1. Police board recommends for budget increase, against new positions
Yesterday, the Board of Police Commissioners recommended an increase to the police budget, but turned down a request for more staff, reports Zane Woodford.
Two of the commissioners, Harry Critchley and Gavin Giles, had concerns about the lack of detailed information in the proposed police budget, and voted against.
Woodford writes:
Commissioner Gavin Giles agreed, and said he only received the additional information on Monday.
“I cannot in good conscience signify my approval for something which I do not understand, and more importantly, which I have no been given any reasonable opportunity to even try and understand,” Giles said… It seems to me to be rather an end-run around a proper budgeting process.”…
[Coun. Becky] Kent agreed there’s room for improvement in the budget process, but not this year.
“We have a responsibility to move this budget along,” Kent said.
“It seems to me we’re seeking expediency over good governance,” Giles said.
“We are saying we have an imperfect process, but we’re on a timeline so we’ll adopt it and we’ll hope to have a better process as the year goes on. I think that’s an appallingly short-sighted view of what our responsibilities are as set out by the provincial government.”
Giles seems to understand what proper governance entails.
Click here to read “Halifax police board recommends increased budget, rejects proposed new positions.”
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2. Halifax Shipyard workers sign new contract
“More than 1,100 workers at the Irving Shipyard have signed a 4.5-year agreement that will see wages rise 20% to 25% over that period,” Jennifer Henderson reports.
Henderson outlines the terms of the contract, which Unifor national president Lana Payne says will “support the growth of the skilled workforce in the shipyard, an anchor for good union jobs in the Halifax region.”
Click here to read “Halifax Shipyard workers sign new contract for raises, more benefits.”
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3. Scammers victimize renters
This is an older photo of a house in Lunenburg owned by Emily Black. Black shared the photo on Facebook two days ago, with a warning:
I want to make a public announcement!!! [This] is my house and it isn’t for rent!!! A poor couple who turned up today to move in having paid 2000$ deposit thought they had rented it. It’s the second time this has happened but we caught the fake ad on the first one.
Yvette d’Entremont contacted Black, and has a story on this and other rental scams that take advantage of desperate tenants in a tight market. You can read her story here.
d’Entremont writes:
Sonya Major owns A-1 Property Management and manages Black’s property.
“I hear about it more in larger metropolitan areas, not in little old Lunenburg,” Major said in an interview Monday afternoon…
Major said she received a phone call at 3pm Saturday afternoon from the tenants who rent the Lunenburg property on Green Street.
They were seeking her advice after finding strangers roaming their backyard. When they went outside to ask what was happening, the strangers informed the tenants they were moving in.
“Our tenant said, ‘No you’re not, because we live here. This house is not available for rent.’ They said, ‘Oh, no, we’re moving into the basement apartment.’ And she said, ‘Well, there is no basement apartment,’” Major said.
The story also includes an interview with someone scammed out of a fake security deposit on a different property, and tips on avoiding being scammed.
Click here to read “‘Do your due diligence,’ says Lunenburg property owner after couple scammed by fake rental ad.”
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4. Australian mining company sheds Nova Scotia firm + Rio Tinto awfulness
Earlier this month, Joan Baxter reported that Australian mining company St Barbara was handing off “its troubled gold mines and mine properties — including those in Nova Scotia operated by its subsidiary Atlantic Mining Nova Scotia… to a new junior mining company it will create.”
In the story, Baxter notes that the new owners will be taking on a whole bunch of environmental and other liabilities:
The owner of the Moose River gold mine will have to abide by an agreement with Nova Scotia Environment and Climate Change (NSECC) to remove 2.65 million tonnes of waste rock it has trucked into the Touquoy pit for temporary storage.
The owner of what are now St Barbara-owned mine properties and proposals will also have to continue trying to get several approvals from provincial and federal regulators.
Those approvals have so far eluded St Barbara — and before that Atlantic Gold which the Australian company acquired in 2019 — because it has either failed to provide the information required or changed its proposals in mid-assessment.
Baxter’s story was behind the paywall, but is now free to read for all. Click here to read “St Barbara is shedding its Nova Scotia gold mine, leaving a litany of environmental concerns.”
If you would like to read all of the Examiner’s reporting when it comes out, rather than having to wait a month or so, please subscribe here.
