Some New Year’s Eve ideas from the Mirror, from Hour, from the Gazette. Or will everyone be staying home to watch the Tout le monde en parle special?
Updates from December, 2009 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Fagstein has expanded his piece on radio types doing podcasts with detailed interviews: Kelly Alexander, Mitch Melnick, Peter Anthony Holder and David Tyler.
But I can’t forgive Mitch Melnick for having a logo that’s a bad imitation of the London Underground logo. -
Some then-and-now shots: Ste-Catherine West on Coolopolis; Guillaume Saint-Jean is doing another run on Spacing, giving us a view of Champ de Mars, a defunct reform school and a Victorian school demolished for the construction of Place Dupuis.
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Critical piece on the white face of Quebec television may not have much influence coming from a Toronto paper.
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More than half of the homicides committed here in 2009 are already solved; the killing of Natasha Cournoyer, mentioned as the most notable, has probably been eclipsed by the late entry of Nick Rizzuto’s shooting this week.
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Jean Charest is sticking with the PPP model for building the ever-vaporous superhospitals. Good luck with that, Jean.
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Nick Rizzuto’s funeral will take place Saturday morning at Madonna della Difesa, and it sounds like his father won’t be getting compassionate leave from his U.S. jailers to attend. I wonder if the neighbourhood folks will come out (as they did for the funeral of Arturo Gatti in the summer) or go into discreet lockdown.
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Mike Boone exceeds his normally bumbling self today with an incoherent screed about why the police should’ve cracked down hard on the folks brawling in the metro on Saturday.
Boone says:
- We need more authoritarian policing
- The metro is special and needs extra strong policing because he remembers riding on it as a kid
- Some lame comic (?) stuff about not telling kids to pull up their pants
- Some stuff about nervously avoiding eye contact but not feeling threatened
- Some confused post-stoner mumbling trying to equate people who would like responsible policing with hippiesThis is not an argument. A clear account of what happened has not been forthcoming from any source, and questions remain, but it isn’t unreasonable to want police in the metro to be well trained in crowd control. I also don’t think it unreasonable for us to want our police to stop assuming that any random black person in sight is automatically a suspect.
Please, Mr. Boone, take your Geritol and go to sleep.
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In this holiday lull the killing of Nick Rizzuto stands out like a tarantula on a slice of angel food. A gun has been found and an investigation has begun. And experts continue to weigh in on what the killing implies, some almost going so far as to suggest we’re better off with the Mafia – a known quantity with a business approach and attitudes we’re all familiar with from the movies – than with the possible rise of street gangs, kids from hungry immigrant families who pose a more chaotic threat. But it’s obvious no journalist or expert knows who had Mr. Rizzuto killed, and if the police know, they’re not talking. Surmises about power struggles to come are also still just guesses. Radio-Canada wisely focuses instead on the effect of the killing on the Rizzuto family.
Metaphor borrowed from Raymond Chandler. It seemed appropriate. -
Alanah Heffez joins in the fun of rifling through the Gazette archives with an interesting piece on an attempt to pedestrianize six blocks of Mt Royal in 1970. She also discovers the probable reason it didn’t work.
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Be aware that speed limits are now down to 40 km/h in some parts of town.
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Yesterday, RCMP and city police were pressed into service to help process the backlog of passengers needing to be depth-searched before boarding at Trudeau, so today the airport has joined the trend to completely ban carry-ons, meaning you’ll be stuck with the airline’s magazine and in-flight movie, and your own inner resources, until things calm down again.
