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Do we have to endure the return of major league baseball and have it fail a second time for it to finally penetrate that this town is not a suitable spot? Radio-Canada falls into the old return of the Expos trope discussing it. CTV reports that supporters would like a central stadium with 35,000 seats.
And I’d like a pony.
CBC writes about this weekend’s municipal byelections – “Weekend byelections a test of Plante administration’s popularity” – but I doubt it. There will be a low turnout, and anyone who takes an interest will likely be more concerned about local borough governance than who the mayor is or what she’s been doing.
As some may know, there was a major WordPress update recently. Possibly too optimistically, I updated the blog, and Thursday I initially found I any comments more than a day old were not displaying.
Then I lost access to the back end entirely.
Thanks to my hosting people at whc.ca, an errant plugin was deleted and I now have access, but you may notice an error notification at the top of the screen. Also, you can comment on anything, but although I still have all the older comments, they’re not showing up, and that has to be fixed too.
So the blog is limping along, but needs fixing. I will be working on it this weekend so don’t be surprised if you log in and it looks different. I may be trying something out.
So it looks like there’s now a mobile theme. It’s grey and a little bland (no offense) and it leaves a kinda useless band of nothing to the right. It also doesn’t seem to remember my username and email. I can post a screenshot of how it looks for me, if it helps.
Now it’s back to the way it used to look. Still not remembering my handle and email, though.
dhomas, thanks for the feedback. I’m hesitant to change WordPress themes but it may be the only solution to some of these problems, as Automattic hasn’t updated this one for some time. I may need to wait till the Christmas break to find the time to focus on getting a new theme and customizing it.
The city is promising that St-Hubert between St-Zotique and Jean-Talon will have its new awning in place next summer. The more southerly section, down to Bellechasse, will wait till the following year.
Update: Saturday’s La Presse news recap mentions that the cost of steel means the awning will be more expensive than originally expected.
Shelters for the homeless are overwhelmed again as temperatures drop, sadly a predictable tick in the yearly news cycle.
Meantime, social housing is struggling with cockroaches. Don’t follow this link if you’re squeamish.
Why would just social housing have a problem with cockroaches? I lived in two big apartment buildings in this city for years and never saw anything bigger than an ant. Never had any pest control services since I lived here either. What’s going on inside these apartments?
Until that story a few years ago about the Fauborg St Catherine being infested, I didn’t even think cockroaches existed up here. Have also not stepped into the Fauborg since I read that story. Not even the Starbucks.
Apparently some of the people who live in social housing have a hard time with the basics of looking after themselves. This can be due to health reasons (difficult for them to move around, etc.) or mental health reasons (difficult to understand the point of being clean), or just because they are people with hopeless, terrible lives who were raised in toxic environments where they never learned any life skills. (These are the same people who you want to work at IGA BTW, Bill.)
The result is messiness and unsanitary conditions, which attracts vermin, plus an inability to deal with it once the vermin move in.
The article mentions that there is a program to hire some people to literally go in and tidy up these apartments before the exterminator shows up. That means cleaning up old food containers, picking clothes off the floor, etc. Yowser, what a lousy job.
I’m lucky in that only two of the ten apartments I lived in (on-island) had roaches, and not very many of them. My first apartment was in a high rise, and I saw maybe six roaches in the year I lived there. (And believe me, once I saw the first I became hyper-vigilant). A few years later I spent two years at the top of a triplex in Mile End (before anybody gave AF about Mile End). The first year was roach-free, but then they sprayed the building next door and we had a small invasion. Saw a dozen or so the first week or two and then it went down to about two or three a month until the lease was up and I left.
Now that I am a city-ruining suburbanite, I only have to deal with deer, ground hogs, and racoons. (No coyotes yet.)
I should add that it only takes one such tenant in a six- or eight-unit building to keep the roach problem alive. Hence the program to find those problem apartments, clean them up, and then exterminate TF out of them.
A friend of mine lives in a rather expensive apartment ($1400 for 500 sqft) near Guy-Concordia metro and not only do they have daily very loud building noises because the building owner is updating the ground floor with shops, but there’s a lot of cockroaches crawling around. Kitchens in the whole 15 stories building are all interconnected via utility spaces and just having one tenant import them (via a box of groceries or another harmless vector) can be enough. They eat some food in every kitchen and multiply in the walls near the pipes. And since getting rid of pests is a landlord problem (not always justified) this is extremely hard and costly when it involves almost hundred apartments.
So it’s not only the poor in social housing that have cockroaches…
@Blork – If true, that is really terribly unfair to the rest of the folks living in social housing. The “unable to be clean” crowd should really be in some sort of assisted living type situation (with the services of the apartment tidier person that you mentioned).
When I was a kid, we briefly lived in a mixed development where every other apartment was socialized housing and the others were rented out at market value (still cheap). It was the only time in my life that I lived with cockroaches (I have a phobia) and my mother blamed the tenants of the subsidized units for it.
Bill Binns, people are not static. Picture a person in their 60s who loses their job to a business closure, to automation or some other factor out of their control. They can’t find a new job because most employers aren’t keen on hiring someone so old. They get into social housing and at first everything is fine. Ten, fifteen years pass and they’re declining – they’re not ill enough to need residential care, but their eyesight isn’t great and their energy level is flagging. They’re not organized. They can’t or won’t clean as much as they should. And so on.
I could devise a dozen stories, where because of changing situations a person loses control of the condition of their living quarters, but it’s why you can’t neatly and permanently categorize people as you suggest. Also, mare makes a legit point. The only time I ever had roaches I was in an NDG building and one of the tenants was a loose cannon of bad habits who turned out to have a colony of the things under her fridge. I don’t know what happened after that because I moved out.
