Category Archives: My articles

| Blogosphere, Montreal, My articles, TV

TWIM: Racial profiling, dream listener and dancing!

This week was a productive one here at Fagstein WorldMedia Ltd., so much so that I’m three days behind on reading my newspapers. Here’s what’s in Saturday’s paper from yours truly:

No racial profiling here

First up is an interview with Paul Chablo, the communications director at the Montreal police department. He’s the first anglophone to hold the job and has been trying to reach out to anglophone media. He’s also a really nice, charismatic fellow.

But we weren’t talking about him. Instead, the interview is about the police’s response to allegations of racial profiling. It was prompted by allegations from Kamrol Joseph, a 25-year-old black man who was questioned by police after stepping into the street to hail a cab in Cote-Saint-Luc last month. He refused to provide ID and was arrested so he could be ticketed. He was released after his identity was established, with a ticket for jaywalking. He went to the press.

Chablo says this wasn’t a case of racial profiling, and that Joseph only told the officers he was trying to hail a cab after he was arrested. Instead of targetting a black man in an affluent neighbourhood, they were responding to a man in the street sticking his hand out, thinking he was gesturing at police to get their attention.

Believe it or not, that’s the explanation. There were some other insightful comments he gave during the interview:

  • No Montreal police officer has ever been found guilty of racial profiling. There are about 20 complaints per year, but they’re all either shown to be unfounded or inconclusive.
  • A case that went in front of the ethics committee involving Gemma Raeburn, a woman who got a visit from police after neighbours mistook two black men helping her clean her garage for burglars, also wasn’t racial profiling, even though the officers who responded were sanctioned. The police ethics committee ruled against the officers and imposed short suspensions for the comments made to Raeburn, which included “bullets don’t see colour” and “why don’t you go back to your country?” Though the comments were racist, the committee said, the initial reason for the intervention was apparently considered justified from the police’s perspective.
  • In addition to lots of training of new recruits, the police are outreaching to the community, employing the services of Community Contact editor Egbert Gaye as a mediator. (Despite an email asking me to verify, some well-meaning copy editor changed his email address to a grammatically correct but factually incorrect spelling. It’s comtact@bellnet.ca)
  • In all cases where a complaint is brought against officers, the department likes to have sit-down meetings with the citizens and officers involved to solve the matter informally. And such meetings often work, giving people a chance to vent and clear up misunderstandings. A lot of these complaints, Chablo says, come from people who think they’ve been singled out for minor offenses, only to later learn that dozens of other people were ticketed for the same offense on the same day.

UPDATE (Oct. 23): Gemma Raeburn has a response opinion in Saturday’s paper, which takes issue with the “criminal profiling” vs. “racial profiling” comments Chablo made about her case. Some of her outrage I feel might have been my fault, as she understood from my article that Chablo supported the officers in this case. To be clear, he didn’t condone the racist remarks (and freely labelled them as such). His point was simply that this wasn’t “racial profiling” because the police were acting based on a phone call.

I dreamt I read this weird blog

This week’s blog is dream listener, a blog about the hand-painted cardboard signs being posted around the city by its author. It’s a project that started last November and runs for a year, with the author (who wants to remain anonymous due to her quasi-legal activities) writing about her dreams. An audiobook of the project is being released next Friday, with all proceeds going to the St. James Drop-in Centre.

So You Think You Can Pun?

Finally, an explainer about U.S. TV series (mostly reality shows) having their formats licensed to Canadian companies who create Canadian versions and sell them to the CRTC as Canadian content. It was based, of course, on this blog post where I wonder what this is doing to Canadian television. That, in turn, was based on news that CTV has secured the rights to make So You Think You Can Dance Canada. Apparently the Idol franchise is worth more than $2 billion.

| Blogosphere, In the news, Montreal, My articles

TWIM: Spacing Montreal and Princess Di

This week’s blog is Spacing Montreal, which quietly started this summer and formally launched last month. Since then it has quickly become one of my favourite blogs about the city (even earning a coveted spot on my Montreal blogroll). It has posts in both languages, good stories paired with good photos, and it sticks to its theme. If you haven’t already, you should definitely check it out.

