Evergreen Nova Scotia

Saturday, March 19, 2022

Donnybrook - My memories of growing up there.

Where I grew up

When my parents moved into their first home in the valley called Donnybrook near Ireland Road (College Grant) in Ohio, Antigonish county, Nova Scotia, they used oil lamps for light, an outhouse and carried their water from a brook on the property.

My dad, Donald Keir Steeves had taken his army savings and helped his step-father, Claude John Steeves set up a sawmill near Din's bridge, a metal arched structure across a gorge and dam below, near Ireland Road.

Dad was able to acquire an old army truck which was selling cheaply and could be used to haul logs and lumber to buyers in Pictou county.

Mom came to Donnybrook as a young graduate from Normal College in Truro, Nova Scotia. She took a teaching job at the one-room schoolhouse at the bottom of the Marsh Hill along the Ohio West road.

Sunday, March 14, 2021

Master Corporal John Steeves, Dec 11 1961 - March 4 20201

John was my younger brother and I miss a lot

Saturday, July 11, 2020

Un-noticed by Canadian media, death toll from covid has passed at least 1000 in 150 different countries worldwide

covid-19 is restricting those few precious years when a kid can be a kid...

Got that bit of sad and bad news from 40 gallons and a mule today, July 11th 2020....

here is the link to the story.

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Doris & Stan Wortman raised a great family - except for grandson Gabriel

Bob Stanfield actually successfully caught footballs all afternoon during that election campaigning day event oh so long ago --- and the press photographers actually photographed him repeatedly doing so.

But what their subtly editorializing bosses all chose to publish -and publish over and over and over - what the photograph of the one time Bob missed.

Stanfield narrowly lost that election to Pierre Trudeau by just one seat - and the football fumble scam is generally given the blame.

Canada's own "Gotcha !" and "The Sun What Won It !" moment.

Think of that, whenever you read in mean stream media about that awful monster of a grandson of Doris Wortman.

Because as this 40 Gallons and a Mule blog post clearly shows, her children and grandchildren all bettered themselves from her and her husband's humble working class beginnings....

Sunday, May 17, 2020

Gabriel Wortman story revealed at 40 gallons and amule blog

Https://40gallonsandamule.blogspot.com

https://40gallonsandamule.blogspot.com/2020/05/gabe-wortmans-complicated-love-life-its.html

Detailed stuff not just speculation
Doucuments facts photos

Thursday, January 30, 2020

Proposed Owl's Head golf course is wrong !

If golf courses are about anything, they are all about grass.

Rich deep grass over rich deep soil.

The proposed Owl's Head golf course along the Eastern
Shore near Ship Harbour basically looks like Peggy's Cove.

Would you build a golf course at Peggy's Cove ??!!

I can just see your and my hard earned tax dollars being
wasted during an election campaign to see that hundreds
of Liberal truck drivers are well paid to truck Musquodoboit
Valley farm soil all the way to Owl's Head to build a golf course.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs !!! (As long as you are a Grit.)

Maybe I am being cynical or maybe I am just being a born and raised Nova Scotian who knows how it works down here...

Why is Nova Scotia so slow to take profitable advantage of our ever-present ever-powerful winds?

We have windy politicians galore - but their wind is mostly NATO : No Action, All Talk , when it comes to seriously making our province a wind-power among nations....

Friday, December 6, 2019

Martin Henry Dawson's first medical role : was as a WWI Medic

Note the RED CROSS badge on Martin Henry Dawson's Cdn Med Corp uniform !

I am not sure he was ever on a combat battlefield as a medic though - he worked at base hospitals a few dozen miles behind the front lines.

He was , later, in the front lines leading the charges across No Nan's Land as a very brave junior infantry officer.

Friday, November 15, 2019

New photo of Martin Henry Dawson !

Martin Henry Dawson 1919

Helen Creighton, the famous Nova Scotian folklorist, kept everything of her long life, and then left them to the Public Archives of Nova Scotia, where her lifelong friend Phyllis Blakney was director.

Among the photos PANS put on his public website was a photo Helen kept of her brother Terry and a group of friends, including a very happy relaxed young Henry Dawson !!!!!

The date was 1919 and the group of young Nova Scotian soldiers were simply glad to still be alive and in relatively good shape after years in the mud of the Western Front.

One of Henry's Vancouver relatives found the photo online and I thought I would link to the PANS website so all the world could see a smiling Henry, instead of all those stern faced or glum photos Michael Marshall is usually publicly posting of Dr Dawson...

Martin Henry Dawson in middle, 1919

Monday, August 15, 2016

Trappenberg Green campaign : Advanced Voting in Halifax Needham by-election starts this Saturday !

You may also vote every day in person (except Sundays) at the Returning Officer's HQ .

Election Nova Scotia has all the lowdown ...

Thomas Trappenberg, Halifax Needham Green candidate, to be interviewed by CBC information Morning

I very much enjoyed a roundtable of the Liberal, Tory and NDP by-election candidates in Halifax Needham this AM on CBC Information Morning.

