Thank you, No One is Illegal Montreal, for setting the record straight on the shooting of Fredy Villanueva. It wasn’t an accident, nor the actions of a frightened police officer with inadequate training. It was obviously the expression of the “killer cop’s” blood lust for murdering brown people in cold blood.
Oh, and the riot was justified and rioters aren’t criminals.
“No justice, no peace” indeed. (Doesn’t that just mean “wage war until you get what you think you deserve?”)
For those wondering when a politician would exploit the shooting and subsequent riot in Montreal North for transparently self-serving purposes, Affiliation Quebec’s Allen Nutik just sent out a press release:
As a champion of minority rights, AffiliationQuebec calls on Quebec’s cultural communities to select effective candidates to run under the AQ banner in order to elect relevant representation to send to the National Assembly.
The tense situation in Montreal North offers a unique opportunity for these communities to ‘break free’ from Quebec’s nationalist agenda, and to play a direct role in their own governance.
It’s amazing how many new causes are dummed up every hour to replace the apparently inadequate “kids mad ’cause cops shot other kid.”
Apparently jealous of Toronto’s nighttime propane-based fires, some intrepid young Montrealers heroically rescued some propane canisters from a local hardware shop and set them ablaze last night.
On a slightly more serious note, an analysis of Toronto media coverage of its susprise breaking news. Toronto media were caught especially off-guard because the incident happened in the middle of the night on a weekend, when few (if any) people are on the job.
Montreal’s media got lucky, in that the riots started before midnight, before newspapers were put to bed and everyone went home for the night. In addition, the top story was about the police shooting that prompted the riot, so newspapers (like mine) could combine the two together and not have to rip apart their front pages.
La Presse has the best roundup of the action (including a column by Patrick Lagacé, who was on the scene and has some stories to tell about it), as well as the best photos from photographer David Boily. LCN was on the scene live with its helicopter coverage, and though suffering from the usual breaking-news confusion saying-stuff-off-the-top-of-your-ass time-filler, was enough to keep us journalists glued to the set. (LCN/TVA reporters, meanwhile, repeatedly ignored police demands to retreat to a safe area once shots had been fired, making the anchor’s half-transparent “are you ok?” clichés seem almost silly.)
The best anglo coverage came, of course, from Canadian Press, whose reporter Andy Blatchford (a former classmate of mine) had a story filled with quotes.
Unfortunately, most of the other media are playing catch-up today, and you’ll see more photos of day-after busted up businesses than the riots themselves.
As for blog and “new media” coverage, it was pretty well nonexistent. Some posts with “this is bad” comments, but no citizen journalists stepping up and doing a proper reporting job.
In the wake of the beheading on a Greyhound bus that titillated the media shook the nation, the Globe has an exposé on the fact that people take the bus to go from Alberta to Manitoba.
The Gazette has a Canwest-penned article in today’s paper (complete with adorable photo of Montreal-guy-who-visits-websites) about how people don’t read the fine print when visiting websites and entering into contracts with web companies. It cites their obscene length as a key factor:
In the case of online ticket purchases, if you actually click to read Ticketmaster’s fine print before buying concert tickets, the terms run nearly 6,200 words. It takes far longer to read than the three minutes and 15 seconds Ticketmaster gives you to make a decision to buy tickets.
It also points out that the terms can be abusive to the point of absurdity:
They’re often lengthy and complicated. Sometimes they can be changed unilaterally by the company, and they usually include a limited corporate liability clause.
Readers are encouraged to comment on this article. In order to do that, you have to agree to this 785-word license release, which also requires you to read and agree to this 10,509-word general website terms of service. Both contain an absolute liability waiver, and the latter contains a clause that allows the company to unilaterally change the terms without notice. It also contains gems like these:
Don’t let it be said my bosses don’t have a sense of humour.
(By submitting a comment to this blog post, you hereby agree that Fagstein is awesome.)
with his urgent Mats Sundin-related bulletins.
Some of us are working alone in the Sports department late at night, hoping beyond anything else that an announcement doesn’t come out of the blue to screw everything up.
Patrick Lagacé points to this report about a kid in Georgia who bounced a baby across a room by jumping on an inflatable pillow. He’s now facing charges for child cruelty.