Also this week from me in the paper (but not online) is an explainer on the Princess Di inquiry going on in Britain. You can read all about the circumstances of her death (including two investigations from two different countries both concluding there was no supersecret government conspiracy) in this Wikipedia article. Say what you want about Europe’s better ideas on governing, but at least our inquiries are about government conspiracies that actually happened.

| My articles

HPV vaccine, warts and all

This week I give you a Bluffer’s Guide on the HPV vaccine, which the Quebec government announced this week will be given to girls age 9 to 26.

Some resources with more information:

My take: There are some legitimate concerns about safety (no long-term studies, wasn’t tested thoroughly on young girls), but until we find evidence of some harm this could cause (which I find unlikely), I agree with the immunization plan.

That’s not to say that Merck, which sells Gardasil at a rate that makes it the most expensive vaccine ever, isn’t pushing this hard with a lot of self-interest and stands to make billions. But that’s capitalism.

| Blogosphere, My articles

Creative Generalist: I still don’t quite get it

This week’s blog is Creative Generalist, which is about … uhh … stuff. … Ideas and stuff. Yeah. It’s kinda philosophical, but the general idea is that you need “generalists” to balance the “specialists” and see the big picture. I think. Steve Hardy, the author who also works for Andy Nulman‘s Airborne Entertainment (I think it’s a requirement that you be hyper-philosophical about marketing to work there) thinks I did a good job, so I guess I did.

| Montreal, My articles, Technology

TWIM: Parking and Wi-Fi

This week on This Week in Me:

I speak to Ville-Marie’s Jacques-Alain Lavallée about how complicated on-street parking restriction signs are in Montreal. I’d been bounced around through about four or five people talking about this subject, but settled on the borough since boroughs set the policies for on-street parking. He notes that a lot of the restrictions come by request from residents and businesses who want space for deliveries, diplomatic vehicles, etc.

Perhaps the only controversial statement was his answer to why the signs are unilingual French:

The city of Montreal is a French organization. The signs are pretty visual and easy to understand, but as a French organization, the law allows us to have a French-only policy. All the signage on autoroutes is French (except on bridges, which are federal jurisdiction).

I’m sure that’ll satisfy the tourists who are trying to figure out what “MAR-JEU” means.

Also this week, I have a bluffer’s guide on the health risks involved with Wi-Fi. (No link because it’s not online — Page B5 of Saturday’s paper). I’ll post it in a week when the copyright clears, but in a nutshell there’s no proof that electromagnetic radiation causes cancer. The only thing it can do to human tissue is heat it up a bit. Whether that may cause long-term health effects is up for debate, but I find it unlikely to have a statistically significant impact.

| Business, My articles, West Island

GoJIT: “There was a loss”

This Week in Me features an interview with Serge Duchaine of GoJIT, the Dorval-based transportation company which lost a lawsuit last month and was ordered to pay over $118,000 to a St. Tite company for $90,000 of lost cowboy boots.

Doing the interview, I learned something interesting about standard practices in the industry (emphasis mine):

Gazette: Why did you offer only $6,000 in compensation for $90,000 of lost merchandise?

Duchaine: When you don’t insure goods, you’re automatically insured for $2 per pound. All the rates are based on the value you’re carrying. So the guy says: “It’s not enough, I’d like to protect all our merchandise.” There’s an insurance fee that every transport company has in the industry. More than 95 per cent of clients take a calculated risk. It doesn’t happen enough for them to buy this coverage. If someone says they want more protection, they have to buy it from an insurance company.

Ironically, it’s GoJIT which had insurance in this case: liability insurance. So the insurance company, which would have to foot the bill, is appealing the decision.

Still, it would be nice to know how 88 boxes on six palettes, over 100 square feet of warehouse floor space, just disappeared without a trace.

| My articles

Hell no, we will go

This Week in Me is a Justify-Your-Existence interview with Mandeep Dhillon, a rabble-rouser with No One Is Illegal who’s among the busloads headed to Montebello (map) this weekend to protest the Three Amigos and their Security and Prosperity Partnership, an area Stephen Harper is gung-ho about.