Later, while out campaigning in the riding, I had a nice brief chat with Dr Rod Wilson, the Liberal candidate and his door to door crew.

Now I have just learned that tomorrow, at 740 AM on CBC Info Morning, Nova Scotia's interim Green party leader Thomas Trappenberg will also be interviewed in his role as the Greens' candidate in Halifax Needham's by-election...

Thomas Trappenberg to be interviewed by CBC re Halifax Needham by-election

Trappenberg's Green supporters, going door to door, Needham by-election

Dr Thomas Trappenberg's Green supporters campaigning door to door Falkland Street August 15 for Halifax Needham by-election

and later ran into Dr Rod Wilson, Liberal candidate, a very nice gentlemen...

Sunday, August 14, 2016

NS Greens putting signs up & knocking on doors for Trappenberg in Hfx Needham by-election !

Thomas Trappenberg is the Green candidate in Halifax Needham by-election

Thomas Trappenberg is also the current leader of the provincial Nova Scotian Greens.

Friday, April 22, 2016

Martin Henry Dawson photos

Over at Michael Marshall's blog, Impure Manhattan, he has uploaded a dozen photos of Martin Henry Dawson.

They cover every decade of Dr Dawson's short but world-shattering life :

Thursday, October 22, 2015

"Elizabeth May's Plan will SAVE FPTP" claims Michael Marshall at HFAx2

Blogger Michael Marshall, over at HFAx2 , dares suggest it would have been a disaster for the world's environmental movement, if Elizabeth May's 2015 efforts to concentrate Green Party resources on just 16 winnable seats had worked !

Civil disobedience, Proportional Representation, Ending Global Warming

Michael Marshall at HFAx2 has made a bold proposal to get the fight against global warming moving : a campaign of civil disobedience to achieve Proportional Representative in the electoral systems of the major Western nations most opposed to acting on climate change !

If the UK, Canada, Australia et al don't get proportional representation and soon, Michael says, the voices of politicians serious about combating climate change will never be heard in those nations' corridors of power.

And then the rest of Humanity will proceed to very quickly directly kill off many species and cook the rest indirectly.

His idea is not original he says.

It was raised back in the UK in the 1980s, but went no where - the campaign for PR wasn't passionate enough then for its advocates to welcome the thought of actually going to jail to promote the cause.

But today, the cause of PR is most critical to those voters all consumed with wanting to see a good number of really green-minded MPs in the world's parliaments.

Some have already gone to jail to oppose clear cuts or pipelines.

Doing the same to move PR forward would be doing something of global not merely local import.

Read his full post here.

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Michael has a new blog @ HFAx2

HFAx2

HFAx2 means 'Help From All : Hope For All' ie HFA : HFA .

Or just HFA x2 , for short.

Michael says the main reason why the tiny microbes survived four billion years of the worst the Cosmos could throw at planet Earth, when the giant dinosaurs faded at the first hurdle, was HGT.

HGT means horizontal gene transfer --- the tiny microbes share their individual genomes with all other microbes world wide --- it is the biggest possible BIG TENT when the microbes need fast clever totally new solutions to totally new global disasters.

Its why we see bacterial resistance around the world after only a handful of years after a new antibiotic is introduced.

Michael says the whole open source open access PD copyleft etc movement is the human equivalent to HGT and our best hope for survival in the looming ecological disaster.

We can't rely on the 1% ---- they got us into this mess !

The other 99% has the answers, if only we don't let Harper and his gang of WASP supremacists bare them at the gates because they aren't his kind of people.

No they are not --- his kind of people are monsters....

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Tracy Leal Book Arts tells all about how to bind a book forever and ever !

Seaforth NS born and raised Tracy Leal loves to make homemade books , particularly miniature books (as well as make marbled and other decorative end papers) something she shares with her father and fellow artist Rowland Marshall.

Now living ( pro temp) in metro Victoria BC , she has expanded her book making interests from Nova Scotia's Eastern Shore to a brand new website on the world wide internet at Tracy Leal Book Arts !

Here is a small sample stand of her miniature books she has made to date :

I can't tell if that is a penny or a loonie at bottom to show sense of scale - either way, they are TINY !

Friday, August 8, 2014

Aaron Leroy Alston - first in world to get shot of penicillin

Read a fascinating post all about the fact that the first person ever to receive a shot of the new wonder drug penicillin was not white and wealthy but rather black and working class.

That would be amazing even today - but in 1940 ?!

It was like a red flag to a bull to right wing Americans determined to see that dying Americans didn't get any medical care unless they or their family could pay for it.

Louise Glaze Alston

Bravo to Doctor Dawson and Aaron Leroy Alston and to his marvellous mom, Mrs Louise L (nee Glaze) Alston, second oldest child in a family of 11 kids and so probably a stand-in for mother long before she had kids.

I an the second oldest girl in a poor family of 14 so I speak from experience !

Monday, September 3, 2012

Suschitzky lives long enough to see his iconic photo honored - UNBUTCHERED by Oxford University

One hundred years young last month, a world famous photographer finally saw his most iconic photo signally honored by Britain's National Portrait Gallery - and displayed unbutchered as well !