The best anti malaria movie ever shot in Ville Emard

Scenes from summer 2008

We're guessing that Gerry's Barber Shop (complete with the English part of the sign whited out - aye carrumba!) was a local landmark in Western Verdun. Well, Gerry's is no more, apparently.

There have been far fewer gold finches at the feeder this year, only four at a time maximum, a couple of years ago I had about 16 on the feeder at once. I have no idea why this is. But a senior from Ontario wrote me today bemoaning that the price of nyjer seed has risen dramatically lately, thus forcing him to quit the bird hobby he loves. Perhaps there are less feeders now. Someone do a Masters thesis on this.




Legend has it that this girl's Cincinatti sportswritin' mom had eugenics in mind when she lured Julius Irving to have a baby with her even though he was already married to someone else at the time. The child in question, Alexandra Stevenson, never exactly did to tennis what Dr. J did to basketball. In spite of really wanting to like her, my half hour watching her at the Rogers Cup qualifier on freebie Sunday was a total letdown. She was getting booted by the admirable Ahsha Rolle, who I've since corresponded with through fb. The end turned out to be a huge fiasco in which Stevenson and her mom behaved like fools. Check comments below for a link to a great report on the insane conclusion.


My mother-in-law Jeannie Vincent, aka Mary Gilchrist (don't ask, I don't know) has said about 10 words to me since she moved in with us from Grenada via Trinidad a decade ago. In other words, she's just about the perfect woman. About once a year I find a massive cucumber and ask her if she's ever held one that big before. The answer is always "Yes."


Really. Summertime. We only have it so we can realize how bad winter sucks.

If there's one thing that puts this city to shame, it's the lack of water features around town. This one is somewhere near Acadie and I'm not sure where and it's not the most beautiful but I gotta salute the effort. As you know, every new building is supposed to put about 2% of its budget into artwork. They usually put up a boring old statue out in front, we'd love to see more of this watery stuff.



Tiny peeps

tiny cars.

Damaged trees on Roy - who to blame - ?

The usually huggable Simon Dardick has grumpily snapped trees in front of his publishing empire on Roy Street. He says the damage is caused by careless snow clearance guys. There's a whole bunch like this. He figures the knocks will kill 'em. But me says that trees routinely get nibbled by little critters and develop such harmless holes in the bark even in places where they don't clear snow. Wherein lies the truth?

Quiz - who is this ?

Time's up. She is known as Ka. She is Miss Plump Quebec 2008.

Nightmare at Le Ritz

Surely Muhntrayal's baddiest Maf bar has been Le Ritz on Lacordaire just south of Henri Bourassa. In the Yk2 they've already had about 40 run ins with the law, many dealing with cocaine dealing. A couple of days ago a black fellow was in there doing whatever business he had to do and was offered several bullets in his body. He survived but the entire staff of the joint had scooted by then. Here's the entire dossier of the misdeeds that occured in this place. The RACQ has its decisions online now and it's sometimes fun to snoop. (If anybody's up there, pls shoot a snap and send it to me at megaforce at gmail cuz the shot I borrowed to the left is abyssmal.)

Women on the rise ...literally

An NDG institution is on the move. Black Women on the Rise - now known simply as Women on the Rise - has sat in a building adjacent to and run by the St. Raymond's Catholic Church (in the photo) at 5775 St. James Street West (aka St. Jacques) for a couple of decades at least. The Women on the Rise helped out mothers with young children. The moms would show up and the kids would play around and the parents would network and good helpful information would flow. It's a good thing. But the church that owns the building has told the moms that it plans to use the space for something else. So Women on the Rise is getting the boot. There's some mention that they plan to expand their Alcoholics Anonymous program to become something that will allow the drunks to actually stay at the place. This is now just a rumour but will surely be extremely unpopular in the neighbourhood, as the idea of a new Old Brewery Mission in a quiet residential area would not be an easy sell anywhere. Many are watching the situation with eyebrows etched. Women on the Rise will likely relocate to Terrebonne Avenue, so Lower NDG's loss is the Monkland Village's gain.

Habs new uni

Pardonnez moi le bad photoshop, but this should give an idea of what to expect this upcoming sneezin' at the New Forum. The Habs are expected to wear a variety of their old uniforms to celebrate the team's centennial and this is the one from 1910. More stuff to sell.

Brian Britt - gone for good...

