NEWS
1. Feed Nova Scotia ends Christmas registry
“Feed Nova Scotia has announced the end of its 35-year-old Christmas registry program and the creation of a new fund it says will benefit more people throughout the province,” reports Yvette d’Entremont:
In an interview Monday afternoon, the organization’s executive director Nick Jennery said the Christmas program was both unsustainable and inequitable. He said costs to administer the program had “ballooned” in recent years, hitting a high of $440,000 just for the 2023 holiday season.
For the past two years, Jennery said it took seven full-time contract staff to run the Christmas program for three straight months.
“It’s a wonderful program and it does great work, but it takes three times the amount of effort to pull together a Christmas hamper than it does to get fresh fruits and vegetables out the door,” Jennery explained.
…
Jennery said money they would normally spend on the Christmas registry will instead be distributed across the province to agencies supported by Feed Nova Scotia via a new holiday fund.
That fund, the organization said in a media release, isn’t restricted to Christmas and is designed to provide all members with “year-round flexibility to celebrate the holidays and occasions most important to the communities they serve.”
Click or tap here to read “Feed Nova Scotia creates new fund in face of increasing food insecurity.”
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2. Route 19 charged with liquor violations after workplace death
In July, the Cape Breton Post reported that:
The provincial Labour Department has launched an investigation into a workplace death at a craft brewery and restaurant in Inverness.
A media report surfaced Saturday that RCMP were dis-patched to a call about a “workplace death” at about 1 a.m. Friday [July 14] at Route 19 Brewing, located across from the entrance to Inverness Beach Village.
No further details about the incident were released. An RCMP spokesperson said Sunday via email that police “completed an initial investigation and (are) turning the file over to the Department of Labour, Skills and Immigration.”
Long-time Route 19 brewer Dallas Lewis died at age 48 on July 14, 2023. A GoFundMe page created to raise money for Lewis’s family notes that “As we reopen our doors we ask that you please respect our staff during this difficult time and not ask about this tragic incident.”
Yesterday, Jp Landry, the executive director of Alcohol, Gaming, Fuel & Tobacco at Service Nova Scotia, referred a disciplinary notice involving Route 19 to the Utility and Review Board (UARB) for violations alleged to have occurred on July 13, 2023.
The referral cites alleged violations of Sections 61, 64, and 76 of the Liquor Licensing Regulations. Section 61 deals with serving liquor to intoxicated persons. Section 64 prohibits a variety of activities related to the “orderly control and operation of the licensed premises.” Section 76 prohibits employees from drinking while on duty.
No further details were included in Landry’s referral. A date for a disciplinary hearing has yet to be set, Route 19 has yet to file a defence, and none of the allegations have been heard by the UARB.
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3. Titanic doping
Did you know about the Titanic doping? I didn’t. It happened when the James Cameron film was being staged here in Nova Scotia, in 1996.
Specifically, writes Tricia Ralph:
In August of 1996, the Canadian Press reported that around 80 members of the Titanic film crew were taken to hospital for symptoms arising from what was originally thought to have been caused by food poisoning. News articles from around that time reported that the Halifax Regional Police (HRP) ultimately concluded that the crew’s food (the lobster chowder) had been laced with a drug called phencyclidine (PCP), also referred to as “angel dust”.
Ralph is Nova Scotia’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, and she weighed in on the 1996 poisoning because someone (the applicant’s name is withheld) had filed a freedom of information request with the Halifax police, asking for all investigatory files. To no one’s surprise, the cops mostly refused, giving the applicant just a handful of mostly redacted pages that revealed no meaningful information. So the applicant appealed to Ralph. More on that in a bit, but first, back to the day.
From news reports, I learn that the Titanic production was making use of the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh, a Russian science vessel that was hired to get to the Atlantic resting place of the Titanic. Apparently, the boat was using Dartmouth Cove as its staging base, and a sound studio just uphill on Atlantic Avenue in Woodside was the site of the poisoning, at a wrap-up party for the crew.
It sounds just terrible.
“I just was appalled,” Jean Kimber, the women’s costume supervisor for the film, told Daily News reporter Shaune MacKinlay (MacKinlay is now Mayor Mike Savage’s PR person). “We had 70 people to transport and there was one ambulance.”
MacKinlay clarified that there were two ambulances dispatched, but one only made one trip to the nearby Dartmouth General Hospital. Most of the 80 sickened people were transferred by a minibus.
Susanne Hiller, reporting for the Daily News, wrote that:
Halifax police say they are questioning workers at Catering Consultants Ltd., as well as everyone involved in the production. That means interviewing people from Nova Scotia, Ontario and California.