I’ll remember it more as the first interview I conducted that my batteries in the voice recorder actually lasted through. I interviewed her just after Tuesday’s CN protest, after the cameras had left and everyone was about to head home.

I’m sympathetic to many of the arguments about public transparency and native rights and police brutality. Unfortunately I find the language used by Jaggi Singh and his ilk to be off-putting at best.

We’ll see on Monday whether the fears of Montebello’s residents — that protesters who can’t get near the fortress of doom resort where leaders are staying will instead just smash windows of local businesses — are justified.

| Blogosphere, My articles

A rare glimpse into Coolopolis Towers

Readers of the Gravenor Bros. excellent Coolopolis already know that it’s the featured blog this week.

Getting the story behind it wasn’t easy. Coolopolis Towers is located in an undisclosed offshore location and is heavily guarded. My credentials being as pathetic as they are, I would never have been allowed entry.

Instead, I sent in Mandy, a secret agent who’s been working for Fagstein WorldMedia Ltd. for many years (for reasons of security, I can’t show a picture of what Mandy looks like, but believe me she’s a knockout). Her charms easily got her past the first few layers of security, and her shameless appeal to Kristian Gravenor’s vanity quickly gained his trust. (The secret? Ask him about Azerbaijan.) Through some innocuous-sounding questions and by slipping some helpful chemicals into his drink, Mandy got Gravenor to spill the beans about Coolopolis. A hidden transmitter quickly beamed that information to my top-notch surveillance team sitting on a stealth dinghy nearby.

As the article points out, Mr. Gravenor is a fan of exaggeration. The “gorillas implanted with intelligence chips” are actually chimpanzees, and the chips are just GPS tracking devices. The “800 lb Godzilla-like dragon creature” that is supposed to be guarding the entrance can be generously described as maybe 400 lbs, and is hardly Godzilla-like at all. And “Ruprecht, Her Majesty’s Royal Mail carrier” is actually Roberto, a Mexican-born illegal alien who says his bosses haven’t paid him in weeks.

Instead of owning up to it, of course, Kristian appeals to my vanity, hoping that I’ll keep some of my findings to myself.

Not a chance. The world has to know about Coolopolis.

| Montreal, My articles, Public transit

The users provide the colour

No featured blog this week (sorry), but instead I have a short story about the Ile-Sainte-Hélène metro station (now Jean-Drapeau) and an interview with its architect and designer Jean Dumontier, for the Expo Artifacts series.

Most of the information is old news to metro buffs (like the fact that the large halls on the platforms used to house bathrooms), but I found it interesting that the lack of colourful artwork in the station was purposefully designed, since the large crowds wearing colourful 60s clothing provided plenty of colour.

The paper version also includes a (small) photo of Dumontier with a three-dimensional model of the station’s original (more elaborate) plans, which he still has at his house.

| Blogosphere, Fun, Montreal, My articles

The ultimate Transformers geek

Two articles this weekend by yours truly:

This week’s blog is Urban Photo (or should I say “URBANPHOTO”?) by freelance writer Christopher DeWolf. It’s one of the ones that’s been on my list for a while (long before he asked me to write about it). It covers urban life and design with an emphasis on photography. Its contributors include blogosphere familiars like Kate McDonnell and A.J. Kandy.

Also this week is a Justify Your Existence profile of Transformers collector Daniel Arseneault. He has 1,700 of the action figures but still manages to have a normal-sounding life. Yeah, he lives in his parents’ basement (with a staircase that forces you to bend down as you descend lest you hit your head), but he’s an auto mechanic and sport enthusiast with a fiancée. Read up about him here and on his website, or join his Montreal Transformers Fans Facebook group.

And while you’re checking out Montreal Diary this week, you can read Amy Luft’s recounting of last week’s water fight.

| Blogosphere, My articles

Un titre bilingue for a bilingual blog

This week’s blog is An Unexamined Life, written by an anonymous (well, I know who she is because she added me on Facebook) bilingual mother whose kids don’t know about it (hopefully they won’t figure it out). It’s another in the people-I-emailed-in-February- but-haven’t-spoken-to-since- so-they-probably-thought- I-forgot-about-them camp.

