A CBC interviewer once asked Winnipeg lawyer Jack London, who often commented on legal issues, what qualities make a good judge. "Politeness" topped London's list. This struck me as apt. People who wield great authority should have the grace to do so without lording their stature over those whose lives they will rule upon. In this morning's New York Times,  Jeffrey L. Fisher, a Stanford law professor who once clerked for soon-to-retire US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, recalls Stevens’s trademark courteousness: During William Rehnquist’s tenure as chief justice, a lawyer was arguing in the court for the first...

11 April, 2010

Yale University has banned all sexual relationships between faculty and students. According to the Yale Alumni Magazine, the new rule extends a previous ban that applied only when the faculty member had "direct pedagogical or supervisory responsibilities" over the student. Now all undergrads are off limits. Yale is a bit slow clambering aboard the sex panic bandwagon. When Dean Henry Rosovsky sought to impose a similar rule at Harvard in 1983, Prof. John Kenneth Galbraith reacted with a confession: [caption id="attachment_4928" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Kitty and Ken Galbraith, wayward couple"][/caption] Just over forty-five years ago, already a well-fledged member of the...

08 April, 2010

The New York Times has an excellent interactive graphic showing the underground layout of the Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, West Virginia, where at least 25 miners died in a methane explosion Monday. The Times also detailed the Massey Energy Company's dismal safety record: In 2008, one of its subsidiaries paid what federal prosecutors called the largest settlement in the history of the coal industry after pleading guilty to safety violations that contributed to the deaths of two miners in a fire in one of its mines. That year, Massey also paid a $20 million fine — the largest of its...

07 April, 2010

Received a note this morning from Colin Doyle in Osaka saying Contrarian was working just fine in Japan. Alas, within hours, an even more severe breakdown set in. Hostpapa's own systems were down throughout the day, so beleaguered help desk agents couldn't even get in to see what might be wrong with the servers that run Contrarian and CBFilm.ca. This is one of North America's biggest (and, I say again, normally most reliable) hosting companies, so the Oakville offices must have been going nuts. Service came back early this evening, and seems to be brisk once again. Let's hope the...

07 April, 2010

In 1950, Max Klein, President of Detroit’s Palmer Paint Company, was looking for a way to jack up demand for paint. Dan Robbins, a commercial artist employed by the company, remembered Leonardo da Vinci used to give numbered patterns to his apprentices. The following year, Palmer introduced the Craft Master line of paint-by-number kits with the slogan, “Every man a Rembrandt,” and a craze was born. The company sold 12 million kits. Robbins became the most exhibited artist in the history, a title he still holds, according to the on-line Paint by Number Museum, entry portal pictured above. Palmer went on to...

05 April, 2010

Gary Lauder calculates the wasted fuel and time caused by one intersection's stop signs at $100,000 per year. Roundabouts work better, but how about a "Take Turns" sign? Hat tip: Crest Halifax....

04 April, 2010

Polish filmmaker Bartosz Konopka recounts the history of the Berlin Wall from the perspective of rabbits trapped in the no-man's land created by the structure. Freed from hunting pressure, they multiplied and prospered. After all, no one was shooting at them. Such structures, known to biologists as "exclosures," often belie their brutal genesis with an unintended beneficial impact on wildlife. After all, they exclude the most destructive of predators: people. The DMZ between North and South Korea is said to be teeming with otherwise endangered wild animals. Until the cleanup began last summer, the fenced-off Sydney Tar Ponds was...

27 March, 2010

With the 50th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho fast approaching, the Times of London asked various luminaries to assess its impact. Peter Bogdanovich, director of The Last Picture Show and author of The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, recalled its first public screening: I saw the very first showing of Psycho for the critics and the public together in the DeMille theatre in New York at 10 o’clock on the morning of June 16, 1960. It was an extraordinary event. There were about 1,000 people sitting in the stalls below and the press were...

27 March, 2010

A study [pdf] by U of T researchers Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong purports to show that people who purchase green products behave less altruistically. [P]eople act more altruistically after mere exposure to green products than after mere exposure to conventional products. However, people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal, after purchasing green products than after purchasing conventional products UK Guardian columnist James Baggini thinks he know why: The general truth lurking behind these findings is that the feeling of being pure is a moral contaminant. In ethical terms, the best never think that they are the best,...

21 March, 2010

Thursday night, the Cape Breton Island Film Series screened its 200th film, a milestone we had no thought of reaching when we began the series in January, 2003, with Bowling for Columbine. You can download a pdf list of all the films we've shown here, and you won't find many turkeys. The list makes a great aide-mémoire at the video store. Ten films I particularly liked were: 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days City of God House of Sand Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Lost in Translation Man on Wire Rabbit Proof Fence Shut Up and Sing Thank You for Smoking The Lives of Others Hardly anyone liked: Russian Arc The...

19 March, 2010
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