One of the caterers who helped prepare the PCP-laden food was arraigned in Bedford provincial court on extortion charges July 23.
Chef consultant Richard William Middleton, 33, is accused of using threats to induce Daniele DiBenedetto, the manager of a local Tim Hortons, to pay a sum of money between July 15 and 19.
The Ridgevale Drive man is also charged with robbing DiBenedetto. He was released from custody on an undertaking to have no contact with the alleged victim. He returns to court Nov. 19 for a preliminary inquiry.
Local actor Frank Babb, who was an extra on the set, ate three bowls of the spiked chowder
“It was like having two joints of really good weed and a dozen beer,” he said.
“There was one woman sitting in a wheelchair with an IV in her arm,” he said. “Others were throwing up. The majority of people had trouble walking and had slurred speech.”
Middleton was never charged with the poisoning, and I can’t determine if he was convicted of the Tim’s incident. He is of course presumed innocent of anything to do with the Titanic. And no one else has ever been charged.
So if it wasn’t Middleton, who did poison the seafood chowder? That’s why the person filed the freedom of information request.
Ralph, the information commissioner, found in favour of the appellant and recommended that the police “Disclose de-identified factual observations made by third party witnesses within 45 days of the date of this review report.”
That recommendation and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee at Timmy’s, but that’s about it. That’s because Ralph has no enforcement power. So the cops will likely tell the applicant to pound sand, and there the matter will sit, unless the applicant decides to take on the great expense of bringing the matter to court.
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VIEWS
1. Spirit in the Dark
“I’m cool with the cable cars, the Golden Gate Bridge, and other San Francisco tourist attractions,” writes Evelyn White:
But during a recent sojourn in the city I was thrilled to stroll by the Fillmore Auditorium. For it was there, in the early 1970s, that Aretha Franklin (1942-2018) gave a concert that featured a surprise appearance by Ray Charles, who joined her on stage for an iconic performance of “Spirit in the Dark.”
Born in segregated Georgia, Charles (1930-2004) had become completely blind by age seven, reportedly as a result of glaucoma.
Sans solar sunglasses or a pinhole viewer, I instead marked yesterday’s eclipse by repeat playings of ‘Spirit’ from Franklin’s album Aretha: Live at the Fillmore West (1971). It is also the title track (without Ray Charles) on her 1970 release Spirit In the Dark. About her inspiration for the self-penned tune, the famously private Queen of Soul once said: “Hmmm, that’s one I’d rather not talk about. It’s very, very personal.”
Click or tap here to read “Aretha Franklin found the Spirit in the Dark.”
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2. Chasing the eclipse: we now need the moon more than ever
My first real memories are of the moon.
I was born on Easter Sunday, whose place on the calendar is defined as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.
Oh, I don’t remember my birth, of course. And I have assorted proto-memories from early childhood — vague recollections of being in a car when I was badly counting deer, so I must’ve been about three years old; a nightmare of a tiger; being teased by siblings; a few snippets from kindergarten.
But by “real memory” I mean memories where kid Tim wasn’t centre stage — when stuff out there in the world made a lasting impact on me for simply being what it was. And those date to when I was six years old.
The first was on the evening of July 20, 1969, when I watched the moon landing on TV, and then Dad kept me up way past my bedtime to watch Neil Armstrong get out of the spaceship and walk around the surface of the moon, one of the standout moments in all human history.
My second real memory comes on March 7, 1970, five weeks before my seventh birthday, when my hometown of Norfolk, Virginia fell in the path of a total solar eclipse.
The entire family gathered in the backyard, except two of my brothers who were up on the roof. I recall that well before totality, the tiny holes insects had eaten into the leafs of the trees served as pinhole cameras and little half moons and then crescent moons appeared on the ground below. Then, as the sky darkened, lots of birds headed to nest in the trees, as if it were nightfall. Then, silence.
I looked up during totality, and saw a sky full of stars. The corona of the sun encircled the utterly black moon. It was truly wondrous.
As the eclipse moved back to partiality, the birds awoke, squawking like crazy. The crescent moons, then the half moons, appeared on the ground below. Then just another spring day.
Is it odd that my two earliest memories of an appreciation of the external world concern the moon? I dunno. Everything about the moon is odd.
First, even the moon’s very existence is extraordinary. No other planet we’re aware of has a single moon of such proportionate size.