CTV News Montreal anchorman Brian Britt has retired. Last night was his final broadcast. He didn't want anything to be announced. No bubbly please, we're West Islanders. He shall surely be missed. Who's going to cover the strip-aerobics lessons now? Expect Todd Vanderheyden to assume Brian's seat opposite Mutsumi at six.

NDG farms from the past

According to Peter Raimondo, who has chronicled the St James Cliff area on his site, this was the lay of the land in lower NDG in the 40s.

The goats (that grazed on the cliff) belonged to Mr. Pasquini. His farm was on the hill where Upper Lachine road and St. James (now St. Jacques) meet. I remember working on the farm pulling weeds from the onion beds. I lasted one day. Mr Pasquini also had a horse and chickens. The number 31 street car used to terminate its run at this intersection and return to the Craig street terminus which was downtown, on St. James west of St. Lawrence Blvd. The Aubin Farm ( Hector) was on the north side of St. James about 200 yards past the intersection mentioned above. I believe there is a Aubin Motel on the site today. About 300 yards father on, there was another Aubin farm on the hill ide. Then there was the Nittolo farm and others. Cavendish Blvd. did not exist in those days.

The Lachine Rapids Daredevil

Back in July of 1881, this guy made himself a protective rubber suit. He planned to venture alone into the Lachine Rapids to try it out. If he survived, whoever he was, he intended to take his act to "the exhibition."

There goes Giovanni D'Amico

Giovanni D'Amico, 41, of NDG, is a familiar face to many in the west end. I met him first maybe 12 years ago. He was a smooth talking gosh-golly, anglo souvereignist who lived with his sister in what he happily described as an underpriced apartment. Gio D'Amico started a web site company that vowed to donate a big percentage of its money to good causes. He asked me to write an article about his initiative. Seemed like such an invitation to phoney accounting that I declined the offer but another journalist took him up on his effort to get freebie fan press. I had previously developoed a bad feeling towards him after bumping into him at a terrace cafe on Mackay. He uncharacterstically stared blankly ahead while I tried to make small talk. Now he has been arrested and charged with beating up and raping several street hookers. WTF? What exactly would be the point of doing that? I just don't get it. Weren't those women on his list of corporate charity recipients? He has plead not guilty. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

Venusmania hits Montreal next week...!

Sometimes while sitting at the red lights I don't run, I try to figure out who the biggest names living on the planet are right now. Nelson Mandela (happy birthday baby) would surely clock in at number one. I guess Bin Laden, Putin, Lech Walesa (slidin' fast), Thatcher, Brad Pitt...well you could fill out the top people on your own ...but surely my favourite female notable on this planet is the statuesque, gracious, ball-smashin' vixen Venus Williams. It's been love at first smash for me and over the years I've egged her on through the TV to beat that shrimpy little Belgian Henin and Blisters and Morelesbo and now that phoney arm pumping Ivanovic who I am praying will get steamrollered here by The Godess. Word is, however, that a very young sister team in Montreal could -and this is an extreme longshot - become our version of the Willliams sisters. Elizabeth Abanda, 14, and Francoise Abanda, 12 are kickin' up dust on the kiddie tennis circuit, winning left and right in Canada. The knock on Elizabeth is that she's very short and probably won't be getting any taller. The younger one, seen here shopping in Italy, well it's a bit early to tell. The two kids sent a videotape urging Serena to come to Montreal to play alongside Venus, so we salute their spunkiness.

The future of Montreal - keep pushing that snooze button

Montreal, summer 2008...what a flop!

That's because tourism is deadsville this summer, or at least its pulse is like that of a hibernating grizz.

A combination of the high petroloon, US election year, staggering gas prices, a lousy US economy, the Quebec City distractions, have combined to make Montreal 2008 a tourist write-off.

Montreal's restaurants, skintraders, festivals - all recently glittering local cash industries - now sit alongside our exporters weeping at the bread queue. It makes you nostalgic for the hipsville boomtown Montreal post ice-storm 2000-2003 when so many people were flocking to the city that you couldn't even find shelter.

The days of nightclub city, Bradgelina movie shoots, the 77 cent dollar are gone and so are the visitors. We've become a fast-aging service economy where people ride bridges to suburbia at night.

