The Third Way I’ve had to print a correction with regard to a June item I wrote about The Third, a new weekly listings paper I had somehow understood to be a production of the CBRM. The Third, it turns out, is a free, local, 16-page print weekly, published andRead More

Last week we looked at the unsuccessful proposal for the development of Sydney’s waterfront submitted by SHIP.ED, an alliance between Albert Barbusci’s Sydney Harbour Development Partners (SHIP) and EllisDon, the Ontario-based construction company. To call the SHIP.ED proposal grandiose is to dabble in understatement: in addition to a hotel andRead More

Tailor-made A few years back, I bought a winter coat at Gala Re on Charlotte Street in Sydney. I love this coat—it’s mostly green wool with bits of blue and brown and every bit as warm as my puffer jacket. In style, it’s very 1960s—the early, more formal part ofRead...

As noted elsewhere, I spent far too many hours this weekend reading issues of the Cape Breton Post from December 1984, in which I found very little of relevance to my ongoing series on our failure, that year, to bury the power lines on Charlotte Street, but a great dealRead More

Summer, I have decided, is a time for experimentation. When the thermometer hits 30 degrees Celsius, the only thing I want to dive deeply into is the Bras d’Or Lake, so this week, I’m going to try something a little different. Instead of covering one topic in depth, I’m goingRead More

Talking Turkey I learned recently that in Scottish Gaelic, a turkey is a “cearc-fhrangach” or a French chicken. (Chicken is “cearc,” France is “An Fhraing.”) Turkeys, as you no doubt know, are native to the eastern part of North America, not France, so why did my ancestors think they wereRead More

Okay, stop: FOIPOP edition Sometime on Tuesday, as I was working away on this week’s edition of the Spectator, I received a notice in my mailbox of what I assumed was a package waiting for me at the Post Office. December packages are usually well worth the trip to theRead More

Dorian I begin with a shout-out to those of you who have yet to get your power back and are…unable to read this. Yeah, that didn’t really make much sense, did it? I want to be very cautious writing about Nova Scotia’s Dorian experience, given the Bahamas’ Dorian experience, whichRead More