Tragedy in a Cape Breton community, as rendered by the amazing Kate Beaton. What's so stunning about this is its absolute, pitch-perfect authenticity. H/T: Alicia Penney via Dream Big Cape Breton. See more of Kate's work at Harkavagrant....
Watch this! H/T: Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, at The Atlantic....
Contrarian reader George Gore liked the video if Guillaume Blanchet, The Man Who Lived On His Bike, because: I lived for four months on a bicycle in the fall of 2006 and spring of 2007, riding from Chester to Ciudad Victoria, in Mexico, and then up the Rio Grande valley from Matamoros to Alpine. Gore also shares my non-hostility toward Amazon: In 1961 I was a twenty-one year old college freshman partially supporting myself by working in a bookstore. The store manager was Bobby Berg, who was the best bookseller I have ever encountered, and I shared that opinion with a lot of...
Last week, a branch of the Anonymous hackers' collective known as Antisec took took over the Boston Police Department's website, replacing the home page with a screed protesting against the eviction of Occupy protesters, and a video of American rapper KRS-One performing his song "Sound of Da Police." Regaining control of the website took almost a week, enough time for police to devise a deft antidote to hacking: droll, deadpan humor. This is one cop shop that doesn't look flatfooted....
From the moment I first stepped inside one, I have regarded dollar stores as miraculous institutions, unappreciated by the cognoscenti. In this morning's New York Times, reporter Jesse McKinley describes how he outfitted his new apartment in Albany, NY, entirely from items purchased at the various dollar stores that abound in the area (with a slide show). The daring Mr. McKinley does not observe my only rule of dollar store consumption: Avoid items intended to be ingested....
What's that ghostly visage cruising over Halifax on an overcast Fourth of July, 1936. Hint: take a closer look at the logo emblazoned on the airship's tail. It's Luftschiff Zeppelin #129, better known as the Hindenburg, on a transatlantic flight just 10 months before its catastrophic docking at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. The photo is one of many fascinating images on a Nova Scotia Archives web display called An East Coast Port: Halifax in Wartime, 1939-1945. The Hindenburg overflew the city at about 1000 feet, causing the Halifax Herald to fret two days later over the possibility “those aboard the Hindenburg were...
No matter how valid the legislation, in this case, may be there will always be someone (my cousin Louise) who can share an exception to its effectiveness. I think it is a red herring. To oppose Bill 102 on the basis that, in a specific situation, it would not have served its intended purpose is a bit much. [caption id="attachment_9103" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Darrell Dexter - Throwing a bone (Tim Krochak phot/Chronicle-Herald)"]Gillard has a point. I was arguing from a very specific, though not unique, set of facts. and they have limited application to disputes involving conventional businesses. To be completely honest, I saw the first contract arbitration issue as an opportunity to lay out the disgraceful behaviour of a union that thinks of itself as progressive. But what's the case for Bill 102? What bad situation will it remedy?. Union people say over and over that collective bargaining works in Nova Scotia. For the most part, I think they are right. Why not let it play out? Why impose settlements on unwilling parties? After the jump, Gillard responds:[/caption] You may have been able to provide and example of an exception to the benefit of the legislation but whether you are right or wrong on the implications of the legislation in this situation is irrelevant. Finding a specific situation where something may not work falls short of making a convincing case in opposition. Good legislation is hopefully the goal of government. No government assumes their legislation is perfect. Frankly, it's just this type of argument that reminds us of the complexity of a government's legislative agenda. There's always going to be a "my cousin Louise" type exception.
Even as Occupy protests comes under increasing pressure from local governments, the movement's ability to gain traction remains both remarkable and largely unexplained. In a tweet last weekend, author James Glick, a pioneer of literate tech reporting, suggested an off-the-wall metaphor: I think #OWS was working better as an API than a destination site anyway. The Atlantic's tech editor Alexis Madrigal expands on this idea in a fascinating way, including a lucid explanation of how APIs — Application Programming Interfaces — work (for the 97 percent of us who have no idea). The most fascinating thing about Occupy Wall Street is the way that...
While puffed up pols and media toffs worked overtime this week to present Halifax at its snotty, hidebound worst, one local business demonstrated the city's best spirit. During tonight's Occupy Nova Scotia rally on the Parade Grounds, a carload of free pizza arrived from Freeman's Little New York, together with a note: And how did the Occupy Nova Scotia kids respond? They voted to donate one of the pizzas to the HRM cops. Now that is classy. Photo: Bethany Horne; H/T: Chris Lambie...
Last year, we published a snapshot of Contrarian's brain as he listened to Costas Halavrasos on Maritime Noon. Psychobiologist Barry R. Komisaruk of Rutger's University in New Jersey has done me one better, by releasing a stop motion animation showing sequential MRI brain scans of 54-year-old PhD student and sex therapist Nan Wise as she manually stimulated herself to orgasm. It is not known whether Wise was listening to Halavrasos at the time. The first portion of the video shows a sequence of 20 snapshot fMRI images, taken over a 12 minute period, during which Wise approached orgasm, achieved orgasm, and entered a refractory period. The...