In other mining news, mining giant Rio Tinto did a little oopsie in western Australia, losing a capsule of highly radioactive caesium-137 off the back of a truck headed to Perth. ABC (the Australian one) reports:
The disappearance of a dangerous radioactive capsule in Western Australia has sparked calls for tougher radiation safety, as authorities continue to search a 1,400 kilometre stretch of road for the tiny object.
An urgent warning remains in place after the caesium-137 capsule, only 6 millimetres in diameter and 8mm long, was reported missing on January 25.
1,400 km is about the distance from Halifax to Ottawa.
Curtin University (it’s in Perth) engineering professor Nigel Marks, who has a background in working with radioactive materials, tells ABC highly radioactive capsules should not just fall off the backs of trucks:
“At the moment, I don’t think anybody can quite believe that something that’s highly radioactive has fallen off the back of a truck,” he said.
“Clearly if you can have a few screws come undone and then a bolt missing and then your source escapes, that just isn’t enough protection.”…
It’s a regulatory failure. They thought they had enough levels of containment, but obviously they didn’t,” he said.
“It’s probably a case of [people] becoming too familiar with the radioactive materials … with familiarity can just become a lack of awareness of the things that can go wrong, like what we have in this situation.”
Last July, Rio Tinto paid the Australian Tax Office $1 billion Australian dollars to settle a tax avoidance case.
And a year ago, a report damned a culture of sexual assault and bullying at the company:
WA Premier Mark McGowan has urged the mining industry to take action against sexual harassment and assaults in the wake of a damning report commissioned by Rio Tinto that revealed widespread experiences of sexism and sexual assault.
The report, released on Tuesday, included accounts from 21 women of being raped or subject to attempted rape or sexual assault while working for Rio Tinto.
It also found racism and bullying were widespread in the industry.
Rio Tinto, of course, has extensive operations in Canada, and the Montreal Planetarium bears its name.
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5. Electricity’s weak link: the power pole
The Globe and Mail published a great story by Matthew McClearn the other day, called “Climate-minded electrical companies look to improve their weakest link: the wooden utility pole.“
This is one of those stories that takes you deep into a subject, and is full of insights. Of course we know power poles are vulnerable in storms. But what are the origins of power poles anyway? Who makes them? Why are they more vulnerable? Where does the wood come from? I love it when a story goes deeply into a subject like this.
Interestingly, the power pole begins in 1844, when Samuel Morse built a 65-kilometre long telegraph line connecting Washington, DC and Baltimore. Morse had wanted to bury the line. But, McClearn writes, “the first segments of wire proved defective; one of his partners suggested the quickest and cheapest way to complete the project would be to string wire overhead on wooden poles. By the time the earliest electricity grids were built in the 1880s, the pole-and-overhead-wire approach had become entrenched.”
The leading manufacturer of utility poles in North America is Stella-Jones, which has a plant in Truro. McClearn says the company’s sales have more than doubled in the last decade, as poles installed after the end of the Second World War reach the end of their lifespan and need to be replaced.
However, there’s a forestry challenge related to all this:
According to a recent report by the North American Wood Pole Council, only about 5 to 10 per cent of trees in a typical forest are suitable for poles. The council warned that if utilities keep favouring large poles, harvesters will have to wait at least a decade longer for trees to grow sufficiently. That would increase prices and delay orders. Instead, it encourages utilities to purchase smaller poles and shorten spans between them.
A small competitor to Stella-Jones, Calgary-based RS Technologies Inc., smells opportunity. The scent is reminiscent of a freshly snapped wooden pole.
CEO George Kirby said the poles originally used to build electricity networks came primarily from old-growth forests. Today’s poles are harvested earlier, making them weaker and shorter-lived than their predecessors.
McClearn looks at alternate poles, new ways of designing wooden poles, and more. Excellent piece, and very well written, too.
The service pole in my backyard is decades old and Nova Scotia Power is supposed to replace it. We are coming up on two years since they came and did the preliminary work, cutting trees around it. Maybe by writing about it in Morning File I can get the same results Tim Bousquet got with the lighting on Thistle Street. (Not much chance.)
The Globe and Mail has what it calls a “dynamic paywall,” which means stories that are free for me, may not be free for you. If the story is behind the paywall for you, and you don’t have a subscription but want to read it, head over to your library’s website, log into Press Reader, and read it there.
