Updates from December, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 20:47 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply  

    Test post four

     
    • Kate 20:47 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply  

      Test post three, #test_three

       
      • Kate 20:28 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply
        Tags: test_two   

        Test post two, consectetuer adipiscing elit.

         
        • Br 20:34 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

          #tags are here, friends!

        • Kate 21:15 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

          Just a test. I see that the only way to move a hashtag from here to Twitter is to put it in the (invisible) headline. There’s no other magic. And I have no idea whether someone can filter out posts with specific hashtags, but that’s not my problem, is it.

        • Brett 11:36 on 2019-12-05 Permalink

          I think those tags in the post header are more for your benefit; i.e. they are useful for you to organize your posts and categorize them, etc. For hashtags to show up when someone writes a comment and have them linked and clickable probably involves some kind of third party plugin. For now, the search feature that you have in the sidebar seems to work pretty well for text searches. Is there a way to add a field for tag searching?

        • MarcG 12:07 on 2019-12-05 Permalink

          The person on Twitter who requested this feature seems to know of a way to filter out certain hashtags and your “Test post four” seems to have done the trick.

        • Kate 12:51 on 2019-12-05 Permalink

          Brett, if I needed to categorize or organize my posts I would’ve created a system long ago. Meanwhile, yes, I use the front search (or a similar search on the back end) when I want to look up earlier posts on any topic.

      • Kate 20:27 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply  

        Test post one, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

         
        • Kate 20:15 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply  

          The STM is making it official that it’s OK to transport skis and toboggans in the metro even at rush hour. Although the article’s illustrated with a picture of a bus, it doesn’t mention the same being OK for buses, although it does confirm that bicycles are still not welcome in the metro at rush hour.

          In other winter sports news, Rosemont borough is installing a refrigerated rink on Beaubien in Petite-Patrie, just off Plaza St-Hubert.

           
          • denpanosekai 23:17 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

            Speaking of skating rinks… I can confirm that the Angrignon speed skating rink is still not a thing. It was promised for end of 2019. You’d think by now they’d at least have some part of the parking lot blocked off.

            https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/montreal-to-have-speed-skating-oval-in-angrignon-park-by-2019

            My guess is that the whole thing was just quietly canned.

          • CE 23:21 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

            I’m glad to see something happening with that parking lot on Beaubien. It always seemed like such a waste of a potentially good spot for either a park or new commercial/residential building.

          • Mr.Chinaski 02:27 on 2019-12-05 Permalink

            According to the friends of the Angrignon Skating rink, the project is not dead, money was allowed for a study :
            https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Community-Organization/Anneau-de-patinage-r%C3%A9frig%C3%A9r%C3%A9-400m-parc-Angrignon-379520245521618/

          • jeather 11:06 on 2019-12-05 Permalink

            Why in the world is it ok to transport skis and toboggans at rush hour, but not bikes?

          • Michael Black 11:24 on 2019-12-05 Permalink

            Decades ago Le Monde a Bicyclette argued that point. When they campaigned for allowing bikes on the Metro about 1979, they had demonstrations where they’d take ironing boards and other items onto the Metro, no problem. And then they’d argue that these big items were equivalent to bicycles in terms of being in the way. It took some time before the rules changed, though at least there weren’t rules put in place against large items on the Metro.

          • Kate 11:37 on 2019-12-05 Permalink

            jeather, I’m assuming it’s because these things are narrow and you can stand with them quite close to you, whereas a bicycle is horizontal so takes up more space.

            I don’t know whether there are, or should be, restrictions like putting some sort of safety cap on pole tips the way it used to be required to have blade guards on skates, for example. One sharp stop and things like that can go flying.

          • jeather 12:32 on 2019-12-05 Permalink

            Skis, maybe. Toboggans?

            But given how many people just keep their backpacks on their backs like monsters when the trains are packed, I wouldn’t trust them.

          • Meezly 12:54 on 2019-12-05 Permalink

            During heavy snow, sleds and toboggans are the best way to transport small kids, as strollers are practically useless in snow. Imagine how much more space a stroller would take in a metro, and I think strollers are allowed during rush hour.

          • Kate 13:48 on 2019-12-05 Permalink

            Strollers are allowed everywhere at all times, I believe. I was wondering about that last weekend during the STM open house: when I was a kid, strollers definitely were not allowed aboard buses, but I don’t remember when that changed. I remember my mother pushing my little sister around in a stroller for a long time (she was a lazy kid who preferred not to walk) but we never got aboard public transit with it.

          • Orr 10:20 on 2019-12-07 Permalink

            Speaking of skating rinks, a really big missed opportunity was to make the renovated tennis courts at North-East corner of parc Jeanne-Mance to be skating rink in winter.
            This is a really good location for a recreational skating rink.
            The only skating rink in the park is not a full time recreational-skating only rink and is a temporary seasonal rink with boards, a hockey rink actually.

        • Kate 19:29 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply  

          Has anyone studied exactly why the state of our emergency wards goes completely bananas as soon as a few flakes of snow hit the ground?

          Even though the health ministry has set up a whole chain of “winter clinics” for the second year running, it doesn’t seem to help. The list is here.

          Update: It seems flu season has started early.

           
          • Kate 19:25 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply  

            A group of people whose daily lives will be turned upside down by the long closure of the Mount Royal Tunnel after the holidays intend a class action suit against the REM.

