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?
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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 Vito 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. -
Alannah 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.
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The means used by police to quash the brawl on the Green Line on Saturday night are being questioned, particularly their treatment of bystanders and a mention I’ve seen of a gratuitous hassling of black kids who had nothing to do with the fight. Luckily nobody was hurt and, what seems even more unusual, no charges have been laid.
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Journalists are commenting today on the implications of the killing of Nick Rizzuto: is it a power grab in an ongoing struggle to dominate Montreal’s mafia, left somewhat rudderless with Vito Rizzuto in an American jail since 2006? That’s what La Presse’s expert thinks, and it’s not so far off what the Gazette’s experts think too. What Nick Rizzuto was up to and whether his death will spark further killings remains to be seen.
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Someone started joyeuxfrontenac.com for people to send messages of support to the lock-outés. Only catch, messages have to be sent via Facebook.
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Fagstein, wearing his journalist hat, looks at several local radio folks turning to podcasting to keep themselves in the public eye one way or another. What he doesn’t pause to consider is that dang little detail, revenue model.
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Mike Cammalleri scored the Canadiens’ 20,000th goal of all time tonight, but the team went down 4-2 to the Senators.
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After he accumulated a .968 record in a four-win streak, Jaroslav Halak will start this evening against Ottawa. He was also picked as star of the week by the NHL.
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Nick Rizzuto, son of reputed Montreal godfather Vito Rizzuto, was gunned down today at lunchtime in lower NDG, 31st homicide of the year. Nobody has been arrested.
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It’s an attempt to be funny about the success of the Bixi, but writing that your heart swells with hope when you see another cyclist about to get whacked by a motorist is never going to be amusing.
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Mile Endings has a nice profile of artist and activist Maclean; a Bing (!) map created from Endless Banquet entries; Coolopolis looks at the sad and fiery end in 1956 of streetcars that had been in service since the early part of the century.
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Yet again, a fire alarm gave away the location of a cannabis grow-op this morning (although the Gazette says it was in Villeray and it isn’t, it’s in Petite-Patrie, which Radio-Canada gets right). Dangerous jury-rigged electrical supplies are a chronic hazard in that business, and beginning to sound like another good argument for legalization.
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Chris DeWolf has a really nice piece today on the history of the name Mile End and how it’s been used, forgotten and then resurrected. Also digging into the Gazette archives he finds a description of the area in 1840 when it was still farmland.
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Montrealer Shama Chopra is all over local news because she was aboard the Northwest Airlines flight attacked by a man with an explosive device as it landed in Detroit on Friday evening. Inevitably, security has been ramped up at airports and on planes, in which you’re now required to sit still with nothing on your lap for the final hour of the flight.
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A brawl broke out in a metro car last night between McGill and Place-des-Arts (which is something, since it’s one of the shortest runs in the entire system) and lots of police came, whereupon the whole thing seems to have spread to further stations on the green line. What sparked the brawl is not clear, and there were no arrests.