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6. L’Arche co-founder Jean Vanier sexually abused dozens of women over seven decades, report says
Ian Brown wrote yesterday’s Globe and Mail story on a new report that says Jean Vanier was guilty of sexually abusing at least 25 women between 1952 and 2019 (the year he died at age 90). Brown is the author of the book The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for His Disabled Son. The book ends with a section on L’Arche, the organization Vanier co-founded, which Brown describes in the article as “a global network of communities where the intellectually disabled are able to live as equals.”
Brown writes:
The 900-page report is a striking condemnation of sexual abuse, secrecy and repression deep within the Catholic Church and the founding of L’Arche…
Mr. Vanier – the once revered founder of the world’s most progressive communities for adults with disabilities, a frequent candidate for the Nobel Prize who changed the way the world understood the intellectually disabled – is revealed as the centre of a “cult” (to use the investigators’ word) that practised bizarre, religiously motivated sexual rituals.
The report weighs in on everything from the early use of L’Arche as a smokescreen for the cult, to the psychoanalytic theories of Mr. Vanier’s sexual habits.
The story is extremely disturbing and the report, Brown notes, “undermines the world-famous foundation story of L’Arche.” The women Vanier abused were nuns and other women working at or with the organization, not residents. There are four L’Arche locations in Nova Scotia: in Halifax, Wolfville, Iron Mines, and Antigonish.
“It’s a measure of how shocking the report is,” Brown writes, “that L’Arche Canada executives are already at pains to underline two essential findings: that none of the abused were people with disabilities, and that so far no charges of abuse have been laid in Canada…”
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7. More AI news
In the latest installment of her “Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things,” Mary Campbell of the Cape Breton Spectator looks at “artificial intelligence” tool ChatGPT.
Campbell quotes Douglass Rushkoff, who says he’s seen university papers written by ChatGPT, and they are better than the ones students usually write by using voice to text on their phones (and not proofreading):
Rushkoff explained that in the eight years he’s been teaching at a public college he’s “occasionally” encountered papers that have been “cut and pasted” from essays and articles or Wikipedia, but these were “relatively easy to spot,” requiring just a web search for a particularly suspicious sentence.
He also acknowledged that some students purchase their papers with the cheeky suggestion that for now, while it’s free, ChatGPT “kind of levels the playing field” by giving students who don’t have the money to “pay for a bespoke paper from an anonymous grad student gig worker” the opportunity to “produce and submit essays they haven’t written.”
He said he’d encountered his first AI-generated paper recently and while the sentences were clearer and the organization better than those of the papers actually “written” by his students (which he said are usually created through voice-to-text apps on iPhones without proofreading).
I keep wondering whether these automatic writing tools represent the coming of the apocalypse, or if they are more in line with the introduction of the calculator and spellcheck. There was widespread concern that students wouldn’t learn basic arithmetic, or that there would be no need to learn how to spell. I know brilliant people with doctorates who are lousy spellers, and it’s not because of spellcheck.
However, spellcheck does make their lives easier. Similarly, a few weeks ago I was interviewing an engineer who was excited about ChatGPT. He told me he’s not a very good writer, in that his style is very direct, and people find it off-putting. Something like ChatGPT would allow him to enter the points he wants to make in a report, and have it write it in a style that would be more palatable to his peers. I find it hard to find fault with that.
I am also among those who think that if an automatic writing program can pass a university-level assignment, perhaps it is time to rethink those assignments and what we prioritize in higher education.
Rushkoff speaks to this, in a quote Campbell cites:
I understand why we might want to give competency exams to paramedics and cab drivers before entrusting them with our lives, but a liberal arts education? It’s not a license to practice, it is an invitation to engage with ideas, with culture and society. That’s a hard culture to engender with 50 or more students in a seminar, or several hundred in a lecture, particularly when many colleges can no longer afford teaching assistants or graduate students to help read papers. It’s even harder when students are showing up more for the credit than for the learning. But the only truly workable response to a student population that has turned to AI to produce its papers is to retrieve the time-consuming, face-to-face interaction that for me, anyway, constituted the most memorable moments of my education: yes, I’m talking about live conversations with students about ideas, their perspectives on what they’ve read, or even their responses to my questions about their work.
The Cape Breton Spectator, like the Examiner is subscriber supported. You can subscribe here.
A couple of years ago I wrote about Replika, “the AI companion who cares.” I was in touch recently with someone who gave Replika a spin, to see if it had improved in the last couple of years. This person wrote, “I tried it a couple of times and it’s probably somewhat better but still says something fairly out of turn or shallow every 5-10 minutes.”