             
            • Kate 14:12 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply  

              More pieces are coming on the Polytechnique theme: Toula Drimonis on how it took 30 years for the official park sign to acknowledge that the massacre was an attack against feminists; Tracey Lindeman in the Guardian on how hate crimes can propagate more hate crimes; CBC’s Loreen Pindera, a new hire then at CBC Montreal, tells of her experience covering the story. All three pieces mention the importance of the sign, of the city acknowledging the antifeminist nature of the attack.

              And the mayor is calling for tighter gun laws.

               
              • Kate 09:20 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply  

                A man was shot in a hotel room downtown near Atwater, early Wednesday. He’s in bad shape and there have been no arrests.

                A reader of my Twitter feed has asked that I produce a feed without any shootings or stabbings, which would be technically quite tricky. First, the feed is simply these WordPress posts turned into truncated tweets, so it doesn’t contain hashtags, as requested by this reader. I’d have to use WP categories or tags and see that they converted to hashtags properly on the Twitter feed, and then I’d have to tag every post.

                I briefly embarked on categorizing posts years ago but it was tedious and, after a short experiment, I didn’t find it was useful to my readers or myself. But does anyone else think they would benefit from having tags or categories or trigger warnings or anything else added to this blog on a regular basis?

                 
                • Kevin 10:03 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

                  We live in the safest era in history.
                  That’s why the occasional non-lethal stabbing or shooting makes news: because it is such a rare act.

                • Mr.Chinaski 10:30 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

                  I like this graph : https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2018001/article/54980/c-g/c-g01-eng.gif because it show not only murders but attempts in Canada through the past fifty years

                • Patrick 13:16 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

                  @Mr. Chinaski, What accounts for the two peaks in the early 80s and 90s, do you know?

                • Myles 14:18 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

                  It’s interesting to see that homicides used to outnumber attempts and now the reverse is true, I assume because of better medical care.

                • Hervé 16:27 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

                  It’s not hard for readers to skip over posts that don’t interest them. If tagging is tedious I say don’t bother.

                  Juste mes deux cennes.

              • Kate 09:14 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply  

                The state of the city’s water mains is still pretty terrible despite money and efforts poured into fixing them in recent years, and lots more funds are required to patch the thing up. The emergency repairs of that water main beside the Ville-Marie is costing $26.5 million, for example.

                 
                • Kate 09:11 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply  

                  The 19th-century pipe kiln found under the bridge has been reported in the Smithsonian magazine and in Atlas Obscura.

                   
                  • Kate 09:08 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply  

                    The Plateau has acted to preserve its iconic commercial signs, and Le Devoir shows us photos of some of them, although they seem oddly cropped in a few instances.

                     
                    • Blork 11:31 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

                      WTF is up with that cropping? It’s as if they’ve assigned the task to a bot. There’s no way that’s an attempt to be “creative.” Something is messed up there.

                    • Joey 11:48 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

                      All the photos are the same size (785 X 1172), which implies that Le Devoir’s CMS is pretty inflexible (or whoever set up the page isn’t familiar with it). I doubt the photographer, Valérian Mazataud, was told that each phot would be automatically cropped 2X3 without any kind of artistic direction…

                  • Kate 09:06 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply  

                    The SDC in the Village put up some slogans around Ste-Catherine Street, I guess to balance the loss of the festive baubles of summer, but has quickly taken some of them down, particularly one reading J’aime quand tu viens. Item tells us what the others are, and about two more that were taken down.

                     
                    • Patrick 13:21 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

                      My wife used to edit textbooks for US high school students taking French, and she learned early on that you never used the verb “venir” in the model conjugations. (Photos of people with wine and cigarettes were also taboo.)

                  • Kate 09:02 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply  

                    CTV’s got to stop running pieces about Montreal by this Toronto-based writer, who presumably saw fit to decorate this item about Montreal being in the top five cities to be an expat in with a cheery photo of a calèche, just as the existence of calèches is ending. We’re in a class with Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Ho Chi Minh City and Singapore, and that’s leaving aside the thorny question of what exactly an expat is.

                     
                    • Hamza 11:15 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

                      when they are not white, they are merely immigrants/ethnic. when they are, you get a fancy label like ‘expat’

                    • SMD 11:57 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

                      Agreed.

                    • Tim S. 12:39 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

                      The article does include quotes from people from Nigeria, Venezuela and Brazil (alongside Britain and Australia). They could still be white, of course, but at least it’s more than Europe/Anglo countries.
                      My biggest takeaway is how happy they were with low housing prices. Those won’t last long, it seems.

                    • Tim F. 14:14 on 2019-12-04 Permalink

                      I suspect it’s more of a socio-economic status thing than a strictly racial thing – although of course there is a correlation between the two. A berry picker from Mexico is an “economic migrant”; a fund manager from Nigeria is an “expat.”

                    • Jo Walton 10:39 on 2019-12-05 Permalink

                      I think the difference between an immigrant and an expat is whether they intend to go home, or whether they think of this as home. Jo, immigrant

                  • Kate 08:49 on 2019-12-04 Permalink | Reply  

                    A policeman who said a mildly rude thing about a driver’s excuse (more than two years ago – what kind of backlog do they have?) has received a 15-day unpaid suspension, his tenth breach of the police ethics code, and he’s teetering on the brink of dismissal.

                    To be honest, if a driver was making excuses about the time of day vs. his headlights, using his religion as a basis for claiming to know when the sun rises, I don’t actually think saying I don’t care about your prayers is a insult to Islam. It’s just a cop tired of hearing feeble excuses from drivers. Cop ethics hearings should throw out incidents like this and focus on actual ethical problems, of which any city this size provides a plentiful supply.

                     
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