July was a busy month for me, so it's only now that I finally get a chance to compile my Moving Day pictures and post them.
This group took about 15 minutes to haul a fridge up a flight of stairs. For a little while, it looked like it might end in disaster.
515 bus with Casino wrap
You know, if you're going to wrap a bus with the logo of the Montreal Casino, maybe you should do it to a bus that, you know, actually goes to the casino?
The fact that this spot is just across the street from a bus that does actually go to the casino makes this even more silly.
You might have missed it, but just over a week ago, Maxine Mendelssohn's final column for The Gazette was printed along with a long goodbye text.
Mendelssohn, some of you might recall, began writing for The Gazette while still a journalism student at Concordia University in 2003, and on July 15 of that year she began a city column in the A section. At 23, she was young and inexperienced, but that was the point.
In her debut column, she said that "unlike some other columnists, I am not a card-carrying member of Navel-Gazers R Us. I'd rather not be in the spotlight but shine it on other people."
Over the ensuing months and after the column was killed less than a year later (May 4, 2004), Mendelssohn's column was called everything from "a unique perspective" to "an insult to my generation"
Mendelssohn continued writing for the other end of the paper (she wrote for the fashion section when she started), doing profiles of young people for the now-defunct Urban Life section, and more recently profiling stores Q&A-style for a column called Retail Detail, which will continue under different writers.
The reason she's leaving: she got married and she's moving to New York.
Despite the increasing crunch on newspapers in general, and the shrinking size of the paper, the number of columnists that have been dropped recently has been on the low side, at least compared to the house-cleaning that was done in January/February of 2008.
Among the recently departed:
Martin Coles had been writing Camera Angle, a photography column on a monthly basis since 2001, and on a biweekly basis starting Nov. 21, 1987, making for about 450 columns. But his articles go even further back, to July 28, 1979. He is a part of Dawson College's faculty teaching professional photography. His last column was published on Feb. 21.
Gaëtan L. Charlebois was one of the paper's ambassadors to francophone popular culture, writing about francophone television for a column called La Télé and francophone vedettes for Chaud Show. He came to The Gazette from Hour, where he had served as theatre critic. Before that, he was doing the same job at the Mirror. He began writing theatre reviews, contributing especially during festival season, and writing his two columns on Saturdays and Sundays starting in 2002 and 2003. His final La Télé column appeared on March 7. His Chaud Show column ended on Jan. 27, 2008.
Other more minor cutbacks also included dropping seniors columnist Hugh Anderson and the HealthWatch column to biweekly (the latter runs on alternate weeks with Shaping Up columnist June Thompson*), and killing off the sports crossword puzzle.
* An earlier version of this post said June Thompson's column had been dropped to biweekly. In fact, it was always biweekly. HealthWatch was dropped to biweekly when it was moved from Monday to Tuesday because of the slimming of Monday's Gazette. And calling it recent might be a bit of a stretch too since it happened in September. But what the hey, facts aren't important, right?
Union Montreal's Tram plan: Orange lines denote planned routes
Saturday's Gazette has a feature from transportation reporter Andy Riga about whether trams are the future of transportation in Montreal.
There are two schools of thought on the matter. On the one hand are people like Projet Montréal's Richard Bergeron, who get a hard on every time he hears the word and thinks there should be thousands of them (250 km worth) criss-crossing the city. He even has a proposal to replace Mont-Royal Ave. with a tram. Tram proponents (which also include Mayor Gérald Tremblay) say they're clean, they're fast and they're fun, and they'll attract tourists as well as those who think buses are too crowded and smelly.
On the other hand, there are those who think trams are too expensive for their purported benefits. They're inflexible, require large infrastructure costs, and won't actually pull more people out of their cars even as they necessarily reduce the amount of roadway available to traffic. The Gazette's Henry Aubin, for example, thinks that trolley buses, which are also electric but can navigate around roadblocks and don't require tracks, are a less sexy but much more sensible option.