But even worse than “out of turn or shallow” are reports that Replika is exhibiting stalker-like and harassing behaviour:
The App Store reviews, while mostly positive, are full of dozens of one-star ratings from people complaining that the app is hitting on them too much, flirting too aggressively, or sending sexual messages that they wish they could turn off. “My ai sexually harassed me :(“ one person wrote. “Invaded my privacy and told me they had pics of me,” another said. Another person claiming to be a minor said that it asked them if they were a top or bottom, and told them they wanted to touch them in “private areas.” Unwanted sexual pursuit has been an issue users have been complaining about for almost two years, but many of the one-star reviews mentioning sexual aggression are from this month.
Everything is fine.
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8. 911 goes down
For some reason, my phone makes no sound when an emergency alert comes in. (Must be because it is old — I bought it two years ago. Anyway, as I was writing this Morning File, I could see my phone light up, so I looked down and saw an emergency alert notifying Nova Scotians that 911 service was down.
Before proceeding any further, a word about language. You could write this:
911 service in Nova Scotia is not working right now.
But why do that, I guess, when instead you could write this:
Nova Scotia is experiencing a 911 issue.
The alert encourages Nova Scotians to check Twitter and Facebook for updates. It seems to have taken the RCMP a good half hour to “update” with a tweet reiterating the text of the emergency alert.
Service also went down in New Brunswick and PEI. This is, to put it mildly, bad.
About 90 minutes after the original alert, Nova Scotians got a follow-up message saying service had been restored, and to not call 911 to test whether or not it was working.
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Sandwiches are beautiful and so are essays about them
I love sandwiches. I could eat a sandwich (or two) every day and never grow tired of them. I also love good writing, and I am particularly fond of essays that take disparate elements and bring them together brilliantly.
All of which is to say that the Notable Sandwiches newsletter hits a sweet (or savoury) spot for me. Notable Sandwiches is (usually) written by Talia Lavin, and edited by David Swanson (who sometimes writes). Lavin is also the author of the book Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy.
The conceit of Notable Sandwiches is extremely simple. Each edition features an essay on a sandwich listed in the Wikipedia entry “List of sandwiches.” The entry describes itself as “a list of notable sandwiches.” Notable Sandwiches is going through them in alphabetical order. Last week’s entry was the cudighi, which, I confess, I had not heard of. Wikipedia tells me it is “a Michigan variety of Cotechino Italian sausage, on a long, hard roll, often topped with mozzarella and tomato sauce.”
Lavin’s genius is in the connections she makes between the sandwiches and historical or current social issues. Some of these connections are fairly obvious. For instance, the club sandwich essay, not surprisingly, digs into the history of social clubs in the United States.
Lavin writes:
Culinary mediocrity aside, the “club” in “club sandwich” once conferred a certain exclusivity—an air of luxury, or at least privilege. This, we are told (code for: I am speculating wildly), likely has to do with the central role of the social club in early-to-mid-twentieth-century society: central, indispensable, and—at its highest and most desirable echelons—all-white, all-male, and all-Gentile. Jews and Black people made their own clubs. The Harmonie, founded by German Jews in 1871, served as an outlet for the blackballed, and in their 1920s heyday there were several hundred Black social clubs in Chicago, during a time when Harlem’s Cotton Club was rigidly segregated for a white-only clientele.
In the late nineteenth century, the Black women’s club movement was founded, under the auspices of the National Association of Colored Women. By the movement’s peak in 1924, the association’s leagues had some hundred thousand members, primarily in the northeast. In Albany, the Home Social Club “represented the pinnacle of the city’s black social structure”—a forum for speeches about Black advancement and politics, but also a friendly locale for Black men to feast on decadent annual January dinners. 1901’s menu featured “creamed oysters, sherry, roast turkey, suckling pig, peas, asparagus, and mashed potatoes, followed up with mince pie, ice cream, egg nog, fruit, and then “Cigars, Smoke, Talk.”
Lavin notes that the origin stories of most sandwiches are “bullshit” but they can nonetheless be instructive. Here is Lavin on the cucumber sandwich:
The cucumber sandwich fits every stereotype about upper-crust Britain between two slices of bread. It’s a Victorian creation, apocryphally invented by British colonists in India who wanted a light snack to counteract the sweltering heat of the country they were busy despoiling. As you ought to know by now, most sandwich-origin stories are bullshit. Still, it’s telling that a sandwich which spread due to new technology, in the form of coal-powered hothouses, also benefits from a boosterish, imperialist myth. The cucumber sandwich is generally prepared with butter or cream cheese, and served crustless at the highest of high teas—Queen Elizabeth was said to have preferred hers with mint. By now, nearly a century into its embodiment of (generously) poshness or (ungenerously) upper-class vapidity, it has become more symbol than sandwich.
