Remember those ashtray-video guys who we later learned had faked their video? They’re at it again, “returning” some doggie doo left in a park to its owner.
Calling themselves “Les Réparateurs“, they want to cure the world of its a-holes.
But now that the truth is out, you’d think they’d clean up their videos a bit and be a little more professional about this entertainment of theirs.
Apparently not.
One of the downsides of being young is that there’s a giant period of history I don’t remember. Expo 67, the Olympics, the opening of the metro, streetcars, and stuff I didn’t even know existed.
For example, I didn’t know there used to be a commuter train to Montreal North.
Fortunately the Web is allowing some of these stories to be told, and young people like me can experience a bit of life before we were born.
Still, these maps of language use in the Montreal area are interesting to look at. They show bilingualism is most prevalent in anglo areas. Is this a success or failure of Bill 101?
Speaking of languages, Liz Thompson of the Gazette has a beef with the fact that there aren’t any Quebec anglos on Parliament’s official languages committee. Is that such a huge issue?
As the Quebecor-owned newspaper’s workers are still locked out of their offices and producing an alternative free paper, journalists at its sister paper the Journal de Montréal are asking their bosses not to publish their stories in the Journal de Québec. Meanwhile, a media snipe-fest is going on as TVA pulled ads for Le Soleil which trumpeted it as “le vrai journal de Québec” in an effort to win over some readers.
Could the Journal de Québec be the next Montreal Star? Or does the pervasiveness of wire services make local journalists truly obsolete?
You know that shitty Internet service we’ve been providing you over the past few years?
Yeah, sorry about that. But we’ll keep your money anyway.
The local cycling blog has a review of the path along the Jacques-Cartier Bridge, and suggestions for improvement of the vastly inadequate approaches to it.
The Gazette launched two new blogs today: G.I. Joey is the (now much thinner) comedian Joey Elias’s blog about performing for troops in Afghanistan. More interesting is Journey to Canada, by a Rwandan journalism student here to cover the war-crimes trial of Désiré Munyaneza. Imagine someone eating pork for the first time, or being amazed by how cold it is here … in May!
Meanwhile, Roberto Rocha has returned from vacation and his Technocité blog is back up, and Peter Cooney’s Goal Posts soccer blog is the only one actually getting comments.
I just got this email from eBay:
Does anyone else find something amiss about this? I mean, if you’re going to reassure your customers that you speak a language, shouldn’t you send them that message at least in part in that language?
So the paper is aflutter about the “St. Thomas Burn Book” on Facebook, which apparently contained some unflattering comments about teachers at this Pointe-Claire high school. (It originally broke two weeks ago, but it’s still news now, right?)
Students with atrocious spelling making libelous comments about teachers is hardly anything new. I’m sure we’ve all said things about (or even to) teachers that we’ve later regretted.
What I find interesting is that, while the original group has been taken offline, at least two others have sprung up in its place to debate the issue further. One says the entire issue has been overblown (true) and the other says the reaction was justified (also true).
Well, it already has one obvious supporter, one reality-checker, and one common-sense opponent.
And since we’re on the subject of Expo and naughty thoughts, Coolopolis has some words on prostitution at ol’ 67.
Today at at exactly 3 p.m., a group of locals, most of whom were only somewhat acquainted with half the rest and had never met the other half, gathered at Place des Arts and began hitting each other with pillows. It was organized by mysterious unknowns at the same time as a similar event in Toronto (CP story on that here) organized by Newmindspace (the people that brought us the metro party in March).
In what I can only guess was a big coincidence, the event coincided with the big open-house launch of Police Week in Montreal. The SPVM, SQ, RCMP, firefighters and Urgences Santé were all there, and brought all the cool stuff from the canine unit to the armored vehicle.
So when a bunch of kids gathered on the steps at Place des Arts with pillows, you can imagine their surprise. At first they did nothing, but monitored the situation (one officer spent quite a while on a cellphone talking to head office a block away). Eventually they started talking to photographers, looking for someone in charge. They harassed one in particular for reasons I couldn’t understand (basically he refused to provide them with identification, what with him not having done anything wrong). But there were no arrests, no injuries, no tickets issued. Everyone just went on their merry way (after picking up most of the feathers they had left behind.
The conversation with the photographer (a student working for The Link at Concordia), which I tried my best to overhear casually, struck a nerve when the officer questioned his media credentials. He asked the photographer how he can trust that the guy is a legitimate journalist.
That’s what bothers me. The same thing happened to me during the metro party. I didn’t have a journalist ID with me, so I got the third degree. But journalists shouldn’t need identification. They shouldn’t need a photo ID issued by their publisher. A journalist is anyone who tries to inform others of what’s going on.
Once you set rules on who can become a journalist, then you take a small step down a slippery slope.
Anyway, back to the pillow fight. There were cameras all over the place, but so far only one set on Flickr and one video on YouTube. If you’re on Facebook you can see the photo page for the event here.
Later in the day I got a call from The Gazette probing me for information about it, so you’ll probably see a photo and caption in tomorrow’s paper.
UPDATE: More photos on Flickr. Not as many as the bajillions from the one in Toronto, but still enough to give you an idea of what went on.
I’m afraid you’ll have to take my word for the fact that I have two more articles in the paper today, as neither is online (If you have the newsprint version, they’re on Page B2).
The first is a Justify Your Existence piece on Concordia Student Union president-elect Angelica Novoa, who has been under attack by her political opponents for being incompetent. Anyone want to take a wager on which side of this political magnet will be outraged with it first?
The other is the third in my series on Quebec bloggers-turned-authors: Mère Indigne, who unfortunately put her blog on hiatus mere days after I interviewed her. On the plus side, this means starting next week I can go back to featuring English blogs, some of which have been in my bank ready-to-write for four months now.
I should be ok for the next few weeks, but if anyone has suggestions for interesting local blogs that are updated regularly, let me know.
Midnight Poutine’s Metro Roulette is back, this time with a review of Cadillac metro. Apparently it’s a so-so station (Matt McLaughlin agrees) in a so-so area.
Isn’t this about the worst time to profile a bar, mentioning how great it is to watch Canadiens hockey games there?
I was wondering why this short, confusingly-written and apparently factually incorrect 940 News story was getting posted to local blogs, until I noticed someone posted it to Fark. CBC has a better story here.
The original story from three years ago isn’t online anymore, but apparently Mr. Neumann, a pediatrician, sued the city for $70,000 (the city settled for $20,000 — the estimated cost of the party was $30,000, which is about what the judge awarded him) after the ruined party, which included these highlights (according to the lawsuit, since the janitor hasn’t come forward with his side of the story):
Interesting trivia here: Jordan Charness, the Neumann’s lawyer, is a driving columnist for The Gazette.
UPDATE: The Gazette finally got its own story on the bar mitzvah from hell this morning, and it includes our fourth figure to date: $27,000. Fortunately they explain that it’s $22,000 plus interest, which makes the most sense out of the figures given so far. It also includes such contradictory information as suggesting the janitor threatened to lock everyone out at midnight (instead of locking them in as previous stories said), and adds that: