Winter Solstice 2013
Shortest Day-Longest Night Stephanie Kelley Winter will officially arrive in our little corner of the Universe here in New Brunswick at precisely 1:11 PM on Saturday, December 21 this year. There was quite a bit of hoopla surrounding the Winter Solstice last year, in 2012, what with it being...
Moving Day at Last!
Stephanie Kelley Finally…The end is nigh for the latest Great Flood Relocation Program! After months of delays, set-backs, game play changes and excruciating waits on everything for everybody, the last two inhabited homes will be moved in a couple of days as I write this. This is...
Flying Wombats & Phantom Corsairs Lies the Auto Industry Sells Us
The first time I heard talk about suppressed inventions and technology was over 40 years ago….my counter-culture friends told about how there’d been a carburetor developed that got 75 MPG but it had been bought out by Big Oil so we’d all have to keep on driving gas guzzling...
Turkey Vulture in Rowena
After I had delivered issues of the September 25 edition of the Blackfly in Plaster Rock last week, I headed home on route 390 so I could go through Tobique First Nation to make my final two drop offs at Bodin’s and the Maliseet Gas Bar. It was a...
Fun Finds at the SPCA Thrift Store !
By Stephanie Kelley In the last issue of the Blackfly we published an article about the SPCA Thrift Store in Plaster Rock, but I had not yet visited the store personally. When I delivered the BFG on Wednesday Bill Mosher gave me a little private tour of the store,...
Agenda 21 and Rural NB
Rural New Brunswick is under siege these days. Rural hospitals , along with other services, have been closed or downsized all over the province. During my recent stay at the much reviled Waterville Hospital, which was supposedly built to consolidate regional health care so as to be “sustainable”...
Stupidity Rules
I first saw this bumper sticker on a car 40 years ago when I lived in Florida. It was plastered on a pickup truck that had all the earmarks of being a redneck ride… complete with a gun rack in the rear window and coon dogs in the back....
The great dictator… a vintage film for our times
In 1940 Charlie Chaplin made one of the very best anti-war movies ever filmed. Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, composed and starred in “The Great Dictator.” When this flick was released in 1940, the USA was still formally at peace with Nazi Germany. The film caused quite a...
Housekeeping Tales & The Servant Problem
I love Jane Austen’s novels, and find re-reading them to be the literary equivalent of eating comfort food. It’s always just such a delight to visit Regency England with Jane, and meet the people of her world as she describes them so perfectly, with all their human foibles laid...
The “F” Word and the Broken Windows Theory
One of the more entertaining, illuminating and downright fascinating books in my own personal reference library is titled “The “F” Word.” It is published by the Oxford University press, the same folks who publish the Oxford English Dictionary, among other scholarly and utterly respectable books. And yes,...