Dany Turcotte was a guest on Tout le monde en parle Sunday evening, where he said the torrent of abuse he was getting online wore him down to the point where he quit.
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Kate
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Kate
A Maisonneuve-Rosemont doctor has been shocked to find two cases of scurvy in his hospital over the last month, it being a disease of extreme deficiency rarely seen here even in a long medical practice.
nau
Back in the day, I knew a punk from Sault Ste. Marie who (like all wise people) decided that all this politically correct vegetarian nonsense had gone too far and that, as a protest, he would henceforth only eat meat. He was pretty happy about this at first but after a few months wasn’t feeling so well. The doctor congratulated him for being the only person they’d encountered who’d managed to give himself scurvy, and many laughs were had at his expense. Sadly, these cases don’t fall into the “You dumb fuck” category but result rather from the collision of social isolation and mental disturbance with the pandemic.
Tee Owe
Humans (homo sapiens) are omnivores – don’t fight biology!
dwgs
nau, care to give any hints about said punk’s identity? Initials even? Timeline? That’s my hometown and now I’m busy trying to guess who it might have been. I have a couple of suspects.
nau
Didn’t know him well, he was a friend of a friend. I crossed paths with him in the early 90s in Vancouver. The scurvy happened later in the 90s after he went back to the Soo. The name that comes back to me is Gary. Stocky guy maybe 5′ 10″ish, extroverted, with 90s facial hair. I remember him telling me his favourite band was the Dwarves. Does that help? (Full disclosure, I relayed the story as it was told to me. I can’t attest to its veracity, but having met the guy it was well within the realm of plausibility.)
dwgs
Ah, probably a few years younger than me, no doubt I know someone who knows him. I thought it was someone who had moved to MTL. The only thing that surprises me is that he moved back.
nau
Yeah, the Ontarians didn’t paint a pretty picture of Sault Ste. Marie but having grown up in a smaller, more isolated industrial town, it didn’t sound that out out of the ordinary to me. I think he moved back east because he got tired of how “progressive” the west coast was, but it’s entirely possible he went to Toronto and it’s just my wonky memory that situates him back in the Soo.
Kate
nau, the guy in your story managed to replicate the diet of meat and ship’s biscuit that left so many sailors ill or dead from scurvy before a Scots surgeon discovered that giving them a bit of citrus fruit cured the condition. It was some time before other scientists worked out the chemical formula for Vitamin C.
jeather
Kate
Maciej Ceglowski is such a good writer. Thanks, jeather.
nau
That’s a great article Jeather.
After posting the story, my brain started torturing me with a composite of all the chauvinistic meat-eaters I’ve ever met asking “So why don’t the Inuit get scurvy, huh?”. So I poked around and stumbled across a Canadian explorer who demonstrated the viability of a virtually all-meat diet: Vilhjalmur Stefansson.
The catch is the meat has to be very fresh to contain enough Vitamin C (raw is best), which is why the sailors’ preserved meat didn’t do the trick. So I guess we’re stuck with clementines unless we want to follow the Japanese in eating horse sashimi.
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Kate
Danny Lavy blows off the cultural value of books in this Brendan Kelly piece on the S.W. Welch story, although it would’ve been nice if Kelly had noticed it’s Shiller, not Schiller. As in oui, papa!
Meezly
Well, as someone had already remarked, Lavy’s certainly not disguising the fact that he’s a philistine, through and through.
MarcG
He keeps flipping back and forth on the spelling within the article, or even the same sentence! “The building was owned by Brandon Schiller — son of Shiller-Lavy co-owner Stephen Shiller”
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Kate
A fifth campaign of snow removal will begin Monday at the start of a mixed week, with rain and snow expected Monday followed by a colder Tuesday and then temperatures bouncing above and below freezing for awhile, and we know what that can do to streets and sidewalks.
Kevin
The sidewalks in my NDG hood are currently a sheet of ice. Wear crampons.
Kate
Even on the sunny sides?
dhomas
Everything melted in my hood. There was a lake of melted ice in front of my house. My kids had fun making a river to guide all the water to the sewer.
Kate
Things are just a smidge icy in shady spots, in my hood, but I went to do a quick grocery run in Little Italy and most of the sidewalk was dry. Still a lot of snowpiles between the cleared extent of the sidewalk and the street, and too many people out, trying to pass each other in that narrow space.
Kevin
Yah, even on the sunny sides this morning.
At some point the borough put down gravel so walking the pooch in the afternoon was safe.Mr.Chinaski
Sunny sides can be the worse these days as melted snow –> water –> freezes back during the night.
Joey
It’s insane that the city is about to start a full-fledged snow removal operation for this measly amount of snow and ice. Especially with more snow forecast for the end of the week. Couldn’t they just pay the kickback without bothering everyone with the actual snow removal?
Kate
Joey, they wanted to scoop it up before it chills down and freezes in place, as explained here, and after walking around Sunday afternoon I could see the logic. But they’re against the clock, because temperatures are going to start falling fast after 6 p.m. Monday and be down around –17 by Tuesday morning.
Joey
That excuse made little sense yesterday and even less now. What could happen? The ice could get colder? There’s so little ice/snow (non-parking lanes and sidewalks are clear and dry), the plows won’t even pick up what’s left. Excited to hear the sirens at 6 tomorrow morning.
