Season’s Meatings Alexandra’s Pizza is challenging patrons to eat a 12-pound donair in 90 minutes, the Cape Breton Post is treating it as “news,” and somehow, neither of those things is the funniest part of Thursday’s article about the contest. The funniest part, hands down, is the accompanying list ofRead More

Roughly half of Nova Scotians rely on groundwater for their domestic water supply. In the Annapolis Valley, that percentage climbs to 90% —  in Kings County alone it is as high as 99%. I’m starting with that fact not because I intend to focus on Kings County but because itRead More

Editor’s Note: I was hoping to begin this third and final part of my water series with a catchy intro, but I can’t think of one, so will simply dive right in. (Dive? Water? Does that count as catchy?)   In 2010, the Canadian Council of Ministers of the EnvironmentRead More

Over the last few columns, I have been exploring our disordered relationship with our material possessions. One of the reasons that so many of us, even those of us who have limited incomes, can still accumulate too much stuff results from the fact that we live in a capitalist economyRead More

On 7 November 2011, Pope Benedict XVI was presented with the first printed copy of the revised English edition of the Roman Missal by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. I have admitted to not being very happy with the translation and as the years have gone by I still hearRead More

Don Mills I read Don Mills’ recent opinion piece in the Chronicle Herald because I thought Don Mills was a mixed-use neighborhood in Toronto and was intrigued by what it might have to say about well…anything. My disappointment in discovering Don Mills was actually just a person was lessened whenRead More

Something amazing almost happened during Tuesday afternoon’s (ir)regular monthly meeting of the CBRM council. As I predicted (call me Kreskin), Martin Chernin and Jim Wooder of Harbour Royale Development Limited (HRDL) asked for an 18-month extension to their exclusive agreement to develop the Sydney waterfront — a development that includesRead More

As you have probably divined, the item of greatest interest to me on yesterday’s council agenda was the request to extend Harbour Royale Development Ltd’s waterfront development agreement and thereby, its role in developing the proposed new CBRM central library, but there were other items on the agenda that IRead More

Author’s Note: Since September 2018, I have been reporting on the extraordinary story of the Kings Bay Plowshares Seven (KBP7), a group of veteran anti-nuclear Catholic activists currently awaiting sentencing for acts of non-violent ‘symbolic disarmament’ at the Kings Bay Trident submarine base in Georgia, home to America’s East CoastRead More

I moved to the Czech Republic in 1996, seven years after the Velvet Revolution (and three after the Velvet divorce, which saw the former Czechoslovakia split into its constituent Czech and Slovak parts). One of the favorite topics of conversation among ex-pats in those days was the quirkiness of CzechRead More