. Credit Joshua Barss Donham with the photos....

12 February, 2016

Let's get two things straight. Kirby McVicar was dead wrong to release personal health information, particularly mental health information, about former cabinet minister Andrew Younger. Information and Privacy Commissioner Catherine Tully is dead wrong to propose sweeping expansion of privacy policing in response. The point about McVicar is so obvious it hardly needs stating. Everyone knew it was wrong the second he did it. The fact he made these disclosures in an attempt to save his own skin only compounds the error. But Tully's over-reaching proposals—to install a Chief Privacy Officer, subject every civil servant to special training in privacy protection, and generally ramp up government's already excessive privacy...

11 February, 2016
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