These changes are supposedly good. We are richer now, after all, thanks to the oil-bearing tar sands of Alberta. Forget your nostalgie de boue Montrealaise. Our old ways could return but it would require the Canadian dollar taking another stunning tumble. But that would involve raising the deficit and debt and screwing up our economy. Maybe we should have been in Iraq after all. But we don't want debt. The Fort McMurray Revolution is here and has forced Montreal to permanently evole.

Alas it seems we'll become a bit of a Switzerland. Too expensive to visit for all but a few devoted Japanese who really want to see that house in Charlettown.

Canada's oil prosperity should continue. Mexican government meddling looks set to doom that country as an oil supplier to the US, leaving us increasingly needed down there.

Canada will get more banking towers and shiny imported cars and the potholes will be fixed and we'll be able to buy imported stuff on the cheap. Your maple leaf napsacks will be a ca-ching sign for beggars in street abroad as the red bud will be a sign of wealth.

But Montreal could hurt in many other ways. The Canadian dollar might make it a little too expensive to study here, which is particularly problematic for our city, which keeps expanding its universities without any real justification. More specifically it could hurt English Montreal which has replenished its constantly falling numbers by students who end up sticking around seduced by the local je ne sais quoi ambience, now threatened by its lack of cheapness.

We'll be a place seen as solid and utterly forgettable. We won't have much of an international profile because nobody will want to visit a place where it costs the equivalent of a weeks salary to visit the amusement park.

Presumably however immigrants will be banging down the doors because a strong loonie will be an a fantastic thing to send back to your mother in Manila and your grandpa in Guatemala.

All this assumes that the bright brains of the third world will want to move here. Assuming that third world governments resist the temptation to meddle, the third world might see a bit of a bucolic renaissance. High food prices could lead the west to slash many of its food import tariffs - including the ridiculous EU embargo on Africa produce. Developing worlders could shun emigration for the farm, knowing that there's money to be made in them there fields.

Canada's prosperity might kill international tourism but it should help attract talented immigrants who can stand bitter winters where the wind binds your lashes together as you wait for the morning bus. Immigration will flower and that's something far more valuable than tourism in these times of boomer decline.

Thus Montreal should transfer some of its efforts from seducing tourists to seducing permanent talent.

The province must also get rid of those ridiculous throwback language barriers that have discouraged potential immigrants from moving here.

Do it yerself booze gets all classy

If you get your wine at the fill-your-own-bottle government booze outlets you've suffered stigmatization cuz their wine had no label. You'd feel chintzy if you pulled one of these suckers out. May as well wear a barrel on skid row. But it was still worth it cuz you'd pay like $6 to $10 for vino that would otherwise cost twice that price. You'd also have to go through the corking ritual which involved some dexterity and could be quite dangerous if you were drunk from all the free sample sips you'd nipped. Luckily the provincial government oppressors now offer screw top bottles and you can slap your own label on that they supply at the stand. The stickers are a pain to take off if you want to reuse the bottle, you'll probably just end up slapping a new sticker over the old one.

Montreal city monthly auction - July 2008.

The big red truck at 969 Louvain contains the auctioneer who sits at the top thingy on the second Wednesday of every month starting at 9 am. In this shot he's selling the higher end bikes, which go for around $80 on average.

The shittier bikes go for about $75 for a group of four or five. I bought 4 for $50. They need repair, but at least one looks pretty good.
There are about 30 sheds full of various seized junk. The entire contents sell for anywhere between $5 to $800. One guy got a good looking deal, fridge stove and various other junk for $210, although you couldn't see clearly what exactly was in there.
This one, with the fancy TV went for over $700. Some full of boxes were going for $400, an aging emaciated midriff-baring biker chick kept buying them as if she was expecting Honus Wagner rookie cards in the boxes rather than shitty Christmas decorations.



There were two sorts of cars. The pre-owned city cars and those which were seized. The city cars - former police cars and so forth -went for like $700 each. They were pretty old and rusty. You're allowed to put 25% down immediately and return with the rest of the cash within a few days. They start the cars, back them up and make them go forward, but otherwise there's no guarantees on their condition.
The rest of the cars were the seized. They don't start them or allow you to pay partially. You've got to haul them out before 4 pm and not allowed doing repairs on site. You won't even known if they have a motor inside. This 2002 Pontiac Montana went for $1,700. The passenger seats behind the front row were missing and the electronic window controls on the driver side were gone, perhaps other stuff was fubar as well. I was tempted to bid on it anyway. I kicked myself.

