Monthly Archives: May 2008

| Montreal, Public transit, West Island

STM to introduce Old Port bus, 470 gets weekend service

At its board of directors’ meeting this week, the STM approved a handful of important changes to bus service on the island. They include:

  • The creation of a new bus route, 515 Vieux-Montréal/Vieux-Port, which will shuttle tourists between the Berri-UQAM metro station and Old Montreal destinations. This is a much-needed bus for tourists and residents alike. Old Montreal is not friendly to vehicular traffic, and sees relatively little bus service, especially outside rush hour, requiring people to walk from the Champ de Mars, Place d’Armes and Square Victoria metro stations to get there. The 500 number is because the route is expected to take advantage of new reserved bus lanes which the city will install in Old Montreal.
  • Adding weekend service to the 470 Express Pierrefonds route. Originally a rush-hour express bus, its runaway popularity convinced the STM to add midday departures in both directions last October, and then extend the schedule to 9pm on weekdays. Adding weekend service was an expected change, as part of an overall plan for West Island bus service.
  • A small route change for the 194 Métrobus Rivière des Prairies between rush hours (when it currently takes the AM route)
  • Extending the 268 Trainbus Pierrefonds to the Côte-Vertu metro station. The one-way rush-hour-only bus is designed to facilitate transfers to the Deux-Montagnes train line at Roxboro-Pierrefonds. Eastbound, it terminates where the 68 does at Grenet and Gouin. Westbound, it starts at the Roxboro-Pierrefonds train station about 10 minutes after the train’s scheduled arrivals. It’s unclear if the extension applies only to eastbound trips or if westbound trips will be extended as well (and if so, how synchronization with the train will be maintained).
  • Creation of a new 220 Kieran bus route in Saint-Laurent, as part of a corporate partnership agreement. Kieran is a tiny street in western Saint-Laurent on the southern side of the Bois de Liesse. Such partnership agreements are usually created to offer transit service to industrial areas for employees of a specific company.

Unfortunately, the meetings don’t provide much details into these kinds of things, so I don’t have any information beyond what you see above.

Expect the changes to take effect with the next schedule change at the end of June.

| Media, Montreal

Maisons Neuves

Ever hear of Maisons Neuves magazine? It’s a French-language ad magazine from Transcontinental, showing nothing but ads for people looking for new homes on the south shore.

Transcontinental can feel free to waste glossy paper and ink printing up ads that nobody will look at. But doesn’t the name of this magazine sound suspiciously similar to another local magazine we all know and love?

I can’t help but wonder if some ad sales rep introduces herself over the phone as being from “Maisons Neuves magazine” (or, since it’s in French, “magazine Maisons Neuves”) and causing confusion among a hapless advertiser.

But that’s just because I’m paranoid, I guess.

| Blogosphere, Media, Opinion

Over the top

Being a journalist makes you a quick enemy of a lot of people who take things very personally. They’ll take something you say as evidence of a personal bias against them, and start taking a fine-toothed comb to everything you write, pointing out every mistake and interpreting everything you say in the most negative way possible.

Political journalism is the worst. People take the most minute things in politics very seriously. I got a good taste of that in university covering the Concordia Student Union. National politics is worse because there’s a much larger audience, because it’s professional (people get paid big bucks to be politicians), and because people think that it’s really important.

So you can imagine what happened to The Gazette’s Elizabeth Thompson (an otherwise straight-faced reporter whose copy I have mercilessly slashed to bits lovingly edited with care many times) when she made a few good-natured but insensitively snarky jokes at the expense of the prime minister’s director of communications, Sandra Buckler, who’s having surgery as part of cancer treatment.

Though there was no malice intended, making fun of someone who is being treated for cancer is a bit lacking in taste, the kind of insensitivity I’ve shown myself on many an occasion when I post before I think.

Reading the comments attached to the post, however, you’d think she started cheering for her to die:

  • I’ve called the Managing Editor to bring it to his attention, and will be contacting CanWest advertisers to let them know I will be actively boycotting their products.
  • Liz Thompson of the Montréal Gazette whose lack of common decency and narcissism has lead the Parliament Hill reporter to refuse to take the high road and apologize for her vile blog in which she defamed the Director of Communications of the Prime Minister
  • That is about the worst thing I have ever read.

