Gary Gallivan will present the history of Cape Breton Island through postcards: A native of Whitney Pier, Gallivan is a life-long collector of postcards. His illustrated talk before the Old Sydney Society will highlight four postcard periods, including "The Golden Era" (1900 to 1914), which featured cards of a high technical quality depicting industrial, disaster, and sports scenes, as well as visits by dignitaries and patriotic events. Gallivan's collection includes rare cards featuring the Broughton mine and Dominion Number 2 colliery, the Gisborne Bridge on the Mira River, a fishing camp at Jersey Cove, Robert Perry’s visit to Sydney, the 1913 fire in North Sydney,...

Vancouver photographer Hana Pesut takes pictures of couples, then gets them to switch outfits and pose again. H/T: Kottke via Kristy.        ...

A view of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and parts of Maine and Quebec, taken from the International Space Station. Click the image for a larger version. The bright spot at the left side is Montreal Quebec City;* that on the middle right is Halifax. Other bright spots include (left to right) Bangor, Saint John, Moncton, and Charlottetown. Close inspection reveals Truro, New Glasgow, Antigonish, Port Hawkesbury, and Sydney. The St. Lawrence River appears as a string of lights heading northeast from Montreal, and the Gaspe Peninsula is outlined in light. I believe the aurora borealis accounts for the greenish hue on the horizon. A...

Alicia Rius, a Spanish born photographer now living in Amsterdam, has produced a series of photographs on one of Contrarian's favorite visual subjects: abandoned cars. What's unusual is that all the photos were shot from inside the car, and from the vantage point of the back seat: All ten images here. Maybe some Contrarian readers have similar photos they'd like to share from this side of the Atlantic. H/T: Alison Nastasi...

French born Guillaume Blanchet, now working as a copywriter for the Montreal advertising agency Bleublancrouge, rode his bike through the friendly streets of Montreal for 382 days, while filming himself from the handlebars, with this whimsical result: My father is 64 years old. He's been riding his bike more than 120,000 km. And he keeps going. I dedicate this film to him. More on Guillaume here and here....

Little Shining Man, a kite sculpture created by Heather and Ivan Morrison, takes flight from a beach at St. Aubin's Bay, on the Bailiwick of Jersey. Videography by James O'Garra. H/T John Hugh Edwards....

Lauren Oostveen, Nova Scotia's tweeting archivist, today unearthed a clipping from The 4th Estate, Halifax's one-time alternative weekly, about a vampire conflab that took place at Dalhouse 39 years ago this month. The 4th Estate story is good, but the yarn Oostveen dug up to go with it is even better. Organized by English Professor Devendra P. Varma, a renowned Dracula-lit buff, the goth-before-its-time conference boasted "the largest gathering of vampire experts ever presented in Canada," and featured a screening of the classic 1931 movie Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. The Himalayan-born Varma, who died in 1994, was apparently quite a character. According to Oostveen,...

Toronto Star movie critic Peter Howell is a 2001: A Space Odyssey fanatic who claims to have seen the 1968 Stanley Kubrick sci-fi classic more than 40 times. For the second holiday season in a row, Bell Lightbox, the Toronto International Film Festival's modernistic movie showcase, is featuring a 70MM version of the film. Critic Howell marked last year's screenings with a column titled, "21 cool things about 2001: A Spacey Odyssey." He reprised the column yesterday with "21 more cool things." In this year's instalment, Howell reports that when Kubrick was editing Space Odyssey, the comedian and filmmaker Jerry Lewis was...

I don't normally post videos that already have five million hits, but this animated version of a talk by educator and creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson underscores a point made by Sunni Brown in her TED talk about the merits of doodling. There is something about the combination of speech and visual note-taking that enhances comprehension, especially comprehension of irony and ideas in conflict. Robinson's talk is about education, but the animated nature of the talk the talk is as arresting as the content. [Educators] are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past, and along the...

The format of a standard business card is so inherently boring, it cries out for creative embellishment. In place of the usual 2x3-inch card, games inventer Will Wright (SimCity) hands out worthless paper currency stamped with his contact information. This bill, which Wright recently gave The Atlantic's technical editor Alexis Madrigal, happens to be from Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. Fittingly, it features electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla. (That's the blurred-out stamp on the right-hand side.) Why didn't we think of that, dear reader? H/T: Alexis Madrigal...