Lowefiles

How to set his thighs on fire? Put a match to some flammable material—preferably Kate White’s new book How to Set His Thighs on Fire: 86 Red-Hot Lessons on Love, Life, Men, and (Especially) SEX—and quietly back out of the room as his trousers begin to smoke. OK, that’s not funny. But neither are the […]

Anti-abortion protesters affiliated with Ontario-based Show the Truth came to Halifax Friday, toting with them the same upbeat performance they’d just delivered in Fredericton—waving about huge placards plastered with photos of aborted fetuses. I heard they were on the march to Nova Scotia (a five-day planned excursion to HRM and the Annapolis Valley in the […]

Confession: I find buttless chaps a turn-on. Clarification: the naked underneath kind, I mean, not cowboy-style with jeans. Sad fact: I only ever get to see in-the-flesh buttless chaps at Pride parades. Much more sad fact: I’m not actually turned on by the gay leather men who wear them, but I’ll take whatever I can […]

Talk about the 10,000-foot view of an issue. I caught wind of measuring tape-wielding police entering the Barrington Street Superstore not from the orange juice aisle, but from a news ticker scrolling across the bottom of a television screen I happened to be plunked in front of a third of the way up the mountain […]

Crocs weigh less than a toasted bagel. They’re cheap like borsch, don’t grow mould, come in delicious colours and—here’s a little secret—they’re machine washable (no tumble drying, please—I shrunk my first pair two sizes when I accidentally tossed them in with the dark load last Christmas). These bulky, foamy kinda-clogs aren’t just our current summertime […]

An incomplete list of activities in which I have engaged while driving a car: applied lipstick, eaten a veggie burger combo, looked up a number in my address book and dialed my cell phone, scrounged around for fallen cinnamon bun pieces on the back seat floor, given a hand job and set the pre-programmed stations […]

I hate that feeling—when you think of just the right thing to say five minutes after a conversation ends and you relive it over and over and over. My most irksome what-should-have-been moment in recent years took place during the Halifax protest for the visit of George W. Bush in December 2004. A reporter asked […]

Dear slugs, You have won, you great stomach-turning bastards, with your slimy, decelerated ways. I concede a grave, shoulder-hunched defeat. Take my garden. You can have it. And go fuck yourself while you’re at it. I believe that is the only time I’ve been able to say that literally. I read in the paper last […]

What should our libraries look like? Please hold for a likely unexpected answer: Chapters/Starbucks in Bayers Lake Business Park. There. I’ve said it. That’s a load off. Phew. I’m unloading my deep dark love of the Chapters/Starbucks corporate mega-machine for good reason (and with a disclaimer: I buy 90 percent of my books from local […]

Tits and ass sell everything from jeans to tennis balls. But this ad campaign is different. And it’s not because they forgot the ass. The web site you’ll want to visit—immediately—is checkoutmybreasts.com. The charity is Rethink Breast Cancer. The deal is this: you go to any Roots store, buy one of the snazzy target logo […]

Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, says one cannot “predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely.” Hawking (who’s quoted in Bill Bryson’s staggeringly good A Short History of Nearly Everything) is talking about an especially tricky theory of quantum physics. But think about […]

Dealing with a newborn at age 63? Like Patricia Rashbrook, the Briton who purposely got knocked up late last year and is due to give birth in two months? Even with the sickly sweet sentimentality of Mother’s Day washing up on the shores of this weekend, the thought leaves me drowning in fear. Don’t get […]