TVO aired an hour-long documentary by Mikael Colville-Andersen in his Life-Sized City series, about Montreal, in which he talks to various local characters about what makes the city livable.
Updates from January, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Work is about to begin on the McGill REM station, which will constrict traffic and foot access around the area.
Daniel
I will be forever grateful that my place of work just moved from an office on Phillips Square.
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Kate
Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun has recently been in the news for her flight from Saudi Arabia and asylum in Canada. The BBC talked to another young woman who fled the kingdom last year and now lives in Montreal. (But they didn’t ask her how she likes the climate.)
Chris
That BBC article is compelling, it reads like a movie plot! (She does say she likes the snow.)
Douglas
Salwa’s story is just amazing. Like a slave escaping to freedom. The Saudi men are just awful primitive human beings to hold their family members like sub-humans. What a culture.
Chris
Douglas, I guarantee you plenty of Saudi *men* don’t want to be under Islamic theocratic rule either. They too can be killed for homosexuality, apostasy, etc., etc., etc. (But, yes, it’s absolutely worse for women!) You can check out exmuslims.org for stories similar to Rahaf’s & Salwa’s.
Chris
I’ve been reading a lot about this story, and have noticed that many articles, like the two Kate linked, do not contain any of the words: Islam, Muslim, or religion. Instead, they focus on (alleged) abuse from her family. While such abuse is horrible, let’s not forget that she _publicly renounced Islam_, a crime punishable by *death*. Surely that ought to be noteworthy, as it was a primary motivation for her to flee. Islam is also a primary influence on her family’s behaviour and worldview, as confirmed by their own public tweet: “A naughty daughter who abused us with shameful and uncustomary behaviour and embarrassed our Islamic customs and values.” I find it noteworthy that this angle is ignored by so many.
Kate
Chris, it seems to me everyone is well aware Saudi Arabia is a theocracy. Journalistic reports shouldn’t include editorializing on Islam.
thomas
Actually, she publicly renounced Islam on twitter while barricaded in her Bangkok hotel room. Seemingly, to bolster her case for asylum — I am not doubting her veracity of her act and it was a smart move. Just pointing out that she had already fled by that point so it cannot be salient as a motive.
Chris
thomas, did you expect her to publicly renounce while back in Saudi? To a capital crime? Nonsense.
People don’t give up religion overnight. It usually takes years. This article suggests she’s been ex-Muslim, and a feminist activist, for some time:
http://www.theguardian.com / world / 2019 / jan / 06 / saudi-woman-held-bangkok-fears-will-be-killed-repatriated
Your last sentence in a non-sequitur. Just because it was a motive unknown to others, doesn’t mean it wasn’t a motive of hers.
kate, someone commits a capital crime, flees to escape death, and the commission of the capital crime is omitted? That not editorializing, it’s omitting relevant facts. Or maybe it is editorializing, but for altogether different motives.
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Kate
The Centre d’histoire piece this weekend looks back at the Chic-N-Coop on Ste-Catherine, a place I recall my mother mentioning wistfully as having had better barbecue sauce than any of the surviving chicken places, although I don’t think she ever tried any of the Portuguese ones.
The resto closed after a fire in 1962.
Bill Binns
There isn’t a photo of it in the article but wasn’t this the place with the magnificent, three story tall neon rooster for a sign?
Seeing those old color photos of St Cat lit up with Neon like the Vegas strip make my heart ache for what was lost.
Kate
Bill Binns, you may be thinking of the original St-Hubert rotisserie location on the street of the same name, which was lit with neon signs almost as much as Ste-Catherine back in the 1950s, I think.
Patrick
I wonder what other chicken places there were that roasted birds in view of the street. There’s a famous description in Hugh MacLennan’s Watch That Ends the Night of unemployed people during the Depression walking aimlessly up and down Ste-Catherine and gazing hungrily at the chickens they can’t afford to eat.
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Kate
The Journal talks to Concordia’s Matt Soar who has been preserving old signs from defunct businesses, and hopes to see them displayed outdoors again.
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Kate
Pierre-André Normandin says Purolator wants to deliver parcels in the metro, but it’s not exactly true. What they want is to place lockboxes near metro stations so people can pick up delivered items more conveniently if they’re not home all day.
I’m not clear how this is better than Canada Post’s flex delivery service, with which it would compete (according to Wikipedia, Purolator is 91% owned by Canada Post anyway), and it doesn’t have the sheer offhand convenience of the outfit that sells hardware doodads and lets you pick them up at any metro dépanneur (no box, no keys, no vandalism).
dhomas
If you ever order from 123ink.ca/living.ca/primecables.ca (all part of the same company, Shopper+), they already deliver to the majority of the Montreal metro’s dépanneurs, free of charge and within a day or two. I actually try to use them instead of Amazon whenever I can. I would prefer this model to the one Purolator is proposing, which seems unnecessarily complex. The dépanneurs receive shipments regularly already and they are always staffed. I’ve had a great experience with this model, and I would say the only downside is that the selection is limited to what the Shopper+ network has to offer.
Kate
Yep, that’s the outfit I’ve bought cables and other oddments from. Any metro dep with Chinese owners will take delivery for you – it’s great.
Chris
But could that system really scale? Those places surely have very little storage space.
Kate
Chris, I don’t think they could – I was just praising that system in passing.
But the Canada Post flex service does have room, and they should be doing more to publicize it. If postal stuff comes to my home address it ends up at an inconvenient postal counter in a strip mall where I never go, instead of which I can pop in and pick something up a block from the metro, where it’s stored inside.
I think what I’m trying to say is that Canada Post has already invented this thing.
Bill Binns
I have not found Flex delivery to the post office to be convenient in the least. For some reason. it always ads a day or two to the delivery times. Worse, the closest post office to me is inside a Pharma Prix and has a single employee. I either get stuck in a long line or in a short line behind someone with extremely complex post office business that takes eons to complete. I am all for lock boxes but I’m sure Purolator will find a way to screw it up.
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Kate
There was a duplex fire in Rosemont overnight, nobody badly hurt – don’t go to sleep with candles burning – and a church under conversion in NDG caught fire Sunday morning in what was an obvious sign of disapproval from God. Been a pretty quiet weekend so far.
DeWolf 09:42 on 2019-01-14 Permalink
Anyone who has been following him for awhile will notice his hobby horses (uni-directional cycle tracks!) but I think this episode did a great job of establishing what makes this city so exceptional. It’s why I moved back here after 10 years away.
Chris 09:47 on 2019-01-14 Permalink
I don’t think I’ve ever met a cyclist that prefers the Maisonneuve style two way cycle paths.