Quiz of today

This rock-on-occo staircase bannister was originally in what was arguably Montreal's most important building. The building is still in use but for other purposes. Can you name it?

Answer: Kate Mc figured it out. It's the old courthouse, now used as an annex for city hall, where they do finances. It has won architectural awards and whatnot.

Verdun - bad bridge planning...

At the last borough council meeting, all 8 elected reps of Verdun voted to build a second bridge to Nun's Island. It's a good idea because currently the only access is via the Champlain/Bonaventure, which is often crowded or under repairs. The bridge (in green on the map) is going to cost something like $15 to $20 million. We're not sure who pays for this, but usually it's the feds that build bridges. 71 percent of mainland Verduners and 74 percent of Nuns Islanders supposedly want this bridge. However they won't be allowed to actually use it, as only buses, bikes, pedestrians and emergency vehicles will be allowed to cross. Borough Mayor Trudel fears that it could be overrun by people trying to get a shortcut to the south shore.

Seems that Trudel needs to rethink this.

The 60,000 residents of Verdun should get a special sticker for their car that would allow them to use the bridge. That would restrict traffic dramatically. It would offer incentive to live in Verdun. Or else the municipal authorities could further restrict it to Verdun residents willing to pay an annual fee to use it. Or thirdly they could charge a big toll on the bridge for anybody who wants to use it, thereby allowing the trickle of cars that go through to pay the at least part of the $20 million price tag.

It's fashionable to hate cars but in fact all sorts of good things happen when a car can get somewhere. The guy who fixes your fridge ain't takin' the bus, nor are those who stock the shelves of your grocery store with delicious grapefruit. There's a limit to the anti-car movement. The idea of a bridge linking Verdun and Nun's Island is absolutely great. Refusing to cars to drive over it is bad.

The village beneath the St. James cliff

These images were shot at the base of the St. James Cliff at around St. Remi and St. James, it's the hill one block south of the Vendome metro, it separates St. Henri (Turcotte village area) from NDG (St. Raymond's parish area).

My father made some cash off this cliff. One day - I'm guessing around 1960 - he read in the paper that a kid died slipping down the cliff. So Gravenor called CN and offered to buy the land at the top of the cliff for one dollar. The strip of land was literally one foot. The CN liked this offer because if anybody else died, my dad would get sued rather than them. So he became the owner of a 12 inch slice of land at the top of a cliff that extended quite some distance.
This was around the time that Place Ville was being built and much excavation was taking place downtown. Builders needed a place to dump the dug up soil. So my dad arranged to have it dumped at the edge of his one foot strip. So with every dumping of land, the one foot strip extended slightly. He must have somehow had the right to do this because presumably every truckload of dirt would also swallow up land beneath the hill.

Soon the one foot strip became much larger and he had literally made land. He then rented the land out to commercial businesses, used car lots, car washes, marine laundry and so forth and had a steady revenue stream from that.

Beneath the hill was a lively neighbourhood known as the St. Elizabeth du Portugal parish largely populated by Italians. The church by the same name was built in 1956 and demolished earlier this year. The adjacent St. Raymond's area also became an Italian neighbourhood, so perhaps many of the Italians from below the hill moved up the hill in the way people from the Point eventually moved to Verdun and continued west. The area is also known for the Home Depot, the Louis Cyr statue, and the former home of the Dubois brother crime clan.

These photos are from Andrea Mancini taken from an awesome site by former resident Peter Raimondo (he now lives in Brossard). The site has existed for at least three years but was only brought to my attention by Peter McQueen.

Cigarette shirts and how they'll save the corner store

You've surely noticed that powerwalls have been banned in Montreal. Didja know that not only did those cigarette wall displays help sales, but cigarette companies would pay the stores to put them up - they were good for about $5,000 a year to the typical depanneur.

Without ciggy revs and payoffs some corner stores could go broke, which means that you won't have anywhere to buy your eggs when you run out, so you'll starve and die.

So we've got a partial solution that's so obvious that we're surprised it took a superintelligent chimp with a brain implant to think it up. Now that the wall is covered up, the only thing to look at is the cashier. Since your peepers are firmly trained on the person behind the cash... why on earth aren't they wearing something like this?

Coolopolis on radio...

I was on CJAD discussing Coolopolis for half an hour a few nights ago with excellent late-night host Peter Anthony Holder... here's a link to the audio.

