Mount St. Vincent PR students looking for a case study on how not to do an interview may want to file away this CBC-Cape Breton year-end interview with John Lynn, CEO of Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation. Interviewer Steve Sutherland comes off as polite, patient, and persistent. Lynn's obvious beefs with local media coverage may or may not be valid, but he undercuts his message by appearing peevish and evasive. Anger rarely works on radio or TV. This guy needs to dial it back....

22 December, 2010

Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio faces Cleveland fastballer Bob Feller, who died Wednesday. “I don’t think anyone is ever going to throw a ball faster than he does,” DiMaggio predicted. Feller was a 17-year-old high school student when he pitched his first game for the Indians and struck out 15 batters. Three weeks later he struck out 17, tying Dizzy Dean's Major League record. "By the end of his brief rookie season," the New York Times reports, "Feller was the best-known young person in America, with the possible exception of Shirley Temple." In 1937, with his picture on the cover of Time, he opened his first...

16 December, 2010

This wonderful story showed up in an AskReddit thread about picking up hitchhikers: Just about every time I see someone I stop. I kind of got out of the habit in the last couple of years, moved to a big city and all that, my girlfriend wasn't too stoked on the practice. Then some shit happened to me that changed me and I am back to offering rides habitually. If you would indulge me, it is long story and has almost nothing to do with hitch hiking other than happening on a road. This past year I have had 3 instances of...

15 December, 2010

Mary Cecilia "Bomber" LeBlanc, shown above with L'Arche assistant Mavis at the 2007 Cape Breton Island Film Series party for l'Arche Cape Breton, died peacefully Thursday morning in her home at The Vineyard, a L'Arche residence in Orangedale, surrounded by friends and caregivers. Death came six days before her 60th birthday, and, incredibly, hours before a provincial health bureaucrats were to meet to begin planning her involuntary removal from l'Arche, over protests of family, friends, and caregivers. Mary was a small woman with a steely will and an outsized capacity for getting her own way—and then leading a chorus of laughter about...

07 November, 2010

[Updated below.] An adventure-vacationer has drawn Internet notice with his first-person account of surviving a shark attack while spear fishing in the Exuma Cays, a district of the Bahamas. Surviving to tell the story obliges me to do so José Mollá's New Age musings about the greater meaning of the episode conclude with this: Seeing a fin in the water is not nearly as alarming as not seeing that we spend our lives worrying about what’s irrelevant. I’m convinced that the shark didn’t come to take a piece of me but instead to leave me with something. A kind of wisdom that I...

07 November, 2010

Being a cabinet minister requires adroit balancing skills. On one hand, a minister sometimes performs duties that border on the judicial, and must do so impartially. On the other, a minister has political responsibilities to the governing party and its allies. To judge from her public comments about an impending investigation into allegations of abuse at group homes operated by the Colchester Residential Services Society, Community Services Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse has an imperfect grasp of both roles. The Nova Scotia Government and General Employees Union complained that managers of the Colchester homes had failed to react, or failed to react quickly enough, to...

31 October, 2010

In response to my post about "seeing" baseball on the radio (and the iPhone), Cliff White writes: Although I am not now, nor have I ever been, a major sports fan, I remember clearly listening as a young boy in the fifties to radio broadcast of local and major league games. I remember nothing of those games except the rhythm and pacing of the broadcasts. I suspect much of the nostalgia for the fifties golden age of baseball is rooted in the soothing, tension dissolving effects of those broadcasts. At a time when fears of the mushroom...

30 October, 2010

Contrarian reader Denis Falvey demurs: Heroism is not the same thing as sainthood; it doesn't mean doing the impossible, it means doing that which is in the finest nature of being human. Sully demonstrated the determination, willingness, and ability to apply his considerable skill and training under extreme pressure, with courage, grace, and hope, engendering these qualities in those around him, to succeed where others would probably have failed He behaved as we would all wish to - in the finest character of humanity, and with no apparent thought for headlines. That's not luck....

20 October, 2010

Patrick Smith, pilot-columnist at Salon, chides the media for cheapening the currency of heroism in the US Airways Hudson River ditching: Moneyquote: This is tough for the networks to work with, I know, but Capt. "Sully" Sullenberger and his first officer, for all their guts and talent, weren't heroes so much as the luckiest pilots in the world. If fate decrees that your engines are to become choked with geese with no chance of reaching an airport, by all means let it happen in daylight, in reasonably good weather, overhead a smoothly flowing river alongside a major city. Change even one of...

19 October, 2010

Elliot Row, Saint John, New Brunswick. Photo by Gillian Barfoot....

18 October, 2010
Show more
Loading...