It’s a personal blog (sometimes feeling almost a bit too personal), and very poetic. Check it out.

My bank of blogs to profile is nearing empty, so I’m going to start another round. Know of any local blogs that should get more attention? Email me (blog at fagstein.com). Here are my preferred criteria:

  • Authored by a Montrealer or Montrealers, or about Montreal in some way (by Montreal I refer to the greater metropolitan area, including the West Island and nearby shores)
  • Updates often (at least once a week)
  • General audience (meaning not someone’s LiveJournal recounting their daily minutiae and friend dramas)
  • Unique in some way (interesting to read, interesting to write about)
  • Not one I (or somebody else) has already written about (search this blog’s archives for mentions)
| Blogosphere, My articles

OMG. Puppy!

This week’s blog is Christelle FV, whom I emailed almost six months ago. So long, in fact, that the primary focus of her blog, Happy the Most Adorable Puppy in the World, wasn’t even a factor back then.

For those who don’t know, Happy is a Mira dog, part of the foundation’s Foster Families program, where you get to take in a puppy, do basic training and then give it back so it can get specialized training to be a guide dog or service dog.

Imagine: taking in a puppy, and exchanging it for a new puppy when it gets old. All for a good cause!

| Blogosphere, My articles, Navel-gazing

Looking for me? I’m hiding in the dark

No blog this week from me. Instead, Gazette intern and guest blogospherophile Jasmin Legatos has a profile of MTL Street. Don’t worry, I’ve got some more in the pipeline.

For those of you who desperately need a Fagstein Fix (and really, who doesn’t?), you can find me a couple of pages down as I present a Bluffer’s Guide to the new NASA Beyond Einstein program.

Funny story about that piece: Editor Peter Cooney (also the paper’s soccer blogger) called me up on Thursday and asked me to put together a Bluffer’s Guide for him. I’ve developed a reputation as someone who can be counted on to file last-minute, due to a combination of my lust for money and having no life. He suggested one about NASA, and I agreed, and started putting one together.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t listening properly, and wrote about the wrong mission. Instead of Einstein probes and dark matter, I wrote about the Dawn mission, exploring the two largest asteroids in the asteroid belt.

Oops.

I ended up getting a call at 9:30 Friday morning. Fortunately I didn’t have anything to do (except sleep) that morning, so I put together the one you see here.

Let that be a lesson folks: NASA’s up to a lot of stuff, and you shouldn’t get your deep space probe missions confused.

| Blogosphere, My articles

A missing voice

This week’s blog profile is une vie en musique, whose author René Lapalme died June 9 of cancer. It was written before the latest post went up. Normally blogs and other websites of the deceased stay frozen forever. This one, it turned out, was an exception.

Reading René’s blog gives a timeline of his declining health. His increased fatigue causing him to take a break and slowly return to work a month later not knowing the cause, the decision to finally see a doctor, the battery of tests eventually leading to the discovery of cancer, his tearful video thank-you to his readers for their support, and eventually his last post, a self-portrait of a man half his previous weight and without his long curly hair, where those who heard of his death added comments to say their final goodbyes.

The blogosphere response to news of his death was huge. I won’t try to summarize the dozens of blog posts about him from his readers, but it was clear he had a lot of them. A few to point out though:

  • Guy Verville, who first broke the news.
  • Martine, from whom many learned of René’s passing.
  • Andre, of Metroblogging Montreal, among many with brief stories of their encounters with René.
  • A special video tribute, feating one of René’s songs.

Radio Centre-Ville had a special show the Tuesday after his death (where he volunteered his time on a radio show) devoted to him. It’s no longer online, but if someone saved a copy I’d be glad to point to it.
The official obit is here. His self-written biography is better. Though to truly understand his character, I would recommend taking a look at his photo comics, or listen to his music.

I’m not normally an emotional person. I don’t like writing sad things. Hopefully I won’t have to write another blogger obit for a while longer.