The story comes in many parts, in print and online:
Having heard arguments on both sides, I'm still on the fence about tramways. I like the coolness factor and appreciate how efficient they are, but I also agree with the argument that trolley buses are more flexible. The idea of testing them out on routes that are simple, straight and begging for transit infrastructure (like Pie-IX) makes sense to me. If it's successful, then we can ponder more complicated routes like Côte des Neiges, Park and Mont-Royal.
Page A1 for Monday, August 3, 2009
It will probably stand as the last of my firsts for at least a little while. After four years (off and on) of doing just about every other editing job at the paper, last night I sat at the desk reserved for the Page 1 editor. For the next seven hours, I would be writing the headlines that first hit peoples' eyes the next day, the ones that they would glance at on the newsstand as they make their decision whether or not to buy it. It's a very important job, and I'm happy to say I don't think I screwed it up too much.
As the size of newspapers and their staffs shrink, the prestige of various jobs has diminished somewhat with it. Where a few years ago you had a staff of three working under you, now it's the size of the entire desk working on the A section on the weekend. And their workload has increased as well. The Page 1 editor used to spend the whole shift concentrated on a single page (and not even all of it). Now they work on A2, A3 and A4.
In my case, it wasn't so much work. A4 turned into a city news page, A3 had been mostly done in advance, and A2 had the Monday Calendar and Bluffer's Guide, both of which were written by me (and therefore neither needed any editing, right?).
The other thing to keep in mind about this job is that there's no real layout involved. Page 1 isn't laid out, it's designed by a professional page designer, who tweaks tracking and leading to make sure everything looks perfect. After a few hours, the Page 1 editor gets a page with photos and a bunch of dummy type to be filled out.
Since this was a Sunday, news was kind of light, even with the deaths of two Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and the deportation of Karlheinz Schreiber. It was quite late in the evening before the subject of the main photo was decided on (the calls for what go on Page 1 are the responsibility of the Assistant Managing Editor and the Night Editor, both of whom are usually managers). Other candidates included the Highland Games in the West Island, flooded basements in N.D.G., Schreiber being deported, or something sports-related. My passing thought about taking a picture from the water gun battle on the Plains of Abraham was nixed mainly due to the fact that we had dead soldiers on the page (juxtaposition is everything). Besides, it was a Reuters photo and we had plenty of stuff from our staff photographers. So an Osheaga photo (the second time in two days that Osheaga has been the main art on the front page), but with a playful weather element, became the centrepiece, and the inspiration for my pick of quote of the day.
So yeah, Mom, go ahead and save that page. The rest of you, go read the Bluffer's Guide, which is on the subject of the vicious lies being told about our health care system south of the border.
Emma St. and Anita Ave.
What is this street called now?
UPDATE: OK, most of you got this one right again. It's Place Larivière.
A row of cars parked in the middle of a high-traffic bike lane on Boyer St.
It's bad enough when a car ignores the signs and painted lines and decides to park in the middle of a bicycle lane - actually, straddling both bicycle lanes - but it's even more annoying when other drivers follow the lead and park there too. Here we see at least half a dozen cars and vans parked on Boyer St., which is part of the Route Verte.
There were some mitigating circumstances here. There was construction in this area and the bikes were being detoured on to St. Hubert St. That also meant those green poles that normally separate the lane from the roadway were removed.
Still, there was no indication that the lane had been cancelled or that parking was allowed on it. So I wondered, where's a cop - or a parking enforcement officer - when you need one?
A parking enforcement officer surveys the scene and chats with an errant driver
A police officer on his bike leaves the scene without giving tickets or ensuring the vehicles are moved.
Oh, there they are. They didn't end up giving any tickets that I could see. The drivers agreed to move their cars, and the two officers left while most were still parked in the lane.
Still, it felt good to know that occasionally the authorities do notice these things.
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