Lowefiles

December 1. No more smoking. No puffing in any indoor public places. No more separate smoking rooms. Even outdoor patios are butting out. I gotta say, I’m kinda bummed. The scene is Tom’s Little Havana. Friday night. And it’s so busy I can’t get a table. I can’t even get a chair. I stop to […]

Dear Peter MacKay, On behalf of the membership of Hotheads Anonymous, it is my privilege to welcome you to the ranks of our hard-working organization. Let’s tackle the elephant in the room. You’re not exactly anonymous, are you? You’re a member of the House of Commons, and Foreign Affairs Minister at that. We nevertheless feel […]

Downing a half-and-half mixture of lemon gin and Strawberry Passion Awareness Fruitopia siphoned into an empty Coke can and stumbling to the high-school dance? It’s now a thing of the past for students at four Halifax high schools where administrators have cancelled casual dances for the rest of the year. And thank christ for that. […]

If you don’t want to think about your neighbours policing how you always toss last month’s issue of Hustler into the trash instead of a separate recycling bag, you might have a little problem on your hands. A Halifax Regional Council committee is considering mandatory clear-plastic garbage bags to humiliate errant recyclers and non-composters. The […]

No one on the street cares about organized crime, former Halifax Regional Police chief David McKinnon told me in 2000. People care about dangerous dogs. It was a moment of hyperbole easily understood—most people care more about the little things that affect their lives every day than the big issues. I was interviewing McKinnon (who […]

Will we ever know Kimveer Gill? Not a chance. He’s now a character, not a man. A caricature—the Dawson College shooter—pasted together collage-style and stuck in a scrapbook of the Canadian psyche. His transformation began September 13, not at the moment he began shooting, but as the first reports of what he was wearing at […]

Al Cabino kinda jumps out at people. First, he sends me an email: I would love to talk with you about my international sneaker campaign. This is the world’s first and only international sneaker petition. Talk soon. When I mail back and agree to talk to him about his mission to get Nike to manufacture […]

Forget the term “unmentionables.” Underwear speaks volumes. Take fashion—a few years ago thongs were the thing and the more bling the better. Now they’re so when-Paris-and-Nicole-were-pals ago and everything in the lingerie department is low rise, boy-cut and made from organic fabrics. You just can’t wear a high-cut thong under low-slung jeans and not expect […]

The International AIDS Conference is done. Now the majority of the world can feel OK about ignoring an epidemic for another two years. Sounds pessimistic, I know. But I feel pessimistic. And not only because prime minister Stephen Harper didn’t bother to show up at the conference, held this year in Toronto, but because it […]

Don’t let Google Google you writing anything in your blog about Googling. The internet search engine megacorp, whose corporate motto is (suddenly ironically) “Don’t be evil,” is feeling a tad litigious. Last week, Google sent cease-and-desist letters to media organizations (at least, UK daily paper The Independent claims so in an online piece which a […]

It’s not just those who cannot learn from history who are doomed to repeat it. We’re all destined to the fate, and not only when it comes to history. Everything is reverberation—culture, news, gossip, newspaper columns… I was going to write a satirical piece for my column this week about the latest near-terror air travel […]

One too many rounds of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” has finally taken its toll on us. Canadians, according to expedia.ca and Ipsos-Reid, are taking fewer vacation days per year. But at the risk of being run down in the street by minivans full of early-in-the-roadtrip, not-yet-ready-to-kill-each-other families, might I suggest this isn’t […]