May all your publications be error-free, may all your broadcasts be blooper-free, and may any deviation from this at least be really, really funny.
UPDATE: Santa has passed Montreal already.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otOJ5eHjWNU
Category Archives: Photos
Caption Mitch Melnick
Caption Mike FM’s Patrick Charles
Caption Sarah Bartok and Aaron Rand
Caption CBC president Hubert Lacroix
Caption Lori, Todd and Mutsumi
Graite Kenadeun speleng
Great Canadian Coaches bus parked on Berri St. last week
I was downtown around Berri St. and René-Lévesque Blvd. last week, frustrated that I had just missed my night bus connection, when I walked down the street and noticed this curious beast parked next to a hotel. It’s a bus by a company called Great Canadian Coaches, based in Ontario. On the side is a mural of images of great Canadians past and present. The other side of the bus has another few dozen faces. By my count, there are 45 hand-painted images of Canadians (46 if you count Wayne and Shuster separately, more if you count the Group of Seven individually). I thought that was really nice.
Near the door, I spotted this image of Canada’s governor-general, David Johnston:
Image of Governor-General David Johnston... or Johnson?
It didn’t take me long to notice the spelling of his name next to his image. Shouldn’t it have a T in it? I remember the newly appointed governor-general had the same name as a Gazette journalist (which led to some good-natured fun at his expense congratulating him on his new post).
Of course, I was right. Both the journalist and the governor-general are spelled “Johnston”. It’s kind of an embarrassing mistake to make on the side of a bus.
Here’s the kicker: It’s autographed.
Let there be night light
Someone want to explain to me what this is? Taken at 4:20am (more than an hour before sunrise), facing south-southeast toward downtown.
Is it … aliens? The moon? Some secret government experiment? Aurora borealis? Patrick Lagacé?
Rolling the dice on Quebec’s infrastructure
Have you seen so many Transport Quebec trucks in one place in your life?
Infrastructure is one of those things – nobody pays it any attention to it until it fails. People have better things to worry about, so they don’t think about their water pipes, their electricity lines, their building foundations or their roads or bridges, so long as they’re working properly. But when something goes wrong, any of these can suddenly become a top priority.
For this same reason, those who are in charge of infrastructure tend not to prioritize it. If the people don’t care, why should the government? Making a working thing still work is not going to win you as many votes as making a brand new thing. And that’s a logic that’s not reserved for inept governments. Given the choice between paying a professional engineer to do an inspection on that seemingly innocuous crack in a home’s foundation and spending that money on a new big-screen TV, which do you think is going to be the more common choice?
Happy Moving Day
Bonne Fête du déménagement!
STM takes down its totem pole
A new bus stop sign design was shown off with a new shelter design
Last fall, the STM showed off – with great fanfare – a prototype for a brand new bus stop shelter, which it installed on René-Lévesque Blvd. near Jeanne-Mance St. Installed along with it, a few feet away, was a prototype for a new bus stop sign pole, as seen above in this photo I took last week.
Cool, I thought, but as hip as it looked, it also meant losing a lot of information, such as what metro/train stops a bus will go to, whether it’s a rush-hour-only bus or express bus or night bus, and the bus stop code. All this information was moved to a panel lower down that has schedules and other info.
More importantly, I thought, it’s going to be more complicated to add routes to this totem pole, and you can’t indicate detours or disruptions in service like you can by slipping one of those temporary bus stop covers over the traditional signs.
With the new night bus network taking effect on Monday, adding four new routes to this stop (and the deletion of this leg of the 515 bus, which also took effect Monday), I passed by on Sunday to see if they had updated the totem pole.
Ici on commerce en français during store hours
Seen at a store on Ste. Catherine St.
There’s quelque chose that strikes moi about this image, but je can pas put my doigt on it.
Supermoon
"Supermoon", as shot from the Belvedere in Mount Royal Park
The media hype (ahem) projected something a bit more dramatic than what really was. I had to explain to a couple at the lookout that despite the label “supermoon” this was just a slightly larger, slightly brighter moon, and you really don’t notice the change.
Nevertheless, a full moon on a clear Saturday night is a fun time to take photos (and, based on my unscientific observations, cuddle up with a boyfriend or girlfriend).
Clip du Plateau
I was a bit curious why, on a bus at 2 a.m., a woman would be carrying a poster with pictures of Guy A. Lepage tied to it with white paper clips. I’d even considered asking her.
But I fear any rational explanation for this, and so I kind of prefer it to remain a mystery.
Real sharp translation
Found on a Sharper Image beard trimmer box
Man, francophones get all the breaks.