Cheers & Jeers

Jeers: to garbage not collected. A visit to the Robin Hood Bay landfill in St. John’s last week saw several lanes of cars and trucks lined up seven or eight deep, with folks clearly in spring-cleaning mode. Pickups were bristling with deadwood and wind-snapped branches, bags of leaves, and the odd piece of lawn furniture that hadn’t overwintered particularly well. Waiting in line, you couldn’t help but notice the loose garbage strewn on the nearby hill and in the dirty snow banks on the sides of the paved entrance — gulls and crows circled and squawked overhead as plastic bags flapped from the trees. Once inside the gates, the landfill is practically pristine. But first impressions matter. Here’s a suggestion for the city: clean up the entrance so the place doesn’t look like a dump.

Jeers: to fish you don’t ever want to meet. Enter the hagfish, a jawless, prehistoric eel-like thing that oozes rivers of slime when caught, and for which there actually is a fishery. You catch them by lowering a barrel filled with dead stuff to the ocean floor. They crawl in, and eat. This is from a DFO report, which has more questions than answers about the species: “Due to their cryptic nature, inaccessibility (often deep habitat) and difficulty maintaining them in captivity, many aspects of Atlantic hagfish life history and behaviour, including their mode of reproduction, remain unknown. … Hagfish spend a considerable portion of time burrowed into sediments. In a resting state, hagfish have an exceptionally low blood pressure and metabolic rate. They are reported to survive up to seven months without food in aquaria and are capable of surviving anoxic conditions, including being buried in sediments. … In addition to their scavenging, Atlantic hagfish consume a range of fish and invertebrates.” Waste-pickers of the deep…

Cheers: to what’s in a name? And the answer is, nothing, if you don’t know what that name is. In this province, where nepotism and patronage have been an all-too-common two-headed beast, we’ve seen the provincial government try — with mixed results — to remove politics from the appointment process for boards, commissions and the like. But what if things were taken one step further? In Ottawa, the Public Commission of Canada is behind a project involving Ryerson University that will test whether withholding the names of job applicants would improve the process and level the playing field. The pilot project involves six federal departments, including National Defence, Global Affairs and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, and will compare the traditional process with the results of the name-blind method. The Canadian Press reported last week that the project “is meant to strengthen diversity and inclusion in the public service,” and that “name-blind recruitment” is the norm in parts of Europe, including the British civil service. Surely it’s worth a try.