Electrifying Easter Parade in Verdun... beware the seductive drone

I try not to watch this because I find myself humming the darn annoying song for days afterwards..then again they say humming clears the sinuses..so there's a bit of upside to this stuff.

mo' carifiesta 08

It was 80 years ago today on Overdale

..drunken Finns got way too drunk at an illegal after-hours bar and one ended up in a pool of blood...

...now that's lip synching! -

Possibly one of the five greatest Montreal songs of all time gets a heapin' helpin' of lip stretching by Michel Pagliaro.

Carifiesta Montreal 2008

How to kill all those nasty bugs...

Bedbugs are said to be spreading fast in this city. Exterminators charge $400 to steam a room. Too expensive. So you can rent the Polti Mondiale and kill bugs and their eggs with hot air much cheaper. You can rent these machines - which cost over $2,000 -at Simplex Tool Rental shops, $46 weekend rate. It blasts dryish steam at a high pressure into cracks and everywhere. When you're done, go around the room and put caulking everywhere you see a crack around the baseboards and quarter rounds. You can also use it to defrost a freezer, clean clean your oven or blast away stubborn worn-in dirt from the floor. It takes some time to heat up but stays hot for a long time. Simplex has a strong demand for these machines so they can be hard to rent. Other companies, such as Lou-Tec and Gamma, don't even rent them, which is a shame.

Carifiesta tmrw downtown on Dorch

Montreal's only must-attend annual parade starts at noon tomorrow at Dorch around Guy.

Landlines need send buttons

What essential item does a cell phone have that a plug-in-the-wall landline phone does not have?

A 'send' button.

Long ago at my first grown-up job connecting calls around the world - USSR, India, Lebanon, etc - our ancient equipment had an important button to the top right of the desktop keyboard.

The send button made it clear to the machine that you had finished dialling the number. It was important because not all countries have 10 digits to reach their home.

With a cell phone you've got to press 'talk' to get your call out too.

The fact that send buttons aren't universal on all phones limits our telephone number possibilities.

With send buttons, not all phone numbers would have to be 10 digits. The phone company could make money too, by charging more for people willing to pay extra for a shorter phone number.

It would also make dialling easier than the currently prevalent 10 digit dialing system, and the constantly new arriving area codes -( 438 - !? Puh-lease!) would end.

If you had a chance to pay $5 extra per month to have a six digit number, wouldn't you consider it? It'll never happen until manufacturers put those send buttons on all phones.

For the record, the only shorter numbers going are zero, for the operator, 311 for the city of Montreal, 411 for information, 611 for repairs, 711 for deaf services - accessible only for those with TTYs, 811 for Montreal health department (since May) and 911 for emergencies, call 'em up and ask them the score of last night's hockey game.

So the campaign starts here - Canada must pass a law ordering all phones have 'send' buttons on 'em.

Quiz - who is this guy?

This Montrealer became one of the toppermost influential Canadians in the decade starting in 1990. He was not a sportsman, businessman, doctor or politician. He died in 2007.

Answer. Yes! We have a rather clever reader here. It's all-round good guy and former mob lawyer Antonio Lamer, who headed Canada's Supreme Court in the 90s.

Crime photography from the early 70s...

Raymond Guertin, 26, was the first murder victim of 1972.

Kids and neighbours found an olde rolled up carpet behind 6972 Chateaubriand and unrolled it to find this guy's dead body.

They didn't know there was a dead guy in it that had been stabbed 65 times. In fact they were using the carpet as a ball hockey net and a bench on 4 January.

He had a plastic bag over his head tied with an electrical wire. There's a photo of the body - not a very good one - in the Allo Police. The article suggests that the result is typical of gay men and there's no big surprise in this terriblle fate.

I went through the old crime press looking for a photo of Wayne Boden and came up with a large number of photos of murder victims from the early 70s. Some of them rather haunting.

The absolute worst is from the cover of 29 August 1971, a 12 year old boy who had blindfolded and hung dead by his crazy mom. I'm sorta tempted to post it to show how media has evolved but it's pretty awful. If you think I should post some of those photos of victims of grisly fates - most of them aren't very sharp - I'd like to hear what you think.

Some of the photos those papers carried are pretty brilliant, however, for example, here's one of a kid crying after his little brother was briefly taken hostage by a crazy drug addict outside a restaurant in the Point. The little boy was clearly shocked for a bit.


Then again I can just post pleasant pictures, such as this one taken at the Olympic Village yesterday.