From 2003 to 2013, I ran the Cape Breton Island Film Series, showing top notch independent movies to eager audiences in Sydney. A felicitous side-benefit for me is that I got to know dozens of young people in Nova Scotia's film industry. On the eve of the McNeil Government's foolhardy decision to kill that industry, I tried to reassure one of them, a young woman whose work has been celebrated in Cannes and at TIFF. "This is an old tactic," I said as we sipped craft beer in a Sydney pub. "Diana Whalen is deliberately scaring you so that when they trim the credit back a...

10 April, 2015

On the day before Easter, Contrarian reader Barry Morrison stepped out the back door of his house in Howie Centre, Cape Breton, to sip coffee and check the day. Here's what he saw: Nova Scotia readers will be relieved to see Lepus americanus struthopus—snowshoe hare—has begun its 10-week transition from winter morph (white) to summer morph (greyish brown)—all in pursuit of camouflage. In this respect, L. americanus is a damn site more reliable than the cursed groundhog. Incidentally, both hare and Morrison are crepuscular. Happy Easter, dear readers!...

04 April, 2015

Baseball season begins a week from today. This is just to get you in the mood. It may not be completely obvious to speakers of English, even those who watch to the end, but this is a Toyota commercial. H/T:  Bill Cohen, via Effectively Wild's FB page, via Jrock Radio....

28 March, 2015

NS Power and NB Power have agreed to do something sensible. They will dispatch their thermal generating plants jointly, which means the two utilities will be able to use the cheapest available electricity sources in their combined fleets at any given time. They expect savings of $20 million annually. This good news on the electricity front produced an email query from longtime energy gadfly Peggy Cameron to Tim Bousquet of the Halifax Examiner: If NSP can collaborate on grid interconnection with NB Power why aren’t we buying electricity from HydroQuebec and shutting down coal-fired generating plants? It's a good question with a perfectly reasonable answer. The transmission line that...

28 March, 2015

On March 15, I criticized Dalhousie University for forcing whistleblower Ryan Millet, as a condition of graduating and on pain of financial ruin, to undergo treatment by a psychologist of Dalhousie's choice, even though Millet suffers no psychological ailment or condition. Yesterday, a psychologist wrote that Millet was being treated not by a psychologist but by a social worker selected by Dal, adding: I cannot imagine any professional, particularly a psychologist with their stringent ethical codes, cooperating with Dalhousie’s repugnant agenda with regard to this honourable young man who has the ardent support of many clear thinking people and the gratitude...

24 March, 2015

In a March 15 post, I wrote that, in order to graduate and begin paying off his massive student debt, whistleblower Ryan Millet would have to comply with a series of humiliating requirements set down by the very university administration that brushed aside his warnings about the climate of misogynist abuse at the dental school. Among the requirements of his "remediation program," was a stipulation—as I put it— that he "undergo counselling by a psychologist chosen by Dalhousie, even though there is no evidence Millet suffers from any psychiatric illness or psychological disorder. This genteel Halifax version of the Soviet psychiatric gulag ought to disquiet...

23 March, 2015

While bellicose Haligonians spent the week fulminating over the failure of municipal politicians to make six inches of ice and three feet of snow disappear instantaneously, a flock of Bohemian waxwings settled in to feed on an unobtrusive flowering crabapple bush on the Halifax waterfront. Joshua Barss Donham captured these images Friday: By Saturday, when Joshua took the photos below, the flock had grown to more than 70 birds. The Bohemian waxwing is a starling-sized visitor that breeds far to the north and west, in northern Canada and Alaska, also in northern Eurasia. Sightings in Nova Scotia—almost always in late fall or winter—are sufficiently infrequent to mark the...

22 March, 2015

A friend and supporter of Ryan Millet tells me he can't wait to get out of Nova Scotia. Who can blame him, after the abusive treatment he received at the hands of Dalhousie University? A group of Dalhousie professors, led by Leslie Barnes, Assistant Professor of Health Promotion, has turned to the Indiegogo crowdfunding site to show Millet most Nova Scotians admire and support him. Lets Help Ryan see Nova Scotia and Dalhousie differently Ryan Millet is the fourth year Dentistry student who was the whistleblower for the Dalhousie Dentistry "Gentlemen's" Facebook group. He and his family with three young children suffered punitive measures as...

17 March, 2015

Dalhousie didn't strap Ryan Millet to a board and pour water over his mouth and nose to simulate the terror of drowning. But surely Millet must have felt as if he were drowning over the last four months. All Dal did was say to this married, 29-year-old father of three—a non-citizen of Canada who has racked up nearly half a million dollars in debt pursuing a dental degree—that he will not graduate or receive a diploma unless he participates in a "remediation program" of public and private events contrived to humiliate him for his passive membership in the Facebook Group whose abuses he took repeated steps to correct and expose. He must undergo...

15 March, 2015

Chris Hadfield was forever snapping pictures of Cape Breton, and even Kempt Head, when he commanded the International Space Station in 2013. Now Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, currently orbiting the Earth, is getting in on the act. Cristoforetti, @AstroSamantha on Twitter, tweeted this February 28 photo Saturday, with the caption, "Fascinating ice patterns in the Cabot Strait last week. #FrozenEarth #Canada." I just can't figure out why it's not all white. H/T: 101.9 The Giant...

10 March, 2015
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