I was going to tag this at the end of my history summary, but it’s more interesting. The BAnQ has put up a single page enabling easy access to all its public domain, out-of-copyright material. We’re free to download and use this material as we wish, as explained here in L’actualité.
Updates from November, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The Centre d’histoire has one of the oldest photos of town this weekend, St-Jacques Street around 1870, although with a familiar tower of Notre-Dame hovering over the rooftops.
Radio-Canada has had a great week of history content. First, a look back at the life of Pacifique Plante, closely linked with Jean Drapeau during the mayor’s first term in the 1950s during the days of the Caron report and the end of the Red Light district. Text and audio. Also an audio overview of the recently opened Drapeau archive.
Radio-Canada also has a piece on the lurid life and death of Jacques Mesrine, a career criminal from France who came to North America and carried out a string of bank heists in Montreal before returning to Paris, where police eventually killed him on November 2, 1979. The Wikipedia article on the man, while dispassionate, still reads like an outtake from Allô Police.
And then there was the fire department strike in 1974 which led to the destruction of a block of Centre-Sud between Wolfe,
AmherstAtateken, Sherbrooke and Ontario. Some interesting video clips here.The Gazette this week looked back to the construction of the Met with a striking photo of the corner of St-Laurent and Crémazie before the roadbed was installed. There’s also the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1919 (the one who later became Edward VIII then abdicated), and Jacques Parizeau’s response to the 1995 referendum.
However, the Gazette piece about the closure of the Windsor Hotel in 1981 is deceptive and leaves out a big piece of continuity. The photo shown is of the hotel in 1955, but between that time and the mentioned closure there was a major fire in 1957, demolition of most of the building in the ensuing years and the construction of the CIBC tower, which opened in 1962. The 1981 closure mentioned in the article only refers to the hotel annex that still remains on Peel Street, which reopened as a conference centre a few years later.
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Kate
I’m occasionally reminded why I don’t read Josh Freed. Here’s a good example: a piece titled Weather hysteria ruined Montreal’s Halloween. Freed rarely wastes an opportunity to take a dig at the Plante administration, and I doubt he went out Friday evening and saw the many happy trick-or-treaters I saw around town that evening. Freed’s just manufacturing consent for despising city hall, and he leads a lot of older anglos into a permanent state of cynicism and dislike for the current administration. (I see it on social media all the time.)
I can taste the sourness when I read him, and that’s why I don’t.
Blork
I stopped reading Freed about 25 years ago. Before that I found his column to be occasionally funny, but rarely insightful. But over time I found the same pattern repeating: find a topic that you know grumpy people are complaining about, write a column that’s just an elaboration of “I know, right???” and watch as all the grumpy people flock to you because they see an ally, and the Gazette writes another cheque. Boring.
Kate
/taps glass with Blork.
EmilyG
I’m so tired of Josh Freed. He complains too much about driving, complains too much in general, has written about boring things like his own handwriting, and hates both cats and cat people.
Dhomas
I went out with my 3 kids aged 5, 4, and 18 months. There were quite a few kids out with us, just as many as least year. Nothing was ruined.
I even managed to give out some candy, after my kids were done for the night. Candy was at 75% off at Walmart, and I’d passed by in the morning. It was still pretty windy and cold in the morning and I didn’t know if I’d take out the kids at all, so I bought some candy to give out. Worked out pretty well, all in all.
walkerp
Yep, as much as I wanted to rail against the softness of today’s youth, the postponement worked out fine and we avoided what would have been a really wet and unpleasant night of trick or treating. And actually the rain and wind made for a nice spooky halloween at home.
CE
Wouldn’t it be the Boomers and Gen Xers who are soft? It was people from those generations who made the decision after all. I’m sure kids, no matter the generation, will go out in any weather if there’s free candy to be had.
When I was a kid, the Powers That Be in my town moved Halloween to the 30th one year because the 31st fell on a Sunday and the older people thought that was disrespectful. All generations are “soft” in their own way.
Blork
Totally agree with CE, although I would remove Boomers, since very few boomers have kids of Trick or Treating age. This is something I keep seeing on FB too, where there are memes showing pictures of Greta Thunberg alongside old man complaints like “When I was a kid we returned our pop bottles to the store and didn’t throw anything away and didn’t upgrade our gadgets every year” and blah blah blah. FFS! Do these people think that today’s 15-year-olds invented disposable drink bottles and are the people behind planned obsolescence for mobile phones? Do they really think it’s the kids who insist on being driven to school every day? NO it’s the goddamn adults doing all that!
If anything, Greta Thunberg and people who follow her would LOVE to go back to the way things were in the 1950s at least in terms of materials re-use and less air travel and more trains and whatnot. But when you call the dumb-asses out on that you get hit back with dumb-ass memes about “it was a joke; remember jokes? Before people were offended by everything?”
(Yes, I’m having a “sick of dumbassery on social media” moment…)
walkerp
I was speaking very broadly and tongue-in-cheek when I used the term “today’s youth”. For the record, as Gen-Xer, I found my own generation to be super fucking soft (and selfish and unethical) and each generation yet worse until this current one, which actually gives me some hope. More Greta’s please!
CE
@Blork, off topic but based on different comments I’ve seen from you here in the last while, it seems like social media is having a pretty negative effect on you! I purged myself entirely of social media about a year ago and it was like a weight being lifted off me. You’ll pretty much immediately experience much less high blood pressure, outrage, exasperation, annoyance, defensiveness, etc. in your day-to-day life. It’s a very good feeling. It was tough at first but after a couple weeks, I couldn’t even imagine how much of my life I had wasted using those platforms!
