In the spring of 2008, the Halifax group Sons of Maxwell headed out on a one-week tour of Nebraska. They flew United Airlines from Halifax to Omaha, with a connection in Chicago. While waiting to deplane at O'Hare, band members heard a woman behind them cry out, “My God, they’re throwing guitars out there!” They watched helplessly as ground crew pitched their instruments recklessly across the tarmac. Before boarding the next  flight, the band took all the steps normal people would to report the abuse, only to be shunned by every United employee they encountered. Once in Omaha, band member Dave...

07 July, 2009
Three contrarian readers respond on the right size for cabinet:
Give some thought to those 11 very busy politicians, and how easy it will be to control them. Dexter and Dan O'Connor will have complete control of the first-year agenda. The really big issues, NSP for example, will come from the department to the Issues Committee of Cabinet chaired by the Deputy Premier. -- XX
07 July, 2009
Just when you thought the financial crisis might be settling down, the New York Times's Frank Rich delivers a scathing (and link-studded) assessment of the foxes rebuilding the chicken coop. Moneyquote:
As the economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in this month’s Vanity Fair, “In the developing world, people look at Washington and see a system of government that allowed Wall Street to write self-serving rules which put at risk the entire global economy — and then, when the day of reckoning came, turned to Wall Street to manage the recovery. They see continued re-distributions of wealth to the top of the pyramid, transparently at the expense of ordinary citizens.”
05 July, 2009
Crest Halifax has a thoughtful discussion about the problem of low frequency noise from windmills, and the illness some say it causes.
Of course it is possible that those reporting the symptoms of Wind Turbine Syndrome are more sensitive to sound and vibration than most people, or even than detection instruments. It’s also possible that other factors are at work. Could the illness be, to some extent, psychosomatic in nature?
03 July, 2009

Imagine you’re the editor of a major London daily. Your crosstown archrival has obtained two million pages of explosive documents, outing a Parliamentary expense scandal that's rocking the nation. They've parlayed the document trove into a  fire hose of blockbuster stories. What do you do? If you’re the Guardian, you enlist your readers in a ground-shifting, game-saving exercise in crowdsourceing. The Nieman Foundation's Journalism Lab picks up the remarkable story, complete with four crucial pointers for would-be imitators. Journalism has been crowdsourced before, but it’s the scale of the Guardian’s project — 170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a...

03 July, 2009

Writing in this morning's Toronto Star, retired Ontario Superior Court Justice Daniel Ferguson waxes indignant over the decision by Chronicle-Herald Ottawa reporter Steve Maher to listen to and report on an accidental recording of a private conversation between Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt and her communications director, the recently fired Jasmine MacDonnell. Moneyquote: Does this scenario not merit any comment from his fellow journalists? If his colleague had left her briefcase in the washroom, would he have rummaged through it, too? His comment about MacDonnell leaving it with him for five months sounded like a weak argument that perhaps she had abandoned it....

22 June, 2009

This week, the Washington Post, a once great newspaper that has descended deep into neocon territory, fired Dan Froomkin, a blogger whose column on the White House appeared on the Post's website. Post editors and columnists frequently belittled Froomkin as "liberal" or "opinionated," but his real sin was doing what was once thought to be a journalist's main job: challenging the factual assertions underpinning White House policies and pronouncements. He was a rare exception to the craven press corps cheerleading in the run-up to the Iraq war, and he had begun holding Obama's feet to the fire when the Post dropped...

20 June, 2009

James Fallows thinks fellow Atlantic Magazine blogger Andrew Sullivan's coverage of the election crisis in Iran represents a sea change. In coverage of Iran over the past week and especially in these last few days, Andrew Sullivan has on his site illustrated the way the internet and related technologies have permanently changed journalism for the better. So have a number of other people at other sites, which have made themselves clearinghouses for information coming out of Iran in emails, blog posts, camera-phone and ad hoc video transmissions, and other forms including, yes, Twitter feeds. Collectively they've let the outside world know...

16 June, 2009

When a foot-long snapping turtle paid a visit to the Burnside offices of Terrain Group, on the shores of Spectacle Lake, yesterday morning, office staff didn't have to wonder who to call. A Purolator driver took matters in hand and delivered Snappy back to the water. According to the Nova Scotia Museum website, Nova Scotia snappers emerge from water only in late June and early July to dig a nest and lay eggs. Contrarian trusts Snappy will find a more felicitous nest site uncontaminated by engineers and couriers....

16 June, 2009
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