Of course, because there’s video of the incident, TV news was all over this story. Sure, the video is disturbing, but people will watch it. So they play it over and over. That’s an average of one baby launch every 7.5 seconds.
Did they think we’d forget after the first 15 times what it looked like?
There are hundreds of comments (thanks to a bit of Farkage) on this rather disturbing CBC story about a man who suddenly stabbed and killed (and decapitated) a sleeping fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus.
The comments are all debating three different topics:
37 adults could not stop this poor child from getting decapitated. 37 adults chose to cowardly permit a haneous murder right under their noses. These 37 cowards may have saved a few scratches on their skin to lose their souls.
Many many more sane people say that a large man with a large knife in an insane homicidal rage can’t be safely disarmed on a bus by civilians. As it is they barely escaped serious injury.
If Canadians were permitted concealed carry of firearms, one of the other passengers would have plugged that psychopath before he had the chance to cut the poor victim’s head off. Just another example of Canada’s soccer mom gun laws working against the interests of honest citizens.
See if that guy tries to ever cut MY head off… staring at the barrel of my .357
Never bring a knife to a gun fight, psychoboy.
That sounds like rock-solid logic. (Unless of course the psychopath had a concealed firearm and killed his victim in one shot, leading to the same result.)
What I really wonder about is why didn’t the police shoot the perpetrator as soon as they could? With that many witnesses, the perpetrator showing off the head of his victim, the amount of blood that had to be on the scene,would there be any need for court to determine his guilt?
Others suggest that’s not a very rational way of thinking:
There should be some minimum age or education required to post on this news site. How many more people are going to say that we just kill this guy without a trial? What the hell country do you think you are living in?
Never mind the metal detectors. We can’t be safe until we are all locked up so we can’t harm others or harm ourselves.
Think how much safety would be improved on planes and buses if we were handcuffed to our chairs by security guards while in transit. This would stop every assault and every hijacking attempt on an aircraft or bus.
Perhaps the human equivalents of pet carriers are what is needed to ensure our safety. Any time we go out in public, we can be locked into a sort of rolling sarcophagus, and can be wheeled around wherever we need to go by security guards.
These kinds of measures may seem extreme, but no sacrifice is too great to make for safety.
There. Now you don’t have to spend hours reading the comments.
UPDATE: 1,500 comments and counting in under 24 hours.
The local media is busy rewriting this STM press release (or republishing this Presse Canadienne piece with its incorrect web address) about how students will be forced to use the new Opus smart card as a transit pass this fall. The card, valid for two years, will have a picture and personally identifiable information on the back.
For some bizarre reason, the STM started this campaign without updating its web page on the card so that students could learn more about the new system.
One of the claims by the STM, as highlighted by The Gazette, is that the card will eliminate fraud and, hence, taxing by fellow students. The way this will be done, it suggests, is by revoking the card’s credentials once it’s reported stolen.
Let me repeat that: Once it’s reported stolen (This is assuming, of course, that the student in question knows the serial number of the stolen card or the STM can search a large database of personal information to find it).
Now, to those who have never been bullied in high school: What do you think is going to happen after someone has taxed you for your transit pass and you report it stolen?
Of course, the fact that ID and pass are on the same card, and that ID should be checked any time the card is used, should automatically make it impossible to use the card of anyone but an identical twin. But, as we all know, verification of student ID cards is hardly 100 per cent.
From Shatnerian
Prime Minister Stephen Harper made it official Friday, announcing that three federal by-elections would be held on Sept. 8 in Westmount-Ville-Marie, St. Lambert and Guelph, Ontario.
Westmount-Ville-Marie features the big race for us Montrealers, as the Liberals and NDP both have star candidates. Perhaps coincidentally, they are the only ones with campaign posters or websites as of this writing.
The candidates are (essentially in order of the likelihood of them getting the seat):
Air Canada plane takes off after repairs from Gimli, Manitoba (from CBC TV report)
It was 25 years ago this week that Air Canada Flight 143, en route from Montreal to Edmonton (via Ottawa), ran out of fuel above western Ontario and had to make an emergency no-engine landing on what used to be a runway at a small airport in Gimli, Manitoba.