Blork
@CE, I have definitely lightened up on it. I stopped using Twitter entirely except for one or two funny Tweeters that I look at about once a month. I’ve pulled back on FB quite a bit too, mostly just using it for social contact with some distant friends and family as well as a few groups with shared interests (non-political). Unfortunately everyone has one or two family members who fit the “drunk uncle” bill and I’m no exception so I do get pulled in occasionally.
I also have a rule that if a FB thread has more than 30 comments I don’t bother adding a comment. There’s no point; beyond 30 nobody is reading the whole thread anyway and it’s just people reacting to the last two or three comments, or worse (and this really is the worst thing) adding a comment based only on the original post without reading any of the comments. (OMG I hate that soooo much!)
Blork
Oh, I have this one “friend” on FB who is literally the dumbest person on earth. I would unfollow him but he’s so stupid it’s just amusing, even when he’s being offensive. For example, he’s got a huge bee in his bonnet about immigration, but it is clearly out of stupidity not malice (not that it really matters, but still). He recently posited — seriously as far as I can tell — that one way to solve the climate change crisis is to stop immigration, because all those immigrants fly here on airplanes, so if there were no immigration there would be fewer planes flying. THIS WAS NOT THE ONION! This guy was serious! That is so freaking unbelievably STUPID that I could not possibly un-follow him because I want to see if he will out-do that one. (Needless to say I did not comment — no point.)
This is the same guy who — quite seriously — constantly lobbies for putting ashtrays back into cars (I think he literally writes to car companies about this) because he sees cigarette butts as a leading cause of pollution, blah blah blah. (Yes, butts are a problem, but it’s not solved by putting ashtrays back in cars.)
OMG SO MUCH STUPIDITY ON EARTH!
CE
@Blork, if you’re using Chrome (it might work for other browsers too), there’s a nice extension called News Feed Eradicator which allows you to keep Facebook for those contacts you care about and to keep being able to see the dumbest person on earth while not getting sucked into the news feed where you’ll inevitably end up getting sucked in by the awful drunk uncle. It’s what I did because Facebook Messenger is literally the only way I have to get in contact with some people but I wanted to stay away from Facebook. It’s amazing how much better the experience is. You can log onto Facebook when you want, search for the people whose stuff you care about and all the other crap (including ads) simply ceases to exist. No endless scroll because you’re choosing what you want to see and when you’re done, you’re done.
Where did you meet this guy?? I remember seeing people like this on facebook and they were always the people I couldn’t remember actually meeting in real life! Where do they come from??
Blork
@CE, thanks for the tip! I use FF, which has a “containers” feature that at least keeps all the FB tracking cookies separate from my other browser stuff, but it doesn’t block any content.
The guy in question is a guy I knew when I was a teenager. I’m much more careful about accepting friendship requests now than I used to be, and this guy slipped in before I clamped down.
Blork
Oh, and he works for the government. AAACK! I know this because he’s constantly complaining about not getting paid because of the Phoenix pay system.
Chris
Blork, well, complaining about Phoenix is quite justified! The other stuff is amusing indeed. 🙂
Re your 09:45 comment: there isn’t really a contradiction there. Back in the day, the average people really did reuse/recycle more than today (though more out of necessity, not altruism). Yes, that generation invented disposable bottles and planned obsolescence, but it was only a tiny fraction that did that inventing, not the same people that we doing the reusing.
ant6n
I’ve got news for you: mtlcityweblog is also social media.
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Kate
A party of folks visited the old Champlain Bridge on Saturday, taking pictures and looking over at the new bridge nearby, which later changed its colours, a facility it has always had but has not yet been used to mark any particular event.
Tim F
We’ll be taking the kids next Saturday.
Daniel
Oof! Wish I had found out about this earlier. Would love to have gone and now all the outings are complets.
Kate
Daniel, they filled up fast. I tried to sign up too, but no spaces left.
Daniel
Ah, well that does make me feel a tiny bit better. I hate to be “that guy,” but I figured it was worth a shot to send a pleading email asking if they had thought to offer more spots in English or French, so I did. Made me feel I had done all I could, at least.
Uatu
The color change I noticed coming into town one Monday morning on the bus. It was pretty cool and made it look 21st century- like. Too bad everyone else was staring into a phone to notice
Michael Black
I knew about it, but pictured it as opening the bridge for people to walk across. That would allow for a lot of people.
But the tv news last night showed people getting off a bus, with a tour guide, and that obviously limited how many could visit when it happened over only two days.
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Kate
Two cars collided Saturday at Van Horne and Côte-des-Neiges, and one rebounded to smash a bus shelter where two people were waiting. They were both injured although not seriously. TVA has the best photos of the aftermath.
EmilyG 14:55 on 2019-11-03 Permalink
Yay, they have sheet music!
Dhomas 20:30 on 2019-11-03 Permalink
You can also borrow remotely from the BAnQ using the Hoopla app:
http://numerique.banq.qc.ca/ressources/details/6102
Right now, it’s only music and comic books, but other libraries (mostly in the US) allow books and video content to be borrowed.
Joey 08:48 on 2019-11-04 Permalink
@Dhomas you can borrow e-books using the Libby app, which I think requires you to set up an Overdrive account (the Overdrive app also works, though it’s a little more out of date than Libby). Same if you have a Bibliotheques Montreal account via your local public library.
John B 20:42 on 2019-11-04 Permalink
Libby’s great, and if you have a modern Kobo e-reader you can sign in to Overdrive on that and your books will auto-download when it syncs. so you can read them without blasting blue light into your face.
Kate 21:38 on 2019-11-04 Permalink
I have a shameful confession. I tried to “borrow” an ebook from the BAnQ on my ipad, and could not get it to work. Then it expired before I had time to take it there and ask for clarifications.