Vanou points me to this video from Quebec Solidaire’s candidate in Terrebonne Jean Baril, who is frustrated that our public institutions are serving crappy cafeteria food and letting people go to McDonald’s instead of buying locally-produced (and he argues healthier) food. Le Devoir has a short story.
Meanwhile, the Bloc Pot’s Richard Lemagnifique (yes, that’s his real name) has a slightly less serious video about the benefits of hemp.
After a couple of weeks without anything in the paper, today I have a whole page to myself with a feature about Wikitravel, a Wikipedia-like website for collaborative travel guides run by a Montrealer. There’s also companion stories about wikis in general and about its founder’s blog, which uses the French Revolutionary Calendar. And there’s an online extra massive list of wikis from Memory Alpha to Wikocracy. Taken together, it’s my longest story to date (2500 words, give or take), and I’m pretty happy with it. But it was a mess trying to keep it all in my head near the end.
Also today, another blog profile. This time, of Chaos Theory, a blog mostly about mothering two young daughters.
UPDATE: MtlWebLog’s Kate McDonnell notes that “pissed off” is used in the main feature in a quote. To be honest, I didn’t even think when writing it that it might be considered an expletive. Does that say something?
ALSO: Can anyone tell me what Patricia’s beef is? I’m an idiot. I read “except” when I should have read “excerpt”, which meant I mistook Patricia’s praise for criticism. Sorry.
I just came back from Concordia’s Hall Building, the historical epicentre of student politics.
Or at least it was.
What used to be, only seconds after midnight two weeks before the election, a building covered from floor to ceiling in posters of all kinds in some sort of fire safety inspector’s nightmare, is now a shadow of its former self.
At the bottom of the escalator from the second to fourth floor stood a couple of campaigners in orange t-shirts handing out flyers supporting their team. I expected once I reached the top to find another campaign worker with a recycling bin to collect discarded flyers (this illusion of green-ness was first thought of five years ago and has been stolen ever since), but there was no one to be found.
As I got to the fifth floor, and paused to read some of the posters, a woman behind me said she was “insulted” that nobody warned her of an election. It was supposed to be a joke, and I took it as such. Perhaps less so later when I found her chatting with those same campaign workers on the 2nd floor.
For those of you bored enough to care, there appear to be three executive slates in this election: Go, Unity and Impact. No, those aren’t gay bars, that’s what they’re naming themselves. Less than 24 hours after the campaign began, some people are already blogging about it.
The referendum questions, usually the more interesting part of the elections, are the usual fare: a question or seven asking people’s opinions and having no real impact on anything, a question from The Concordian asking for more funding (so it can get a budget similar to The Link’s), and QPIRG trying to suck money out of students by mentioning the People’s Potato and Frigo Vert (without saying that those groups already get separate levies from students). The questions are awfully worded (I’ll try to get a quote once someone puts a question online), but rarely in CSU history has the chief election officer actually made use of his or her power to reject questions which so obviously are meant to prejudice the outcome of the vote.
On the way home I spoke with one of Concordia’s shuttle bus drivers. He let on a student with a cup of coffee despite a boss that’s really picky about the rules. I noted that the STM bus drivers don’t care about food but do care about fares, while the Concordia drivers care about food but don’t care about people showing their IDs before they get on.
Strange.
The video from this month’s YULblog is up. At a minute and 27 seconds, I’m the longest interview of the bunch.
I just can’t say no to a camera … and blinding white LED shining in my face.
The L.A. Times is sounding the alarm about newspapers going “hyper-local” at the expense of having their own take on the news everyone else is reporting on.
I have to agree with Sebastien though, hyper-local sounds good to me. I can get national and international news from the wire services, CNN, Google News and others. I can get the British perspective, the American perspective, views from the left and right. But local news comes from far fewer sources, and they can’t rely on wire services to write their news for them (well, unless they’re Metro or 24 Heures).
Sure, it’s annoying to see the same AP story in every newspaper. But having dozens of journalists writing the same story in different words just so each paper can have its own perspective seems kind of silly too. Better to have everyone writing about something different.
This post from ChuckerCanuck is funny.
Point taken about how the media refers to “top scientists” too liberally. And an interesting point about the planets getting warmer and how there may be other forces at work in changing the climate.
Of course, the inevitable conclusion is obvious: forget reducing our greenhouse gas emissions — we simply have to turn the sun’s thermostat down.
Anyone have experience slowing down the nuclear fusion of 1.9 octillion tonnes of superhot radioactive gas … in space?
Here’s a paper on ÃŽle Sans Fil.
I’m not quite sure what “participatory research” is, but apparently it involves writing academically about silly conversations with the people you’re supposed to be studying.
Adrian muses about the scheduling of tomorrow’s debate between Charest, Boisclair and Dumont, coinciding with a Canadiens game and American Idol.
But is that really a problem? The debate is in French, so anglophones aren’t likely to tune in anyway. As for the Habs, who are desperately playing musical chairs with a half dozen other teams for two remaining playoff spots, are their fans likely to watch a political debate? Or are political junkies going to be seduced by hockey?
The only person I know who’s going to be flicking back and forth between hockey and the debate is me.
Besides, the debate starts a half hour after the hockey game does. That’s plenty of time for the Habs to flush the rest of their season down the crapper.
We have “Dating tips for Montreal strippers“:
5-This is the big one! Listen to anything and everything she says. Make her feel she’s smart. I knew one that graduated med school and continued dancing because of the money, so you should not underestimate how smart some of these girls are.
This is just the kind of quality editorial material I expect from a website like swampfoxz.com. The sheer brilliance of the hard-hitting journalism clearly overshadows the minor grammatical problem with the title, namely that these are tips for dating strippers, not dating tips for strippers (who, presumably, have no problems dating because they’re so hot and all).
But remember kids, these are Montreal strippers. None of these tips will be helpful for dating strippers from Toronto or Vancouver.
Interesting discussion at Michael Lenczner’s blog on what it means to be an anglophone in Quebec.
I was born here, I’ve lived here all my life, and I don’t plan to go anywhere soon (one job possibility notwithstanding). But am I truly a Quebecer?
Austin Hill has a look back at the history of Zero Knowledge Systems (now RadialPoint) in his vastly-delayed inaugural blog post.
The Gazette’s Andy Riga is now blogging his E-File on the Quebec election.
Meanwhile, John MacFarlane is blogging from SXSW.
Yesterday I went out to watch the latest episode of Tivijournal. One of their organizers spotted me with a pen and notepad and came over to chat. I guess that means I should write about them. Especially after that other guy bought me a beer (I didn’t accept).
Tonight, I’m off to Yulblog, where I can tell everyone about my new blog and feel part of the group for a change.