The cucumber sandwich is so far removed from being au courant, in fact, that the sharpest satire of the dish comes to us from 1895, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. In Act I, the fatuous, amoral Algernon plans to serve cucumber sandwiches to his snobbish Aunt Augusta, causing the play’s protagonist, Jack, to exclaim, “Hallo! Why all these cups? Why cucumber sandwiches? Why such reckless extravagance in one so young?”
Lavin then goes on to discuss Wilde’s trial for gross indecency and the anti-trans hysteria in the UK, before settling in to a Q&A with Mallory Moore of the Trans Safety Network.
The British Rail sandwich entry is an opportunity to discuss industrial standardization and rail privatization. The chow mein sandwich has Lavin struggling:
Here is the ugly truth: the chow mein sandwich, impossible to eat as a portable food despite its name, fills me with unspeakable revulsion. It looks like a squid got trapped in a sea of its own blood and was then cruelly forced to wear a bread yarmulke. It is the gore porn of sandwiches. It’s the sandwich version of Elon Musk-era Twitter — its own disintegration is contained within its limp and sagging form. It looks vaguely gynecological in an upsetting way…
I cannot mention — and deplore — the chow mein sandwich without drawing the shadow of its ghastlier, and even more regional, shadow twin, the chop suey sandwich. Next to the chop suey sandwich (which has a similar origin — depressive Depression food), the chow mein sandwich looks like a lush delicacy; insofar as these sandwiches are twins, one of them definitely tried to eat the other in the womb. Jacob and Esau pale and clasp hands, the lentil incident forgotten.
The chop suey sandwich is also around a century old, and is only found in Salem, Massachusetts. It… looks even more like a trapped squid, or perhaps a nightmarish kraken creature straight out of the works of famous New Englander H.P. Lovecraft. (New literary theory: the chop suey sandwich inspired Cthulhu.) Its chief ingredient: Bean sprouts enrobed in the cornstarch of their own torment.
You must seek out some photos of the chop suey and chow mein sandwiches. They are not beautiful, and perhaps not fine, but I generally agree with Mr. Fred Penner’s sentiment here.
You can also enjoy Van Morrison encouraging you to have a sandwich.
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NOTICED
I have been using voice-to-text lately for texting, even though I mostly hate it. Sometimes I just get sick of using my thumbs though. I have also used it for speaking notes. I’m not great at writing speaking notes for myself. Voice to text is helpful for this, because I can speak off the cuff, then upload my recording to the transcription service, clean it up a bit and — bingo! — speaking notes!
Here’s the thing I’ve noticed about voice to text though: When I speak in my normal voice, it’s not great at picking up what I’m saying. Now, this is in part a function of my voice, which is relatively soft. I have been told by people with hearing loss that they have a harder time hearing me than they do hearing others, and that it has less to do with volume than it does with the register of my voice.
The other day, this is the output voice to text gave me when I was trying to text someone:
The anniversaries without credit card Generator with me to create a word file and short for milk and my mom is a device Imperial Hotel Μίδας Okay just get the money and a little bit my mom on spotify
(The Greek word is “Midas.”)
Recently, I’ve tried running my own voice-to-text experiment. When I get gibberish like the first output (which happens more often than I’d like), I repeat what I’m saying but drop my voice to a more stereotypically male bass tone. When I do this, the transcription is almost flawless.
When I did this with the phrase that was rendered above as gibberish, I got what I was actually intending to say:
The owners were not particularly generous with me. I remember when I was a kid my mom sent me out for milk, and I was five or 10 cents short. He told me no problem, just go home, get the money, and then I will give you the milk. My mother was horrified.
I’ve reproduced this type of result over and over again. Aware that I might be enunciating more clearly when I’m using my fake voice, I’ve tried to avoid doing that. Maybe I am anyway though. Who knows?
What I do know is that people who create products, services, and technologies build in their assumptions, often unconsciously. Take, for example, the famous example of the soap dispensers that would not recognize Black skin. Or, take Google Maps. It’s full of underlying assumptions. When I open it up from home, it tells me traffic is currently light in my area. Not particularly surprising, considering this is a stretch of road near where I live. In 25 years the traffic has not been light once, when a car went into the ditch, and the road was blocked for an hour or so.