There are also other (Conservative) blogs that have picked up on the issue and gone so far as to call the paper’s managing editor to express their outrage (another reason I do not covet his job).

To her credit, Thompson apologized to Buckler, and has left (most of) the comments attached to the post, many of which are a bit less hot-headed about her crossing the line.

In the end, hopefully everyone has learned that behind all the politics and professionalism, everyone is human.

UPDATE: Thompson follows up with a heartfelt, honest mea culpa, explaining the lessons she’s learned.

| Media, Montreal

New rag: The Métropolitain

I was getting some comically unhealthy grub at the local grease hole when I spotted what looked like a community newspaper.

It’s called The Métropolitain, and it’s a bilingual bi-weekly paper of long stories produced by Beryl Wajsman, editor of The Suburban, 940 News show host, president of the Institute for Public Affairs of Montreal and editor of its journal Barricades.

The inaugural issue, dated May 1, features a piece by Wajsman asking us to all get along. I think. It’s kind of long-winded, and distractingly changes language every second paragraph.

The contents are definitely political opinion in nature, though the overall stance is hard to pin down. Its articles look like they could come out of the Fraser Institute policy review or the Concordia Student Union handbook. But mainly the stance seems to be libertarian, pro-capitalist, pro-Israel and against just about everyone in politics.

Writers contributing to the first issue include blowhards like lawyer Julius Grey, National Post columnist Barbara Kay, poet David Solway, blogger Vincent Geloso, photojournalist Robert J. Galbraith, and radio host Sharman Yarnell, along with enough nerdy policy wonks to … I don’t know what you’d do with that many policy wonks, actually. Have a West Wing marathon party?

The paper also has more advertising than you’d expect from a premiere issue, suggesting that it might actually have a future. Its editor, at least, is confident it will.

Most importantly, it’s a new publication bringing thoughtful insight (even if I vehemently disagree with half of it) and a Montreal perspective on international, national and even local issues. Even though it’s not about to put The Gazette out of business (and put me out of a job again), another editorial voice on the Montreal scene is always welcome.

Good luck.

| TV

Dear CNN

Dear CNN,

I know figuring out ways to fill airtime is hard.

I know you’re going to resort to ripping off other news organizations and muddle through giving them credit for those stories.

And certainly, this great opinion piece by the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins about horse racers breeding irresponsibly in search for speed beyond anything else is worthy of mention. The Gazette ran a copy of it this morning in the sports section.

But I have a couple of concerns:

According to several estimates, there are 1.5 career-ending breakdowns for every 1,000 racing starts in the United States. That’s an average of two per day.

That’s a crazy statistic, but it doesn’t need to be inflated. So no, Don Lemon, 1.5 is not “almost two” as you say. It’s 1.5. Even for extremely large values of 1.5.

And was it really necessary to drag an expert out of his California bed in the middle of the night so he could be interviewed on an east-coast morning show with a pitch-black racetrack behind him? Have you no sympathy?

| Canadiens

Your Habs playlist

UPDATE: See the 2009 version here, and the 2010 version here.

OK folks, this time they really need us. The Canadiens today sit on the brink of elimination. Down three games to one in the series, the team has to win three games in a row to survive in the playoffs. One loss in three games, and they’re going straight to the golf course.

Super Cauchon is doing his part, but that’s not enough. We all need to contribute.

To help warm up your fan muscles so you’re in top shape tonight, I’ve compiled some Habs-related songs from local radio stations. (Local radio stations being as useless as they are, hockey-related parody songs are one of the few things left that they can do pretty well).

I had a larger collection, but sadly most of them refer to a victory off the back of Cristobal Huet (or worse, José Theodore). So I had to scrap those.

