Three Celebs and a Baby I recently swore off home reno shows after a friend pointed out to me that they are the worst thing you can possibly watch when you’re looking to improve your own living space because the key to their miraculous design transformations is the removal ofRead 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

Pennsylvania Pain I decided to write about the first thing that popped into my head this morning (that wasn’t war in Ukraine) and it was the TV series I just watched, Maire of Easttown, starring Kate Winslet. (Warning: there will be spoilers. If you haven’t watched it and plan to,Read More

I assumed my first 2022 contribution to the Spectator would be pretty upbeat, especially since New Year’s Eve was spent in a hilarious re-watching of various episodes of Father Ted that included a few I hadn’t seen before. And thanks to YouTube documentary introducing the actors, I got to seeRead More

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

Does anyone go shopping for groceries these days without having at least one conversation with another shopper about the rising cost of what we are putting in our carts? Assuming, that is, we are among those who can continue to purchase the same items we have been using for years.Read More

Owl’s Head Thank you Michael Gorman of CBC Halifax for this story about Owl’s Head, the provincial park whose pending protected status was removed by the former Liberal government to open the way for its sale to a golf course developer. Gorman FOIPOPed documents that show that in late 2019Read More

Shore Road Sessions I wrote last year about The Shore Road Sessions, Shauna Walters’ summer series of mini-concerts in her Whitney Pier backyard. The sessions returned this year with a whole new lineup of performers, and I was lucky enough to catch the final show on Tuesday night. I amRead More

Wrong side of the tracks? I was walking home from the grocery store the other evening and as I passed the site of the former train station on Dodd Street, I remembered a tidbit of information I’d picked up during CBRM council’s special meeting on March 31, the one heldRead More

There’s a wonderful pair of linked episodes in Star Trek: The Next Generation which, together, raise some deep and interesting philosophical questions with deep ethical implications. Both episodes take place within the confined space of the holodeck (a place in which the computer simulations are so real that crew members…Read...