I have never had the time to focus as much as I’d like to on local arts and culture and if I make any New Year’s resolutions for 2022, this might be it. But I am, in my personal life, an enthusiastic consumer of movies and TV and podcasts andRead More

This year, 2021, marks the centenary of the first appearance in Canada and Britain of the red poppy as the official emblem of war remembrance: a single symbol of sacrifice that has dominated the rites and rhythms of November 11, Armistice Day, each year since. The idea of selling artificialRead More

Have you read latest CBRM Central Library study? Anyone outside CBRM reading about the private developer who has been given control over the project would probably write it off as fiction, but we know better, don’t we? The study in question is the service, programs and operational plan commissioned fromRead More

C’mon MANS I’ve been noticing the Mining Association of Nova Scotia (MANS) tweeting up a storm lately. The tweet threads — some of which are as long as my arm — can be divided into two main categories: The first — I’ll call it the “Ain’t minerals grand?” category —Read More

I have been trying to determine how, exactly, we decided to locate the new CBRM central library on the Sydney waterfront and as best I can figure, it happened like this:   Architectural & Facility Planning In June 2011, the Cape Breton Regional Library (CBRL) Board initiated a study toRead More

With the modest aim of compiling a comprehensive list of Cape Breton cultural events (!), the Spectator has been working hard on an Events Calendar feature, which launches today. I’m using a WordPress plugin employed by many sites but I decided to spring for the “filter” add-on which makes theRead More

On July 28, 1917, the left-wing British newspaper Workers’ Dreadnought (founded as Woman’s Dreadnought by the suffragette leader Sylvia Pankhurst) published an Open Letter from an unlikely source: the highly-decorated, reputedly-fearless Infantry Officer Siegfried ‘Mad Jack’ Sassoon. Recuperating from a throat wound, and nursing secret doubts about the nearly three-year-oldRead More