I heard an interesting anecdote today. A former bar employee told me a story about two women and a VLT. It seems these women were sitting in a bar, where they could regularly be found, watching a man play a VLT and eyeballing the large “bonus” that was available on the game. The man finished [...]
Archive for May, 2009
28 May
Back to school
I have to be honest here. I would like to see change in how the education system works, but I’m not entirely sure what I want the finished product to look like. I’m not even sure there is a perfect finished product, unless you could design a system so fluid it could mold and adapt [...]
27 May
If we’re not using our democracy, we might as well put it away
“Parties scramble to find candidates to run in election” says the Chronicle-Herald headline. It seems all the big parties were doing some last-minute filing of candidates to beat the 2 pm deadline yesterday. Electoral participation is down on both ends. People are less willing to vote and less willing to run, too. We think that [...]
26 May
Power to the people
Much is made in the media and by opposing political parties of the “costing” of the various platforms. Perhaps rightly so. Voters certainly have the right to know how their elected officials are going to spend their money. Knowing the cost of a what a party says it will do is important, but knowing the [...]
25 May
Fishers, food, and farmer’s markets
Here’s a bit of insanity: Nova Scotia imports 90% of its food supply. Imagine that – something so fundamental as food, and we seem to have no problem having no plan to increase and guarantee local production. This makes our food supply subject to all sorts of nonsense and international goings-on over which Nova Scotians [...]
24 May
It’s not easy being Green
I lost a potential vote yesterday, and I admit I was sad to see it go. With such modest goals as I have, every single vote counts. The potential vote was lost to what the writer referred to as defeatism. You can read the whole comment on yesterday’s blog. I understand the criticism. My admission [...]
23 May
1 of 500
We’ve been out campaigning lately, Charlene and I. We’ve been writing about politics and policy. We’ve been tweeting and blogging and facebooking. We’ve been knocking on people’s doors, talking to them and – in a drastic departure from the way things usually work – we’ve been listening to them too. Here are some things we [...]
21 May
Pin the tail on the scapegoat
There’s one thing Premier MacDonald recognizes about Canadian democracy: senior citizens vote in huge numbers and kids don’t vote at all. How else to explain the new policy proposal that dropped out of his mouth today, that children fifteen years old and younger ought to be bound by a curfew keeping them home between the [...]
20 May
Attack of the Clones: The Nova Scotia Leaders Debate
Did anybody catch any of our would-be premiers last night in their clone-off? I know we all missed some of it, because nobody can hear perfectly over the sound of semi-stifled yawns. There they were, three men in standard issue monochrome collars and standard issue monochrome jackets issuing standard issue monochrome political talking points. Yawn. [...]
19 May
Oral Fixation
Here’s a funny story. Eleven years ago, I can pinpoint it precisely because my oldest son was just an infant then and is an incorrigible eleven now, I had a terrible toothache. Terrible teethache is a more accurate assessment, because the decay and the damage had infected a whole section of my mouth. And it [...]
