Contrarian turned one year old this week, and our pal Lindsay Brown took the occasion to upbraid us, with ever so uncharacteristic gentleness, on our use of the word begrudgery: Your blog is not only wonderful, but essential. Yet I have the temerity to opine that no journalist worth his own block of salt should make up words. Especially a word that resembles the name of a caged bird far more than what their careless author intended to convey. Honey, there ain't no such word as begrudgery. And you should get a hold on your temerity and your opining and make use...

21 May, 2010

In response to this, someone called Peter Watts or perhaps Paul Buher, writes from a cryptic email account: You, sir, are a pig, and no different than Darrell Dexter. You hide under the guise of a political blog during the day, only to be writing for the NDP at night. A $15,000 pay cheque isn't too bad I suppose. Good for you. I have news for you. Anything you write on that virulent blog from this day forward is tainted with the stink of NDP orange, corruption, and self-serving interest. As I said, you sir, are a pig. I wonder how Mr. Whateverhisrealnameis...

21 May, 2010

A resident of England, who spends much of his time in Nova Scotia working on Seaside's rural high-speed Internet project, writes from Tel Aviv, where he is attending a wedding: An Irish fiddle band is providing the music for the wedding. The band members are all Israelis. I was chatting with one of them, and he asked what I did. I told him about Seaside and spending half my life in Canada. "I'm going to Canada in the autumn," he said. "I'm going somewhere called Cape Breton, for a festival called Celtic Colours." So a Londoner visiting Israel meets an Israeli playing in...

21 May, 2010

Contrarian reader M. Austin writes: Your reporting on Go Ogle taking the pi** out of some has brought to my attention the fact that whiz is spelled with an h. This realisation has me looking at Velveeta's jarred cousin with suspicion....

10 May, 2010

As we noted last month, Wendy Southgate was captured 43 times on Google Street View while walking her dog near in Elmsdale, Suffolk, UK. Today, it's a hapless Google Street View driver who captured himself while indisposed on lonely High Rock Road outside Reno, Nevada: Scroll around at the same location and see the disembodied Google Street View Car door flung open by the desperate driver as he sought the pause that refreshes: Hat tip: TWIG 41...

07 May, 2010

When Fordham Rams pinch hitter Brian Kownacki rounded third and headed for home on Chris Walker's eighth inning double last Wednesday, Iona Gaels catcher James Beck was waiting at the plate with the ball. Kownacki looked like a dead dunk, until...

24 April, 2010

As Wendy Southgate of Elmswell, Suffolk, UK, took her dog, Trixie, for a stroll around the neighborhood one morning last spring, she noticed an odd looking car cruising slowly along the street. She wondered vaguely what it was up to. Then last week, Wendy's husband Terry, a firefighter, decided to look for their Cross St. house on the British version of Google Street View, and there were Wendy and Trixie. He looked a little further down the street, and there they were again. He checked a nearby street, and found them again. And again. Finally, Terry followed Wendy's customary dog-walking route—and...

22 April, 2010

I'm about as un-Catholic as they come. I grew up in Massachusetts, where the Roman clergy formed a reactionary vanguard scorned by my family and friends. The magical beliefs at the core of Christian dogma strike me as risible, and I've been known to bedevil Catholic friends by making sport of them. Not much fun in that these days, so palpable is the pain and frustration among Catholic laity over Pope Benedict XVI's Nixonian defense of the sex abuse cover-up scandal enveloping his papacy and the church. No one can take pleasure in their present grief.  Like other non-Catholics I suspect,...

20 April, 2010
Show more
Loading...