Not the first time a touring band has been robbed of all their gear in this town, but they don’t always lose the vehicle too.
Updates from May, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Anyone making bus connections at Vendome will be discombombulated this summer as the familiar bus loop has to close for work on the tunnel to the hospital.
dwgs
It’s not just the bus connections, it also screws up traffic in the area. My son reported that it took the 90 about 25 minutes to get to Vendome station from Westmount high this afternoon. That’s about the same time it would take him to walk all the way home.
Ian
Even according to Google Maps it would only take 20 minutes to walk the same distance.
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Kate
Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine house, left to decline into decrepitude after the pointless demolition of the Overdale neighbourhood in 1987, has finally been restored. Text and audio from Radio‑Canada. It’s not clear from the text who owns it now (possibly the developer) nor who paid the bills, nor what it will now be used for.
Blork
I’m not sure “restored” is the right word. I walked by the construction site several times a week over the past year or so. They took it apart and laid out the stones off to the side. Then AFAIK they tore everything down and put up a new building with the same dimensions and then cladded it with the old stones.
Kate
Wow, I had no idea it was rebuilt from the ground up.
Blork
I should emphasize the “AFAIK” part of my comment. They definitely removed all the stones and staked them up next to the house, then they wrapped it in some kind of shroud, and I’m pretty sure I saw that inside the shroud there was nothing left except the frame, and even that disappeared at one point I think (not sure). I’m going by the way the light passed through the shroud. When you look at it now it looks like a brand new building, with all new materials (except for those greystones on the facade).
DeWolf
Rumour has it the house will be used by the Chinese consulate.
DeWolf
Update: the rumour is wrong! Sorry about that.
Ian
I heard it will be used as the landing platform of our new alien masters in the ongoing “converting the Earth to a nitrogen mining operation” initiative.
I encourage any more legitimate rumours being reported here, however. I’d love to hear what that space will be used for; though I doubt it will be appropriate to the history of the space, I’d love to be surprised.
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Kate
Mayor Plante is to take transport minister François Bonnardel and “ministre déléguée aux Transports et ministre responsable de la métropole” Chantal Rouleau for a rush-hour jaunt on the orange line Tuesday morning, responding to Plante’s pointed invitation back in February.
Security will surely see that the trio are not closely jostled by commuters, but maybe it will be instructive for them anyway to observe sardine class from the middle distance.
Tim S.
Also CEGEPs and Universities are done, so tens of thousands fewer students.
Kate
Yep. They should’ve gone at 8:15 a.m. on a February morning to get the full effect.
Faiz Imam
reading their comments post trip, nothing has changed.
They are not ignorant, they know exactly what the situation is.
CAQ has deep seated ideological views on their mobility priorities, and how they should be managed and paid for. The fact is that for them, congestion of this scale on the orange line is perfectly acceptable, and not worth bumping up above other projects they deem more politically expedient.Good optics for everyone involved though.
Alex L
Apparently, the transport minister thinks the upcoming blue line extension and the REM will relieve the orange line. Some people really know their stuff.
Kate
Right. Bluntly, he’s not interested in making things better for the island of Montreal. The CAQ are basic unreconstructed pork barrel politicians and will build stuff for people they can be sure will vote for them again.
Ginger Baker
I may be wrong about this, but I thought the city wasn’t actually “allowed” to develop the Metro by itself.
Wasn’t there a moratorium instituted by Bourassa in the late 1980s?
Am I wrong here or does the city not actually have the legal right to go it alone?
Any experts able to shed some light on this one?
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Kate
The New Yorker covers the redemption of David MacMillan and Fred Morin at Joe Beef.
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Kate
La Presse talked to Denis Lebel, transport minister in the Harper government, about the epic of getting approval to commission the new bridge scheduled to partly open next month.
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Kate
Grass is not well adapted to city life and is expensive to keep up, so the city is looking for better alternatives for park greenery and especially for strips beside roads and sidewalks.
Faiz Imam
I’ve done lawn maintenance before. Once you get an eye for it, its stunning to note how much grass we have all over the place that needs to be cut regularly. There are thousands of workers out every day fulfilling landscaping contracts for houses, commercial properties as well as municipalites.
putting down grass is just something everyone is used to, and the aesthetic of freshly cut grass is something our culture values immensely. But in reality its almost all a waste.
