Monthly Archives: March 2008

| Montreal

My protest is better than your protest

Tomorrow afternoon, the day before the St. Patrick’s parade, it will probably be best to avoid downtown streets, because you’ll find yourself in the middle of a protest you might not agree with.

At 12:30pm, protesters gather at Ste. Catherine and McGill College to protest against the Saskatchewan seal hunt, which is starting up again for another season. Killing seals is apparently evil for some reason.

At the same time, a protest against the war in Afghanistan gathers at the corner of Peel and René-Lévesque. I guess that means they either haven’t read the Manley report (PDF) or they agree that it was obviously a huge government conspiracy to force the mission to be extended and funnel defence spending to … uhh… the corporations… yeah.

So whom do you value more? Seals or Afghanis?

| In the news, Montreal

School roofs are safe… no, wait

Hey, remember yesterday when school boards were reassuring everyone that its schools’ roofs had been inspected and were perfectly safe?

Funny story: The EMSB CSDM evacuated its schools today because of fears their roofs might collapse.

(Note: An earlier version of this post — and I suspect also the article I linked to — said the EMSB evacuated schools. In fact, it’s the Commission scolaire de Montréal that did so. That board wasn’t reassuring people yesterday that their schools were safe, though most of the others were)

| Public transit, West Island

209, 470 buses get extended schedules

The first step in the STM’s plans to overhaul West Island bus service takes effect Monday when the spring bus schedules start.

On Monday morning, two bus routes, the 209 Des Sources and 470 Express Pierrefonds, will take significant steps in the transition from rush-hour to all-day service.

The 209 (PDF schedule) will be an all-day (but still weekday-only) bus, with departures every 25-35 minutes during the whole day. Final departures will be at 10:55pm (from Dorval) and 12:05am (from Roxboro-Pierrefonds). The STM considers this a “trial run” according to the flyer (PDF), to be re-evaluated based on demand.

The 470 (PDF schedule) was turned into an all-day-weekdays bus in October, but that move was immediately criticized by myself and others because there was no service past 7pm. The STM has finally decided to rectify that situation, adding departures every half hour until about 9pm in both directions. That still doesn’t sound late enough (most Fairview buses run until midnight), and it’s still not service on weekends, but it’s a step in the right direction.

The next changes come in June with the summer schedules. They’re expected to include:

  • Operation of the 210 John Abbott bus throughout the summer to service Kirkland’s industrial park and other places along Highway 40
  • Simplification of the route for 219 Chemin Sainte-Marie
  • Extension of the 268 Trainbus Pierrefonds to the Côte-Vertu metro station

UPDATE (March 21): The STM is also making a fuss about modest increases to lines 77 CEGEP Marie-Victorin (PDF flyer) and 86 Pointe-aux-Trembles (PDF flyer)

| Blogosphere, Media, Opinion, Web design

Sur le Web: Get a clue

RadCan’s Sur le Web, a blog-style page with links to interesting things online, has added the ability for users to comment, except with a strange rule: No links. Period.

Sur le Web is a very strange animal in the local blogosphere:

  • Each post is paired with a tiny video of the blogger’s talking head explaining what we’ve just read.
  • Permalinks are created with page anchors as opposed to individual pages, meaning they become useless after a couple of days.
  • The site’s RSS feed has no text for its posts

Now this. I’m seriously tempted to unsubscribe as a protest, and would have done so long ago had the site been any less useful for information. But the fact that it seems to intentionally make it as difficult as possible to use annoys me to no end.

I couldn’t care less about comments. Fix everything else first.

But the fact that a blog about links to stuff online doesn’t allow links in its comments? That’s insane.

Among some of RadCan’s other draconian rules:

  • No comments in languages other than French
  • No anonymous or pseudonymous comments
  • No more than three comments per person per discussion

If similar rules had been put in place at CBC.ca, we’d be hearing about it. Maybe we need a Radio-Canada version of Inside the CBC?

| Media

La Presse, Gazette up for National Newspaper Awards

It’s that time of year again when the National Newspaper Awards sends out a press release with a list of nominees, and each newspaper writes about what they’ve been nominated for.

The Globe and Mail far and away leads the pack with 15 nominations in various categories (including a sweep of the international reporting category), more than the entire Canwest chain combined. Following it is the Toronto Star with 8 nominations, La Presse and the Citizen with 6 each, and then the leftovers.

The Toronto National Post has only two nominations.

Here’s how Montreal did:

Also of local note, Globe photographer Charla Jones, nominated in the Feature Photography category for photos she took of Leonard Cohen in Montreal as part of this audio slideshow.

