Animated I love traditional, hand-drawn animation and spent a very happy hour over the holidays reading this article by New Yorker film critic Richard Brody about early (meaning, silent era) animation and artists. Brody notes from the outset that all the works he’s talking about can be viewed on YouTube,Read More

If you were a cash-strapped community of communities looking to cut your greenhouse gas emissions and had $100,000 to spend, how would you spend it? Would you blow the boodle on a preliminary study for a “district heating and cooling system” in Sydney’s downtown core? A system that would serviceRead More

Imagine you’re watching US cable television and a commercial comes on for a new prescription medication. It’s a typical drug ad, featuring shots of older people gardening and biking and bowling and parasailing and tossing basketballs effortlessly through hoops as a narrator explains the benefits of this new miracle pill:Read More

“Doublethink,” a term coined by George Orwell in 1984 (the book, not the year), is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “believing two contradictory ideas at the same time” and I think it describes the CBRM’s approach to waterfront development. This past week, I had reason to have aRead More

Hidden agenda setting The CBC’s Tom Ayers had a pair of good CBRM council-related stories this week — and by “good” I mean, it’s good someone is covering this stuff not “This is good news!” Both stories are based on access to information requests to the CBRM. (Ayers didn’t leaveRead...

I watched most of Monday’s almost four-hour Climate Change Municipal Action Plan Update and will recap some of the highlights for you, but I have to begin. with District 7 Councilor Ivan Doncaster’s contribution to the proceedings which consisted largely — I could not make this up if I triedRead...

The term ‘utopia’ — the way we use it today, to refer to an ideal but unattainable state — comes from the book of the same name, written by Sir (Saint) Thomas More in 1516. The form is political critique disguised as fantasy disguised as travelogue. More casts himself asRead More

“You have driven my husband wild with your book!” This is how Jane Crosbie welcomed me on my first visit to Government House in Saint John’s, Newfoundland in 2012. When my book The Ocean Ranger: Remaking the Promise of Oil came out, the then-Lieutenant Governor of Newfoundland and Labrador roaredRead More

Jennifer Henderson at the Halifax Examiner has been following plans for a new provincial art gallery on the Halifax waterfront from a (to me) very reasonable angle — the “when are we going to talk about sea rise?” angle. The Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (TIR) has issued a requestRead...

Hello hydro? Did you hear about the new Star Trek series? Star Trek: Atlantica? Here’s a still from the pilot. It shows the commander and crew of the starship Enterprise (now the Regional Enterprise) receiving communications from the Imperator of the Irving Hegemony. Inter-galactic protocols require they turn their backsRead More