Putting down turf is among the cheaper options upfront, but once you add up the maintenance costs, as well as the environmental consequences vs other options, more creative ideas start becoming more attractive.
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Kate
A man attacked two others with a guitar early Sunday, sending them to hospital, although not so much because of their injuries as because they were very, very drunk. The attacker has not been caught.
Jack
Usually its the opposite
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Kate
This item on microchipping pet animals notes that it will be obligatory after this year to have cats and dogs microchipped. The bargain clinic described costs $40 per animal, whereas it’s normally $90 at the vet, according to the piece.
jeather
“Même au niveau légal, si tu perds ton chat et que ton voisin décide d’adopter ton chat, il a le droit techniquement s’il n’a pas de micropuce.”
This isn’t how the law works. It might be difficult to prove the non-microchipped cat is yours, but that doesn’t mean your neighbour is allowed to steal it.
Ephraim
Is it really stolen if it leaves of it’s own accord? Does the animal itself have rights or are they a possession. (Just asking for a friend.)
Kate
I’ve heard of cats voluntarily decamping from one household into another that they found more congenial, but usually that’s because the original owners weren’t very attentive anyway.
Blork
That’s how we got our black cat about 15 years ago. He was a kitten and his people left for vacation in the middle of winter without bringing him inside. To be fair, (a) he loved being outside, even in winter, and (b) they looked for him and he just wasn’t coming home and they had to get to the airport.
We found all this out a few months after we adopted him (he showed up at our door one cold night around midnight; we took him in so he wouldn’t freeze and he never left). My sweetie was shovelling the driveway one day and the cat was with her playing in the snow. A car drove past, stopped, backed up, and the driver claimed it was his cat. (Black cats are a dime a dozen but this guy has distinctive behaviour.) He caught my sweetie off-guard and ended up leaving with the cat. Fortunately (for us, and the cat) he brought the cat back an hour later when his wife basically explained to him that he was our cat now, as we were providing a good home, had neutered him and gotten him the various inoculations, etc.
OTOH, even if he hadn’t brought him back, the cat would have come back on his own because he was pretty happy living with us and when he makes up his mind, that’s that.
dwgs
Our neighbours have two cats who get fed wet food and one of the humans is incapable of saying no to any cat so our beast spends a good part of his time next door, he basically comes home to sleep. The neighbours will soon be decamping to the cottage for the summer so we’ll get our cat back full time until sometime in October when they move back to the city.
Ephraim 21:55 on 2019-05-20 Permalink
Don’t know who is more to blame, the police who don’t even seem to have a bait car, the insurance companies who don’t insist that a police report be made for every single one of these crimes against a vehicle, the manufacturers who haven’t secured the vehicles against theft so that they aren’t easy targets or the government, who don’t insist that insurance companies can’t pay out unless a police report is made.
Between these three actors, we have the real criminals…. a crime doesn’t exist until it is reported and the police,who won’t do anything unless it’s a crime and they have to report on them to the public. Essentially this is ripping off the public, who pay both the insurance premiums and the salaries of the policemen who don’t seem to do anything about the fact that we are a central for vehicle crime. For example, the rampant theft of catalytic converters, that cost the insurance companies $2K to replace, the owners up to $1K in deductibles for a few bucks, see https://www.reddit.com/r/montreal/comments/bbu9rx/honda_crv_catalytic_converter_thefts/ for an example of this spate of thefts. (Incidentally, this is considered by insurance companies to be a partial theft of a vehicle.) Worth a few hundred bucks, done in a few minutes at the side of the road. (Manufacturers can do a number of things to stop this, including putting a cover in place so that it is much more difficult to remove without fully hoisting the car.
Thefts of full vehicles are about 168 per 100K… but that’s just what’s reported and FULL vehicles. And just that is $1B a year.
steph 22:19 on 2019-05-20 Permalink
Bands should know not to leave vans full of gear unattended. This isn’t a rule exclusive to Montreal.
“Other bands who have had their gear stolen in Montreal include The Stooges, Hedley, Camper van Beethoven, Elliot Brood, Rufio, Black Halos and even locals get robbed, including Endast, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Obey the Brave and Men Without Hats.” http://coolopolis.blogspot.com/2012/11/band-van-robberies-ruining-montreals.html
Tee Owe 12:34 on 2019-05-22 Permalink
Not to forget 1972 when the Stones equipment truck was dynamited