Editor’s note: As you may have noticed, Fast & Curious is being published on a Friday. It’s an experiment to see if it a) works for my readers and b) works for me. Feel free to send me your thoughts.   Port Hawkesbury Man Does it really make sense toRead More

I do not own a car, so I have a rather cavalier attitude toward downtown Sydney parking — I’m that person, striding purposefully toward my destination, chuckling at you as you circle the block, looking for a place to park (unless, of course, it’s raining, in which case there will beRead More

On 9 April 2007, after a $20 million, two-year restoration project, the Vimy Monument, the centerpiece of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France, was reopened to the public. In an elaborate ceremony also marking the 90th anniversary of the assault on Vimy Ridge, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told aRead More

I had CBC radio playing in the background on Monday and an item about property tax assessments in New Brunswick came on and the next thing I knew, I was listening to Kevin Lacey of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF). I didn’t actually catch what he said but I can guess withRead More

In last month’s column, I argued, first, that ethics is concerned not with the world that we actually live in, but with the world that we ought to construct together–with, that is to say, the imaginary world that does not yet exist, but which we might yet create if weRead More

What to do this week Garden planning time is the perfect time to think about what is needed for saving your own seeds. Even at the home level you want to do it properly, which means, you want to have success. Otherwise the seeds you save won’t be true toRead More

“Tartan and coal” proclaimed the front page of the Cape Breton Post, rather cryptically, on Saturday and I couldn’t resist trying to guess what the headline referred to before I actually read the article: the world’s worst ice cream flavor? Sydney Academy’s Class of ’57 prom theme? Alexander Graham Bell’s terriers?  Read More

It may surprise you, as it surprised me, to find out that farming is a political act. And like other forms of politics, it has opposing sides and competing interests as well as philosophical divisions. Quite a lot of drama, really, for people who chose the work because they reallyRead More

Remember that brief swirl of controversy around the mysterious renaming of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality’s Civic Centre to “City Hall?” A front-page story in the Cape Breton Post on March 6 saying the issue would be on the agenda of that day’s General Committee Meeting (placed there by District 6Read More

Bernie in coal country McDowell County, West Virginia is coal country. Although they got into the game a little later than we did here in Cape Breton — their first large-scale mines were developed in the mid-1800s — they made up for lost time and by the 1950s were regularlyRead More