Smallpox. Apparenenently the Kweebeck government believes that there's a whole lotta smallpox virus living in the ground beneath the basement of Concordia's newest acquisition.
The Direct Film bird was once all over Montreal, even appearing in a sequence of drawings on the walls of the subway that created an animated flying bird when the train went by. We mourn the death of the bird.
The Montreal Expos are and will always remain the only thing that ever mattered about this city, on that we all agree. Somewhere, someplace there are a buncha old retired graphic artists who boast about the amazing jobs they did forging Expos caps on players who weren't actually wearing them.
The 1920 Lovells Directory indicates that Montreal had three people by the name of Fucks. The years before and after had no such listings. Wonder if they were fat.
Dan McGinn...a pitcher, I believe...isn't he the first Expo to ever hit a home run?
ReplyDeleteNot just smallpox, the article says typhus too, although I think typhoid fever (what's called "ship fever" on the Black Rock inscription) was more common here. I asked about this issue recently on Ask Metafilter and got some interesting although not definitive answers.
ReplyDeleteI looked up typhus on wikipedia and it's just a little harmless bacteria, doubt that it's a threat to anything other than sick cats.
ReplyDeleteOf course loads of graves are dug up every year all over the place - yes loads even in Montreal - without any consequence, but I guess this being an indoor graveyard makes it a different story.
A few years ago I went down and hung out at this place and talked to the nuns and they seemed obsessed with all the historical art valuables in the place. Of course, at the time they got 'em, they weren't considered particularly valuable but over the course of a couple of centuries they gained some Antiques Road Show Goodie Points.
Fear of theft was one of the reasons that laymen weren't allowed in and the place had heavy security. So the very innocuous gifts they received ultimately prevented them from doing good works, the nuns became slaves of their own wealth.
Undoubtedly those works have all been evacuated.
I never saw the basement though I've got a couple of old articles about a museum down there.
The Grey Nuns wanted to dig up the 230 or so graves in the crypt and move them to Île Saint-Bernard (Châteauguay) where they have a cemetery. But the Provincial Government vetoed the idea for fear that a long-dormant spore might wake up and cause an epidemic.
ReplyDeleteWhen they acquire the middle section of the Mother House, Concordia University plans on laying down a few inches of cement over the graves to prevent students from digging there to perform some idiotic initiation ceremony.
The Expos.
ReplyDeleteSniff, sniff.
God bless their souls.
RE the baseball card on the right:
ReplyDeleteI used to think the Expos logo was E,L and B together. It's only in recent years that I heard it's an M.
(We can't help it if you're clueless - Chimples).