The Winnipeg Free Press has a story about the captain of that flight, Bob Pearson, meeting the two boys he almost ran down with his barely-controllable airplane on July 23, 1983. The boys were part of a family day outing at an old runway that had been converted into a racetrack. Unfortunately, the captain and his copilot didn’t know that and were shocked to find people gathered on their emergency landing strip. With no engines and no room to change course, they had no choice but to land anyway. The kids, being kids, panicked and pedalled as fast as they could on their bikes away from the plane, not rationally concluding that there’s no way a bicycle is going to outrun a landing 767. As luck would have it, the plane’s nose gear collapsed (without power it hadn’t been lowered properly and wasn’t locked in place), slowing it down and keeping it from running anyone over.
Two kids try to outrun a landing plane on their bikes (dramatization image from Mayday)
The CBC also mentions a mural that honours the flight being unveiled.
There really isn’t a way to overstate how awesome this story is. This writeup last year at Damn Interesting gives it a shot, though:
After repeated unsuccessful attempts to restart the stalled engines, Pearson and Quintal once again consulted the 767 emergency manual, this time for advice on an unpowered landing. Much to their dismay, no such section existed, presumably because a simultaneous engine failure had been too ridiculous for Boeing engineers to contemplate.
Basically, the story was that the plane’s fuel gauges were non-functional prior to takeoff (apparently a common occurrence at the time which should have been sufficient to ground the plane until it was fixed), and the ground crew measured the fuel load manually (in Montreal and again in Ottawa), figuring that would be enough. Unfortunately, they made an error in the conversion process (the brand new 767 was an all-metric aircraft in an era when people were still using pounds) and ended up thinking they had twice as much fuel as they did.
By the time the crew realized they had insufficient fuel, it was too late and the engines quickly starved to death. This required some quick thinking from the crew, who hadn’t been trained on gliding a jumbo jet without engines because nobody had ever thought it necessary to train pilots how to do so. One never-before-contemplated-much-less-even-tried maneuvre from the captain, a forward slip (where the ailerons were turned in one direction and the rudder in the other, causing the plane to fly sideways and at a nearly 90-degree angle to the ground to lose altitude quickly) is enough to turn one’s stomach.
Gimli Glider sideslips, flying sideways to lose altitude (re-enactment from Mayday)
Still, despite having no fuel (and limited control), despite the lack of an air traffic control tower at Gimli, despite the runway that wasn’t a runway, despite the pants-soiling forward-slip maneuvre a hundred feet above the ground, and despite the collapsed nose gear, the plane landed safely with no major injuries to anyone on the plane or on the ground.
Perhaps most shockingly, the plane was repaired on site and then flown back for further maintenance, and continued in service for Air Canada for another 25 years. It retired this January, just six months before the 25th anniversary of its historic flight.
For those of you who prefer your stories in dramatic re-enactment form, though, my favouritest TV show ever finally got around to profiling the flight this season (the two stills above are from this episode). You can watch Mayday: Gimli Glider on Discovery’s website for free.
UPDATE (July 28): Discovery is replaying its Gimli Glider Mayday episode Wednesday at 10pm (repeats Thursday at 2am and 3pm)
Stephanie Myles, who was once the full-time baseball writer for The Gazette and is now mainly covering Tennis, wrote last week about how she’s become disconnected from baseball ever since the Expos left for Washington.
The piece generated a lot of response from letter–writers, many of whom feel the same way.
Matinternet has a piece about an Info690 report that plagiarizes (without attribution) an OMGclusive article in the Journal de Montréal this morning that says bus drivers in Montreal are doing a lot of overtime, a few of them even doubling their salary with all the extra work they do.
I guess this is news for some people. If you’ve ever seen an STM driver’s schedule (four hours on, two hours off, three hours on, etc.), you’d start to understand a bit better.
The articles, of course, offer no solutions to this problem. The STM is doing the best they can to hire more drivers, but that takes time, and the number of retirements is creeping upward at the same time as the transit agency wants to add more service.
La Presse’s investigative reporting team is at it again, researching how ice cream tastes.
I know summer is the time for lots and lots of filler (ahem), but I was considering making fun of the West Island Chonicle for doing the exact same thing. At least they have “we have no budget” as an excuse.
Besides, everyone knows Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough is the only ice cream worth having.