The latest scientific thought is that the moon was formed about 4.5 billion years ago when a Mars-sized planet dubbed Theia slammed into a young Earth. The mechanics of the explosion are still being worked out, but it’s thought to explain Earth’s large molten core, the tilted axis of the Earth that brings us the seasons, and (perhaps) the large amount of water on Earth.
At first, the moon was much closer to the Earth than it is now, and so it would appear about three times as large in the sky as it does today. But through the physics of tidal braking, the moon moved and continues to move farther away from the Earth, about an inch every year. This leads to an astonishingly weird coincidence.
Today, the relative size of the moon and the sun are about the same — the sun is about 400 times as large across as the moon, and is about 400 times distant. That means we see a total eclipse — the moon exactly covers the sun, no more, no less.
But it wasn’t always like this. When the moon appeared much larger in the sky, eclipses were more common because the apparent size of the moon far exceeded the apparent size of the sun. And the current situation where the moon and sun have the same apparent size began just a few million years ago and will end a few million years in the future — a blip of time in the history of the Earth, and even in the history of life on Earth. And a few million years in the future, there won’t be any total eclipses at all, because the moon will be relatively smaller than the sun. We’re living during a truly remarkable sweet spot.
The chances are infinitesimal that we humans would evolve on a planet with this odd moon, and exactly at the sweet spot where the moon is exactly the apparent size of the sun, and yet here we are.
As a result, the moon is the source of religious inspiration, the muse for poetry and song, and helped us to understand the universe. Both figuratively and literally, we make love in the moonlight. We become lunatics. We howl freely.
It seems likely that there are hundreds of billions of planets circling other stars in our galaxy, but very likely none of those planets have such a moon at such a distance at just such a sweet spot in time. If there are anything we’d recognize as intelligent civilizations out there, they’ve had to find other means to be inspired religiously, other muses for poetry and song, other pathways to scientific understanding. Will they be capable of love? Of lunacy? Of howling? I wonder if we could even understand such a civilization; perhaps the gap between a moon-formulated society and a moonless society is unbridgeable.
Which is to say, the moon is really important. It’s the basis of our culture, our science, our relationships, our sanity and lack thereof.
Yet when I now think of the moon, I’m left saddened. We’ve turned our back on the moon.
The meaning of the moon-dated Easter has been perverted, as people who call themselves Christians have strung Christ up and killed him all over again. Religion is not a light in the sky, but a poison pit. Poets, musicians, and artists are ignored, scientists attacked. Those who howl “freedom!” the loudest are the least free, chained to their hatred and fear. Love? It’s to laugh for, snowflake. The Earth we know was created by the moon, and yet we smother it with carbon, with the fantasy excuse that we can run off to Mars.
We need the moon more than ever.
And so on Monday, I chased the moon, with the hope of once again seeing a total eclipse. My plan was to drive to Miramichi, specifically to the Miramichi Marsh, to watch the birds during the eclipse.
But soon after turning onto Highway 11 at Shediac, traffic became stop-and-go. Thousands of Nova Scotia licence plates piling up at every chokepoint. I hadn’t left myself quite enough time, so instead of Miramichi, I turned off the highway at Kouchibouguac Park. Driving along the main road into the park, I passed hundreds and hundreds of people parked at pullouts, some with telescopes, all affable and excited.
I pulled off at a trailhead near a river. It was enough. After a while, the sky became orangish. I looked up through my eclipse glasses and saw the beginning of partiality. As it got darker, ducks quacked, and then became silent. Totality came, and I looked up, saw the corona. I could see stars. A few minutes later, the whole processed reversed, first with the ducks downright freaked out by the experience, seemingly complaining loudly to each other. It was truly wondrous.
On the way home, once again Highway 11 was stop-and-go, and from Moncton all the way to Halifax the traffic was heavy.
This pleased me. It seems I’m not the only one in need of the moon. We all need a little wonder and awe, and a lot of inspiration.
Maybe there’s hope.