The assumption is that people opening the map are travelling by car, and will want the traffic report. Then there are the assumptions about what I might be looking for. The top suggested item is often “gas.” Again, the assumption is if you are looking at maps you are a driver. (Although, with the hyper-personalization of everything, perhaps Maps is not making this same assumption for you.)
And then there’s the assumption that the default type of organization is a business. This leads to absurdities like calling the Visitor Centre at Keji a business:
The emergency department at the Halifax Infirmary is also a business apparently. And the Abbie J. Lane Memorial Hospital (average rating: 3.2 stars) has a response to a review, presumably from someone at Nova Scotia Health, who is listed as the hospital’s “owner.” In the opaque weirdness of Google Maps, I can see this review and response when I look at the entry for the Abbie Lane on my computer, but not when I look at it in the Maps app on my phone. Go figure.
None of this (other than the soap dispenser issue) amounts to more than a minor inconvenience, or perhaps a bit of befuddlement, but I think it is worth noting the ideology that underpins the tools we use regularly.
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Government
City
Today
Land Lease Community Project (Tuesday, 6:30pm, Lake Echo Community Recreation Centre) — if needed
Tomorrow
Land Lease Community Project (Wednesday, 6:30pm, Sackville Heights Community Centre) — snow date Feb. 8, 6:30pm, same location; more info here
Province
Human Resources (Tuesday, 10am, One Government Place and online) — Skilled Labour Shortages and Impact on Critical Infrastructure in Nova Scotia; and Appointments to Agencies, Boards and Commissions; with representatives from the Department of Labour, Skills, and Immigration, the Department of Public Works, Nova Scotia Community College, and Apprenticeship Board
On campus
Dalhousie
Today
No events
Tomorrow
Opening Reception: 68th Student, Staff, Faculty, and Alumni Exhibition (Wednesday, 5pm, Dalhousie Art Gallery) — featuring works of art in a variety of media, and showcases the creative talents of our Dalhousie and King’s College communities. Also opening is ‘A Few of our Favourite Things: Selections from the Permanent Collection.’ Refreshments will be served. The exhibitions will be on view until 16 April 2023. Free Admission.
MAiD in early 2023: Where are We Now and Where are We Going? (Wednesday, 7pm, online) — 17thDalhousie Mini Medical School
Saint Mary’s
Tareq Hadhad (Tuesday, 3pm, in the theatre named after a bank, in the school of business named after a grocery company) — the founder and CEO of Peace by Chocolate will speak, followed by a Q&A and reception; info and registration here
King’s
Jon Tattrie in conversation with Tareq Hadhad (Tuesday, 7pm, Wilson Common Room) — author of Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, in conversation with the founder and CEO of Peace by Chocolate; more info here
In the harbour
Halifax
18:00: BBC Topaz, cargo ship, sails from Pier 9 for sea
19:00: Conti Annapurna, container ship, sails from Fairview Cove for Dubai
20:30: NYK Virgo, container ship, arrives at Fairview Cove from Colombo, Sri Lanka
Cape Breton
No arrivals or departures.
Footnotes
- While scrolling through stock photos today, I realized how common the phrase “silence is consent” was when I was growing up. Pretty fucked up, really.
- The Perth Heat are in the Australian Baseball League finals, after knocking off the Brisbane Bandits, who dominated the regular season. They play the Adelaide Giants, who fended off the surging Auckland Tuatara. One of Adelaide’s pitchers is Canadian Miguel Cienfuegos, from Laval, Quebec. Meanwhile, former MLB star Josh Reddick plays for Perth. Game one of the best of three final starts Friday at 7am Atlantic time.
- I knew Bobby Hull was a great hockey player, and that he also seemed to be a terrible person, but until I read this CBC story, I did not realize just how terrible. A friend recently interviewed Hull for a hockey documentary he is working on. I will let you know about it if/when it gets made. (My friend’s last documentary took over a decade and left him saying it was the biggest mistake of his life and he would never do it again, but here we are.)
- Happy to learn there is such a thing as the North American Wooden Pole Council, “Your online resource for preservative-treated wood utility poles in North America.”
- Wrote today’s Morning File while listening to the classic mashup album All Day, by Girl Talk.