I’m still waiting for my NNA for my tireless reporting about local activities and blogs.

| Fun, Montreal

Manhunt is back

Season 3 of Manhunt Montreal begins on Sunday with what is becoming a tradition: the St. Patrick’s Day Manhunt.

Sunday, March 16th, 11:00 AM, at René Lévesque & Crescent.

For those of you new to the idea, I’ll explain (by excerpting my first ever article for The Gazette, printed almost two years ago):

Manhunt is essentially hide-and-seek with a twist: once players are caught, they become hunters. As more and more are assimilated, it gets harder to tell if another player is predator or prey.

“We encourage deception,” said organizer Philip Paynter, a political science and economics student at Concordia University.

Paranoia is part of the fun. Hunters pretend to be prey to create a false sense of security, and the prey in turn try to fool hunters by pretending they’ve already been caught.

Players wear bright orange armbands to distinguish them from pedestrians, and are required to keep inside the eight-block boundary. Players must also stay outside and on public property.

After 30 minutes, anyone who hasn’t been caught is declared a winner, and invited to brag about it.

Sadly I won’t be able to make it as I’ll be helping out with the parade itself. But I’m looking forward to the fun running around outside that Manhunt brings on a biweekly basis during the summer.

| Business, In the news, Media, Montreal

Saputo is cheesed off

Cheese magnet … err, magnate Lino Saputo is suing three newspapers (and their owners) for defamation after articles in November and December said he was a target of an Italian investigation into money-laundering. The stories quoted an Italian weekly newspaper, usually with vague words like “published reports.”

Besides embarrassing the man and painting him with the dreaded Mafia brush, the news sank his company’s stock price and just plain pissed him off.

The newspapers involved are:

  • Le Journal de Montréal, owned by Sun Media
  • La Presse, owned by Gesca
  • The Globe and Mail, owned by CTVglobemedia

This makes me want to attend Concordia’s next Board of Governors meeting, where Patricia Saputo and Gesca’s Jacques Tousignant both sit as members. Awkward…

| Opinion, Slow News Day, Technology

Online survey shows people are online

I just got alerted to this OMG EXCLUSIVE OMG story at Branchez-Vous, which claims that 1 in 4 francophone Quebecers over 18 is on Facebook, and that number goes up to 54% when you limit it to adults 18-24.

Those numbers seemed suspiciously high to me, especially since before this week Facebook was an English website and therefore its reach in Quebec was lower than the rest of Canada.

Then I came across this:

Ce sondage a été effectué en ligne auprès de 1257 répondants du 11 au 15 février 2008. Sa marge d’erreur est de 2,8%.

So this was an online survey. Not only does that outright dismiss the non-trivial (albeit dwindling) portion of Quebecers without regular Internet access, but online surveys are notoriously unreliable. More importantly, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that those willing to take online surveys are more likely to have the kind of free time to waste online that would make them more likely to be members of Facebook in the first place.

So take those results with a grain of salt.

| Montreal

Schools closed today

Here’s the lowdown:

(Decisions apply to all schools and head office unless otherwise indicated)

English CEGEPs:

All open (or at least none say they’re closed)

Universities are usually open through all but the most crippling of snowstorms. Check individual class websites or student portals for details.

| Canadiens, TV

RDS relives when we used to be good

Bored?

As part of its Grande semaine de hockey, RDS is replaying Game 5 of the 1993 Stanley Cup Final. A game between the Montreal Canadiens and the Los Angeles Kings (complete with Wayne Gretzky). It follows a live game today where we beat the Kings 5-2.

The game footage, which doesn’t have an on-screen clock (most of the time) or scorebox or all the other stuff we take for granted nowadays, is “enhanced” with some Pop-up Video-style trivia tidbits and jokes.

I won’t spoil how it ends, but somehow I think it’ll be a happy day.

The game will be followed by a one-hour documentary special looking back at the last time the Habs went all the way, 15 years ago.

UPDATE: Show’s over. For those who missed it, this is what happened.

| Montreal, Radio

Frank McCormick retires from CBC Radio

Exactly one week ago as I write this, Frank McCormick read his last newscast for CBC Radio One in Montreal.

Though you might not recognize the name if you’re not a die-hard fan, you’ve probably heard his voice. McCormick, who has worked in radio for more than four decades, has a booming made-for-radio-news voice that’s given the station an air of authority for years now.

On CBC’s Homerun last week, the final half-hour of the broadcast (after his final news report of the afternoon) was dedicated to celebrating his life and career.

The website has archived both the newscast and the half-hour special for those who want to listen after the fact. Unfortunately they’re in streaming RealAudio format (RealAudio? Seriously?), and my efforts to convert it into something else have failed: