Watching the dishes
To Kyle Shaw, Let me see if I understand the logic you’re using in your editorial “Channelling God” (April 19). Ahmed Assal comes to Canada with his family. He is treated courteously. Rather than appreciating this and reciprocating, he interprets it to mean, “Everything here is freedom.” Assal and his family move into a condo…
HCAP talks back
To the editor, Regarding “Where goes the neighbourhood?” by Lis Van Berkel, April 12: We would like to clarify that the Halifax Coalition Against Poverty does not take responsibility for any anti-gentrification graffiti, “unofficially” or otherwise. That said, HCAP understands and supports the frustration of those negatively affected by gentrification in the north end. HCAP…
She’s like the wind
If you can get in–last night’s show was sold-out, packed with ladies–go see Dirty Dancing at Park Lane, 7:30pm. It was even worth sitting through the lame Special Feature/DVD ad first (hopefully tonight they”ll figure out the aspect ratio so Swayze isn’t all squished up), where there are no star interviews, just chats with people…
Hello? Is it me you’re looking for?
This week the CRTC announced that it was OK for phone companies to charge 50 cents for payphone calls, up to $1 if you use any “non-cash” methods of payment, i.e. phone card. They also announced the CRTC will allow established phone companies to charge more for local phone service, and whatever they want for…
Never forget: PAPA was a Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone has just released a 40th anniversary edition. But Thorney, casual/non-readers might be wondering, didn’t they just do that last year with that heinous psychedilc Sgt.Pepper’s dealy? No, dude, that was the 1000th issue. This is one of three planned issues celebrating the mag’s birth in San Francisco in 1967. It has lots of…
Burning Ears for Friday
New York, Toronto and Calgary are abuzz about Halifax, thanks to robot doctors, gas regulations and a billion-dollar deal. And in less metropolitan company, our town’s on lips in Charlottetown and Sydney courtesy of a new government office and an award for tourism. Full links below. RURAL ANGSTfrom SydneyPremier RodMac must have been playing to…
Greece me up
A new Greek take-out restaurant is opening soon at 2150 Gottingen. Island Greek Donair and Pizza is going to try to win the donair-loving hearts of Haligonians by tempting them with traditional Greek gyros. Co-owner Dimitrios Tsoukos explains that a gyro is a pita filled with spiced pork and topped with tzaziki sauce rather than…
Seek to dream
When volume one, issue one, of Seek landed in our mailbox last week, we didn’t know exactly what we were looking at. But we were definitely curious. The three-page, double-sided fold-out bills itself as a Planning & Design Centre newsletter. There isn’t much on the front page to indicate exactly where it comes from, but…
Burning Ears for Thursday
Suddenly it’s feeling pretty good to be Halifax, what with Condé Nast’s Traveler magazine calling you “the king of Canada’s east coast.” And The White Stripes coming. Full links to these stories and more — watch for the requisite hockey reference — below. THE SUPER CITYfrom New YorkIn a glowing and brand-new article (it’s dated…
Yukkin’ it up with Peter White
The Halifax Comedy Fest has been putting the city in stitches all week, with a few shows still left to go. One of the comedians old-school Picnicface fans might’ve recognized is Halifax’s Peter White, who threw down on April 23 as part of a line-up of new local comics. He’s also just been signed to…
Catalogue diggers
Toronto’s FemBots are revitalized and back on the road following a break from touring 2005’s The City and are now prepared to offer fans the largest live taste of their catalogue to date. The duo of Dave MacKinnon and Brian Poirier—joined by Paul Aucoin and Nathan Lawr—will perform material from all three of the band’s…
Gentrification redux
To the editor, Lis van Berkel’s article “Where Goes the Neighborhood” (April 12) presents the issue of gentrification in bold black and white. After years of abandonment and neglect, commerce is returning to this once-popular part of the city. If you were to ask people living in this area how they felt about it, they…
From Paul
To our friends in Halifax, I have been in a numb haze since my wife Helen Hill was murdered in January, in our apartment in New Orleans, before my eyes. I am slowly reconnecting with our friends from my mother’s home in British Columbia, where our two-year-old son Francis Pop and I have relocated. I…
FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
Put on your match-making pants, Virgo, says Rob Brezsny.
SAVAGE LOVE
Dan Savage discusses a variety of lesbian conversions.
The greater of two evils
The multi-media rampage that followed last week’s Virginia Tech massacre reminds me of some sage advice, “pity this busy monster, manunkind, not,” the poet ee cummings counselled. “Progress is a comfortable disease.” Cummings, who refused to own a radio or TV, died almost 45 years ago—decades before the technological “progress” bestowed upon manunkind by the…
To the moon
Listen to “Make It Home Tonight”off the new album Orchestra for the Moon. Jenn Grant always wanted to be a singer-songwriter, even while she suffered through 10 years of stage fright. “I was preparing to face the fact that I would just have babies and stay home and sing them lullabies,” she says of that…
Lawr and order
Ontario’s bookish songwriter Nathan Lawr has added scholar to his lengthy list of talents, but will squeeze in a brief tour before returning to a rigorous academic timetable of history courses at Laurentian University. He rolls into town for an acoustic solo stint with FemBots and Rich Aucoin on April 28 at The Seahorse. “I’ve…
Sole survivors
Lotus shoes are exquisitely small—measuring about eight centimetres each, they might snuggle into the palm of your hand. Delicately hand-embroidered in silk, it’s shocking that for more than 1,000 years since the 10th century—they were banned in 1911—millions of Chinese women had their feet broken and bound to fit into these teardrop-shaped icons of feminine…
Doomstown’s day
“This is what they tell me,” says David “Sudz” Sutherland from the office of his production company in Toronto. “This is the first time that they see something that looks like it took place in their neighbourhood. In a Canadian context instead of an American context.” Sutherland is talking about Doomstown, the film he wrote…
Scum sail away
It’s a bright April morning on McNabs Island—the sky overhead is a brilliant blue, the Halifax skyline shining in the distance. Still wearing the matching day-glo orange flotation coats they donned for the high-speed boat trip, the group of 14 people clustering at the edge of the water look almost like school kids out on…
Green house effect
I’ve found a bunch of stuff in my attic: a milk bottle cap with “Buy Savings Stamps and Help Smash Hitler” stamped on it, 1950s-era hockey cards for Walter Hergesheimer and Jim Morrison, a baseball card for Angel Scull and a boy’s “hockey diary,” in which he laments he didn’t get to face his “mortal…
Mucho Mondo
Piccolo Mondo is the only Italian restaurant in Metro I haven’t had the pleasure of trying, an omission I decided to rectify on a recent night downtown. With an unassuming small storefront tucked away among a row of businesses at the far end of Argyle, Piccolo Mondo is easy enough to miss if you’re not…
Hot Fuzz
“The Greater Good,” a political motto that’s made its way into the pop lexicon, is mindlessly repeated by the rural folk in Hot Fuzz. Edgar Wright follows up his living-dead comedy Shaun of the Dead with material about assimilation that could easily make another zombie movie. This time it’s a take on the bombastic US…
