I’ve been trying to figure out why Jacque LaPointe sets my teeth on edge. I’d normally expect to like an aggressive Auditor General, but lately, Lapointe has become too much of a showboat. His demeanor changed after the MLAs’ expense scandal, when he seemed to transmogrify from reasoned second opiner to God’s Gift of Good Governance. Lapointe’s latest report to the legislature included a summary of how the 481 recommendations he made between 2005 and 2009 have fared: The overall implementation rate of our performance audit recommendations is inadequate. Only 63% of the recommendations in our 2005 to 2009 reports were implemented...

07 June, 2012

Moon over Auld's Cove: Moon over Beinn Bhreagh: ...

04 June, 2012

Our friend in New Brunswick has been channeling Pat Boone: Dear Aliant, It’s not me, it’s you. We’ve been through a lot together. Land lines and cell phones. Dial-up, high-speed, wireless Internet sticks and now, fibre-op. I’ve treated you well. Sent you hundreds of dollars every single month. Tried to keep the lines of communication open. We’ve talked and talked – never more than during my recent move to New Brunswick. In fact, we just got off the phone with one another, marking our tenth call related to my move from Nova Scotia. I called you just now because I was alarmed to receive...

07 May, 2012

Our friend in Fredericton has been thinking about courage: On this day when everything changed, I think often of my friend. But that’s nothing new – she’s been on my mind every day this past year. For a year now, she has chosen to keep getting out of bed every morning, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to keep going—even when it seemed her world was crumbling. One year ago, in the days before this day, my friend was living as we all do when nothing major has gone wrong, when we are simply caught up in life’s daily...

30 April, 2012

  The video of a clever mariner squeezing his 80-foot mast under a '65 bridge on the Inter-Coastal Waterway reminded Chris Lambie of sailing across Florida's Lake Okeechobee with his father. We weren't sure if our mast would clear a bridge on the eastern edge of the lake, as the water level was pretty high. But my dad did the calculations and figured we'd squeak through. As we slipped underneath the span, the VHF antenna ticked gently against one of the girders, and dad got a speck of rust in his eye. I also remember running gently aground somewhere in the silt that...

24 April, 2012

Contrarian reader Andrew Douglas makes the obvious point that there are a lot more Major League Baseball games nowadays than there were in the first six decades of the 20th Century, and they play a slightly longer season. That can account for some—but probably not all—of the recent flurry of these exceptionally rare events that I remarked on yesterday. From 1901 through 1960, with minor variations, 16 teams played 154 games per season, for a total of 1,232 games per year (16 x 154 ÷ 2). In 1961, the season was lengthened to 162 games, an increase of about five percent. Baseball...

23 April, 2012

Philip Humber of the Chicago White Sox pitched a perfect game against the Seattle Mariners yesterday. He faced only 27 batters, and got them all out. It's an exceedingly rare feat—Humber's was only the 19th in modern Major League Baseball history—but not as rare as it used to be. Or is it? (Click on the chart to view a full-sized version.) In the first 60 years after the turn of the 20th Century, only four major-leaguers  managed to pitch perfect games; 15 have done it in the 62 years since. It sure looks as if pitching a perfect game got easier around 1980,...

22 April, 2012

A fresh rumination on feline ennui from vido poet Will Braden. (The original is here.) H/T BT, via Jezebel....

15 April, 2012

A German friend who has lived in Cape Breton for the last two years took a short swim Easter Sunday afternoon at Dingwall Beach, on northern Cape Breton's Atlantic coast. Water temperature: 3 degrees.  ...

08 April, 2012

Playwright Bryden MacDonald adjudicates the Boardmore Theatre's Festival of One Act Plays at Cape Breton University....

31 March, 2012
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