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Government
City
Today
Halifax Regional Council (Tuesday, 1pm, City Hall and online) — agenda
Tomorrow
Special Events Advisory Committee (Wednesday, 9am, City Hall) — agenda
Province
Today
Health (Tuesday, 1pm, Province House and online) — Withdrawal Management Services; with representatives from Nova Scotia Health, Office of Addictions and Mental Health, Direction 180, and Ally Centre of Cape Breton
Tomorrow
Public Accounts (Wednesday, 9am, Province House and online) — Review of Social Support Programs; with representatives from Department of Community Services, and Department of Municipal Affairs and Housing
On campus
NSCAD
Tomorrow
Artist Talk (Wednesday, 12pm, Anna Leonowens Gallery) — Brigitta Zhao will discuss her thesis exhibition
In the harbour
Halifax
06:00: Seamaster, container ship, arrives at Fairview Cove from New York
10:30: Morning Lady, car carrier, arrives at Autoport from Southampton, England
13:00: BF Fortaleza, container ship, sails from Pier 41 for Mariel, Cuba
16:00: Seamaster sails for sea
16:00: Eagle II, container ship, sails from Pier 27 for sea
20:30: Morning Lady sails for sea
Cape Breton
No arrivals or departures
Footnotes
I’ve now had the “once in a lifetime experience” of a total eclipse twice.
Thanks for that lovely piece on the moon – as Iris suggested – I will be sending it to friends. We also went to NB (north of Shediac) but seem to have beat the traffic. The eclipse certainly met all my expectations – better, even, than I expected… Big disappointment was that nearly all the restaurants, except fast food, in Shediac, were closed… Not seasonal closures – either because it was Monday, or maybe FOR for the Eclipse. We had flagged a couple whose websites said they were open – before we left – but both were closed. The accommodation boom was great for NB (couldn’t book a hotel room!) but I thought restaurants were missing the boat with so many people visiting! Guess they did not want to miss the eclipse (although really they could just have stopped for 30 minutes! )
I motored up to just outside of Rogersville for the eclipse. I pulled off on a sideroad (no streetlights!) and hung out with a guy and his son up from Moncton. Just the 3 of us. It was truly glorious and mythic. I’m so glad I went, and even more glad I stopped in MOncton for the night as opposed to driving all the way back to Halifax
thank you, Tim, for “Chasing the eclipse: we now need the moon more than ever” I enjoyed the read and the comments including the music links. So many people commented in social media yesterday and today about the sense of community, waiting for the eclipse. (This is the simple song which was a comfort to me as a child. I still relish time looking at the moon and thinking of those I love https://youtu.be/l18E-dYvawo?si=Ys9Dg7z-wfp9MpRE)
I made a similar mood odyssey to Tim! We took the train up to Moncton on Sunday, and then spent Monday touristing around until we drove up to Irishtown and parked at a school that was closed for the day to watch totality and eat cake (it was my roommate’s birthday). Many people on the train and at our hotel were following the same plan. We ran into a family whose daughter goes to the school my roommate works at back in HRM. The human element really was almost as enchanting as the sight itself, once we got through some of the worst traffic to get there – the playground at the closed school gradually filled up with small children and their parents who were trying diligently to make sure the rambunctious kids wore their glasses correctly in between stomping through the mud puddles; and then when the sun went dark all the chattering running children stopped and went silent, just like the birds, spellbound by the sight. Strangers coordinated to keep a countdown so we all knew when it was safe to look. We could see Venus come out. Afterwards we joined the long long line of cars rolling back east as the stars winked back into place in a wide open crystal-clear sky, which felt special in and of itself — a beautiful evening and a shared purpose, Stan Rogers crooning ‘Northwest Passage’ from the car speakers as the miles ticked on. It all felt very very human, and I’m so glad we did it.
Unrelatedly: the Titanic PCP Chowder story is my favourite ridiculous piece of anecdotal trivia to share with film nerd friends, usually by way of this Vanity Fair telling: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/12/titanic-pcp-chowder. Bill Paxton said there was a conga line in the Dartmouth General hallway and James Cameron complains about liquified charcoal and claims somebody stabbed him in the face with a pen. History happens here! Lol
*MOON odyssey, dang it!
Yesterday I watched the partial eclipse from my front door in Dartmouth and my cynical expectations were confirmed – no squawking birds, not very dark, basically a ho-hum event for me. Then, I read Tim’s piece on his adventures with the moon. Thank you for making my eclipse day meaningful – after the fact. Another example of why we need excellent writers.
I like Bill’s song, below. I also like this one a lot. Nice bit of writing there, Tim.
https://youtu.be/PYBNulmD0L8?si=gqfpXFS9WZBeCzvK
Tim – this song makes a good coda to yourarticle about the moon – beautifully written by the way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMLooWesMVw
Wild story about the Titanic Doping. The DiBenedetto name rung a bell (kids worked at one of the Tims)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/cops-seek-help-in-bedford-shooting-case-1.567144
Not a lucky guy by any means
About the moon: our debt is quite a bit more extensive. Without the moon there’d be no tides and without them, little chance of life of any sort developing on the sloopy flats.