Here’s what’s left, in no particular order:

They Made Us Believers

by Willy Nilly
Parody of The Monkees’ I’m a Believer
via Q92

25 Feels a Little Like 93 (Video)

by Annakin Slayd
samples Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’
via Q92

On Va Faire Les Séries

by Rick Hugues
via Radio Énergie

On est plen dans les séries (Video)

by Ruck Hugues with Dominic et Martin
via Radio Énergie
(UPDATE: thanks bebehabs for the link)

On veut la coupe Stanley (excerpt)

by France D’Amour
via Rythme FM

Je déteste les Flyers

by Justiciers Masqués

GO HABS GO (on va gagner)

by Justiciers Masqués

La Fièvre du CH

by Alain Dumas
via RockDétente
a parody of I will Follow Him, which in turn is the English translation of Petula Clark’s French song Chariot (you learn something every day)

Bring the Cup Back Home

by Daniel Iorio
via Team 990

Go Habs Go (Montreal has gone insane)

by Christopher Pennington

Go Habs Go (J’entends crier)

by Christopher Pennington
via Team 990

Bleu Blanc Rouge la chanson

via CKAC

Chanson de Halak

via CKAC
Parody of Brown Eyed Girl

Les Canadiens sont là (Game On)

by Daniel Iorio
via Team 990
Parody of Celebration

Ghosts of the Forum

by Bob Olivier and Sylvie Choquette
via Team 990

I’m too sexy for this team

by Daniel Iorio
via Team 990
Parody of … well, isn’t it obvious?

Go Habs Go

by Speedhair
via Team 990

(Go Go Go Go) Go Habs Go

by Tag Radio

Go Habs Go (Allez la Coupe Stanley)

via 98.5fm

Any other suggestions? Or more detailed information on some of the songs linked to above? Let me know in the comments.

| Media, Web design

I don’t need your help, Cyberpresse

Like every other OMGWEB2.0WE’RE S000K001!!!111 media website around, Cyberpresse has added those dreaded share links to the bottom of every story. You know, the ones you click on and, through the magic of URL variables brings you directly to a del.icio.us bookmark-save page, Fark submission page or prefabricated Facebook post.

These things really annoy me for a few reasons:

  1. They’re entirely unnecessary. I already have a bookmarklet to save pages to del.icio.us. For any other purpose, it’s simple to copy the URL and paste it where needed.
  2. There are far too many of these. Del.icio.us, Digg, Fark, Slashdot, MySpace, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Furl, etc. There are so many, in fact, that other services have been created to be the middleman and make sure they’re all supported. If you’re not using one of the top three services, you’re not going to find those links on all pages, and so you have to find an alternative, and so #1 comes back into play.
  3. They’re ugly.

This unnecessary help doesn’t end there. Cyberpresse, like many of its bretheren, also has plenty of other buttons and links that pointlessly duplicate existing browser functions, badly.

  • Text size: Toggles between only three sizes (the default is the smallest). Changes only the article text, not the text of other type on the page.
  • Print: Normally, you’d expect this to provide a specially-formatted print-friendly version of the article. No, instead it just calls the print function through Javascript. Oh, and there is no specially-formatted print-friendly version, so you get the background image, navigation, headers and footers, and all the ads.

It’s all just a waste of HTML, much like everything else on the page that’s not the article I want to read.

Meanwhile, their entirely Flash-based video site provides no way whatsoever to share links to individual videos. I can’t bookmark them, send them as emails, save them to social networking sites, or post them to blogs.

Maybe you should start working on that instead?

| Media, Opinion

Journalist, criticize thyself

This is why people don’t trust the media anymore: La Presse says TVA isn’t covering the Journal de Québec situation fairly, because both are owned by Quebecor.

There’s this thing with the media that’s always annoyed me:

  1. Journalists love to talk about their industry with other journalists
  2. People love reading about the media (within reason, of course)
  3. Journalists are hesitant to write about matters that are “in the family” (owned by the same company) or within the media outlet itself, whether because of paranoid self-censorship or orders from upper management not to pursue a story
  4. Journalists and their media outlets will never talk about their competition, unless it’s to report something bad about them, in which case they go all out.

La Presse isn’t immune to this. Neither is The Gazette (the paper I work for), nor any other media outlet I can think of. And the larger the corporate empire, the worse the problem gets.

Why can’t they be more honest about themselves? Giving a union boss criticizing a platform to criticize you makes you look bad, but denying that union boss a voice makes you look worse.

Remember: It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.