What Kate said. And since when has fairness ever been a factor for people with no money? People are sometimes bound to a neighborhood, for various reasons such as family connections, work/life factors, or even just sentimentality. So what happens when a bunch of latté-sipping motherfu**ers declare your old ‘hood to be the thing, and over the course of a decade the rents triple and the availability of places you can afford is reduced to almost nothing?
If you’re lucky you can hook yourself up with some “social housing” or “affordable housing” or whatever the paperwork is calling it this week. And you end up living in a building that, instead of being mixed like in the old days, is now a concentration of poor people, so the ratio of oddballs and wingnuts is higher than what you’d get under normal circumstances. Plus it’s Montreal 20 years after the tax haters forced the government to close all the supervised housing that kept so many marginal people at least clean and warm and fed, so those people are top of the list for social housing apartments because there is literally nowhere else for them to go.
So there’s you with your IGA cashier’s job, and you can’t afford the $1800 a month hipster apartments in your neighbourhood but you don’t want to move to goddamn Brossard or Greenfield park just for the lower rents, so you end up in social housing, which should be just a regular apartment with subsidized rent to compensate for the market rate inflation but in fact is a distillation of neighbourhood creeps and misfits (as described above) so those are your neighbours. Welcome the something-something rue Notre-Dame.
At one time I’d’ve thought that legalizing cannabis might mean police could turn their attention to more serious matters, but instead there’s a new task force to crack down on illegal production.
Entirely predictable. Imagine if Pepsi could send a bunch of armed men to go kick Coke’s doors down and put them out of business.
And then halve the quality, double the price and limit availability of their own product
One of the rare times I have to 100% agree with a Bill Binns comment. It’s insane the cognitive dissonance of this legalization where all the police departments asked for (and mostly got) big budget increases to handle it.
Rather than making legalization about letting adults decide for themselves whether to partake of cannabis, the federal government decided it was all about protecting the children and eliminating the black market. This was, I imagine, a calculated effort to appeal to both older conservatives (finally we’re thinking about the children!) and older liberals (more money for the government!). But they don’t have enough supply to have the black market wither on its own, so they’re trying to stamp it out.
The city has a new inspector general, Brigitte Bishop. Update: Metro talks to her.
Josh 14:40 on 2018-12-14 Permalink
Love to hear from people who don’t like a thing about how that thing is destined to fail.
Kate 16:08 on 2018-12-14 Permalink
I am allowed to make a prediction.
Bill Binns 16:50 on 2018-12-14 Permalink
I guess I will finally take my turn at standing in the street with an angry sign (maybe a mask!). I could not be more opposed to spending ANY public money on this in ANY way. That includes tax breaks, free land etc
The very last thing this city needs is another underused stadium for it’s collection.
Faiz Imam 17:50 on 2018-12-14 Permalink
Of course, all the promoters would like to make sure no-one talks about the other side of the equation. The closest team to relocation, the Tampa Bay rays, just signed a 10 year extension on their lease.
There’s a couple other teams with stadium issues, but relocation is not even on the table.
And the league has said expansion won’t be considered unless all major issues have been dealt with.
Unless a new player comes out waving a billion dollar check, this idea is going nowhere.
steph 19:11 on 2018-12-14 Permalink
It won’t fail… the MLB simply will never allow a new team to settle in Canada. We’d be wasting our money and energy entertaining the idea. Lets see Quebec city get their hockey team back first.
Uatu 15:28 on 2018-12-15 Permalink
Where’s this new ballpark supposed to be built? Sounds like another PPP long con by more billionaire investors. When is the public going to stop being such suckers?
Kevin 23:25 on 2018-12-15 Permalink
Well, I got insulted today for saying that no, I don’t think the spending habits of baseball players will have any significant impact on a city’s economy.
So that is where supporters are at: we need a team because two or three dozen young men will go to bars and spend some money.
CE 13:03 on 2018-12-16 Permalink
Most restaurants and bars cut celebrities and pro sports players deals for patronizing their establishments. It looks good on a place to have them there.
Frankie 13:32 on 2018-12-16 Permalink
I see in my crystal ball, the ghosts of baseball teams, past, present and future. There, in the mists, of bye-gone times, I see a player moving up to bat. Why, it`s the Grand Orange, Rusty Staub, himself! He swings and misses, swings again and misses. One more swing and then, a mighty crack! The crowd goes wild. It`s hit! Nooo! It`s a crack in the time-space continuum and we find ourselves staring into the abyss…of the Big Owe. There are players on the field, but this time the crowd is small and meek. The team does their best but by the time of the seventh inning stretch, the stands are almost empty. The few fans left don`t sing along to Take Me Out to the Ballgame because no one can remember the words. The song trails off into silence. Only the bleating of the vendors is now heard echoing around the concrete walls: Peeeannnuuuuts! Poooopcooorn! Cacahoueeetes! and then, there is no one. No fans, no music and the team on the field dissolves into nothingness. Oh, crystal ball! Can this really be? A ballpark, a team, but there were no fans to be seen. This is so sad, crystal ball. Is this a tear I feel on my cheek? What can we do, crystal ball? What is the future? If we build it, will they come? There are some who say they will. The mist in the crystal ball clears and there, a figure appears, dressed in an Expos home uniform. The number 8 is blazoned on his chest and he waves his catcher`s mitt. He speaks in a ghostly way as ghosts are wont to speak: Listen to me, for I know of what I speak. Don`t give these guys a penny for their nostalgic dreams. Make them pay for the project themselves and let them reap their profits from sponsorship and tickets sales, the old-fashioned way. And, with a nod of his red, white and blue cap, the ghostly apparition fades away.