Food & Drink

Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things

Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things

June 30, 2023 at 10:30 am

Local elites I heard Alexander Sammon of Slate magazine interviewed about this May 2023 piece he did on the annual convention of the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) or, as he put it, of “unsung Republican heavyweights.” Sammon was a guest on This Machine Kills, one of the podcasts inRead...

Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things

Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things

May 19, 2023 at 10:07 am

Confessions of an inadvertent foodie I accidentally bought a $6 bag of popcorn last week. I didn’t find out the price until I got to the cash and by then I felt compelled to go through with the purchase (it’s ridiculous, I know, but it’s me). I bought it becauseRead...

When Government Relies on Charity

When Government Relies on Charity

April 19, 2023 at 11:51 am

I promised to deal with the volunteer awards that were presented during last week’s CBRM council meeting and, on the one hand, I can do that rather easily by telling you that the following awards were presented to the following people/groups: Gary MacDonald Memorial Award: Sukhmani Sahib Society, Sydney AnneRead More

Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things

Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things

February 2, 2023 at 12:16 pm

Working from home I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about this week and then I discovered that Craig Boudreau, head of  J. Francis Investments, vice chair of the Cape Breton Regional Chamber of Commerce, Sage of Charlotte Street, had once again taken pen in hand to shareRead More

Embracing Winter: The Cold Club

Embracing Winter: The Cold Club

November 23, 2022 at 2:17 pm

Editor’s Note: I caught myself looking rather bleakly at the snow yesterday and decided I needed a timely reminder about embracing winter, so I re-read Paul MacDougall’s 25 November 2020 piece on coping with the cold and I thought you might like to too.   There is probably as muchRead More

Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things

Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things

May 27, 2022 at 10:20 am

Talkin’ ’bout my generator I read Henry Maxwell’s letter to the editor of the Cape Breton Post about the apparently over-sized backup generator recently purchased by the CBRM for the Myles F. Burke Police Headquarters in Sydney with great interest. That particular item has bugged me since it appeared inRead More

Community Cooking

Community Cooking

March 23, 2022 at 2:17 pm

Last week, I took a cooking class run by New Dawn Enterprise’s A Better Bite Community Kitchen. Called “Tomato Sauce Five Ways,” the class was held in A Better Bite’s facilities in the New Dawn Centre on Nepean Street in Sydney and led by dietician Jessica MacNeil. She taught usRead More

Q2 2021: COVID, Tattoos and Affordable Housing

Q2 2021: COVID, Tattoos and Affordable Housing

December 15, 2021 at 11:54 am

The Spectator‘s coverage this spring was varied, to say the least. From Albert Barbusci’s nuclear waste deal, to the workings of the Verschuren Centre to the province’s third wave of COVID with a variety of stops in between, including a feature I count among my all-time favorites — the oneRead More

Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things

Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things

November 18, 2021 at 11:35 am

Cruise news And now, from the “counterintuitive” department, I’d like to suggest that there are ways in which COVID may actually prove a boon to the cruise industry. It’s a theory I developed watching a “recovery of cruise” presentation from a November 2020 conference on “post-COVID” tourism in Cape BretonRead More

Port of Sydney Update: Capital, Cruise & COVID

Port of Sydney Update: Capital, Cruise & COVID

November 17, 2021 at 1:32 pm

The new board chair of the Port of Sydney Development Corporation (PSDC), James Kerr, presented to CBRM council during its regular November meeting last week, a topic I touched on briefly in last week’s Fast & Curious, because Kerr announced the board had decided to make its minutes public andRead More