Court Sports I had a very informative conversation yesterday with Greg Callaghan, a member of the Basketball Cape Breton (BCB) board, who was dismayed to see the Spectator framing the campaign for a new central library as a competition against the campaign for a new community court sports facility. WeRead More

I hope many of you tuned into Wendy Bergfeldt’s afternoon show (CBC Mainstreet Cape Breton) last Thursday and were just as surprised as I was to hear that the CBRM is seriously considering a sports complex add-on to Centre 200 rather than a new central library. I admit that itRead More

During this month’s meeting of the CBRM council,  49 minutes’ worth of discussion was devoted to a motion by District 6 Councilor Glenn Paruch that staff be directed to draft an Issue Paper on commissioning a study into the possibility of building a facility, somewhere in the CBRM, with twoRead More

On 3 December 2014, almost exactly six years ago, CBRM awarded a $128,805 tender to TRACE Planning & Design of Moncton to create a Recreation Master Plan for the municipality. I did not think of this plan a week ago Tuesday, while listening to council discuss the need for aRead More

A couple of weeks ago, I reconnected (via Zoom) with an old friend in Brooklyn, NYC, and in between catching up and sharing gluten-free cinnamon bun recipes, we talked about our respective lives under COVID. She told me that she’d recently gone for drinks in her neighborhood with a smallRead More

Last week, I focused on Orenda Software Solutions, one of “two Cape Breton IT companies” on the receiving end of federal funding announced by Sydney-Victoria MP Jaime Battiste. This week, as promised, I’m taking a look at the other lucky winner, Swarmio Inc, formerly Ubique Networks. Swarmio received a $338,369Read More

  “Nobody is going to put their name on it, whether it’s TD centre, whether it’s Rogers centre, right now with the condition this place is in. I wouldn’t ask them to do it unless there’s a commitment from our government.” — Irwin Simon, majority owner, Cape Breton Eagles  Read More

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

Editor’s Note: This started out as an article about Don Cherry getting fired and turned into an exploration of the militarization of professional sports. You can read Part II here.   It hadn’t occurred to me to write about Don Cherry’s firing — I tend to avoid issues that areRead More

Editor’s Note: This is Part II of what started out as an article about Don Cherry getting fired and turned into an exploration of the militarization of professional sports. You can read Part I here.   Back in 2015, this relationship between the military and professional sports was the subjectRead More