How many CO2 emissions will this purposeless operation cost us?
Kate
Joey, you say that, but there are big piles of snow on all the streets around here, yes, people can drive through but there’s a massive pile between the road and sidewalk on both sides, which is usually cleared when the road’s done. If those piles are left to thaw and freeze and thaw and freeze (which would be typical in March) it could create a much bigger mess, even if no more snow falls.
mare
It’s a really good occasion to finally make some potholes, otherwise our poor motorists have nothing to complain about this spring.
mare
@Kate, in our street 70% of those piles can’t be cleared because people have put plants in the carrés des arbres and staked them at all corners. The piles are sometimes almost 2 metres high. I usually shovel some snow off the top of “our” carré onto the street before snow clearing starts, but with curfew that was a no go tonight. (they’re scraping the street as I write this).
dhomas
I live on the border of 2 boroughs, and the plows from one borough dump their snow into the dead-end on the side of the other borough and just leave it there. The side effect of this is that they end up blocking the sewer drains near my house. As it thaws and freezes, it only makes a thicker layer of ice on top of the drain. So, when it thaws again, the water has no place to go, so it pools in front of my house. Eventually, there is so much water that it starts to go down my driveway, which is compounded every time the bus that runs in front of my house passes and pushes all the water down the driveway at once. One year, it almost flooded my garage and I needed to take the water out with buckets. This is just an example of the effects of not properly clearing snow.
I can see that there were a lot of piles of wet, slushy snow still about yesterday. With a 22 degree drop from yesterday midday to last night, that is basically going to flash freeze in place. It would be much more difficult to remove once frozen today.
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Kate
It’s one year since the first case of Covid-19 was diagnosed in Quebec, in a woman just back from Iran, one of the countries hit earliest and hardest by the coronavirus.
It’s also a year since I last sat down in a restaurant, and I imagine the same is true of most of us.
The media keep playing two sides against the middle. This weekend’s grievance is that hotels have been told not to open their swimming pools, which some had hoped to do to capitalize on spring break. That bringing people together in this way is still something that oughtn’t to be going on is handwaved in favour of the storyline that it’s so hard on the hotels and on the disappointed families. Listen people: the coronavirus doesn’t care.
Lots of pieces this weekend on how to keep your kiddies amused and busy for a week. I hate to sound like the keep-off-my-lawn guy, but do kids really need their parents constantly making efforts to keep them entertained? I remember needing nothing more than free time to either go outside and horse around in the alley, read a book, or grab some paper and pencils and draw things. There was never enough time for the things I wanted to do. Had my parents tried to entertain me it would’ve been bizarre. I don’t believe modern kids are as unresourceful as all that, but the parenting attitude has changed completely.
MarcG
I live near a little park and can confirm that kids are still very easily entertained by spiders, empty boxes, leftover construction material, snowballs, running up and down a small hill, etc.
Meezly
“Keep them entertained” is probably not the best choice of words but it’s simpler to say than how to keep kids on a structured routine that allows for a good balance of free time and positive stimulus?
Keep in mind modern parents & kids are now faced with a pandemic. They have already been limited by social restrictions for several months. Now spring break is here and many parents cannot afford to take time off work but are reluctant to send them to service de grade because Covid and
kids can’t spend time their grandparents
kids aren’t allowed to go over to each other’s houses
it’s still winter so not so easy to be outside for very longMany parents are tired and at their wit’s end. Many kids have had to isolate in recent weeks because of Covid cases at school. My kid’s class had a case and even if the other kids test negative, the whole class still had to isolate for 10 days!
That meant not being allowed to go outside, not being able to play with each other. So I imagine kids are pretty sick of books and drawing things, and maybe even video games and zoom.
Yes parenting was different way back when, but even though this phrase is clichéd it still holds true, these are unprecedented times.
Kate
Mmm, I would’ve loved it, you know? Stay home and draw pictures and not have to deal with the teacher and the other knobs in my class? Bliss.
I realize not everyone is inclined this way, though.
CE
Every time there has been a snowstorm and the kids head for the parks for some sledding, I’m always struck by the ring of parents standing at the top of the hills. Why does every parent need to be there? When I was a kid (not *that* long ago), parents rarely accompanied us to the tobogganing hill, I would assume it was a few precious hours of silence and relaxation for them. I feel like being a parent these days must be extra exhausting!
Kate
CE, that’s the change. Kids rarely play now without parental supervision.
When I was a kid (she said, shaking her cane) my parents stayed home and we hauled the toboggan up to Mount Royal ourselves on the bus from the west side, sledding on the hill above Beaver Lake, not the Park Avenue side. So when it started getting dark, you’d just go home. But nobody would let kids of 10 or 11 do that now.
Kevin
CE
As a kid our parents used to drop me and my siblings and friends off at a hill and come back later.
That ended after the third time one of us was seriously hurt and had to lie there moaning and/or bleeding until they showed up.Kate
How seriously, Kevin?
One time, some idiots thought it was funny to drag their empty sled directly into the path of ours. I got a cut on my face when our toboggan – descending at speed with 3 or 4 kids aboard – kicked theirs up in the air. I don’t want to be all Four Yorkshiremen about it, but after dabbing off the blood in the chalet bathroom I just went home on the bus as usual.
My family never had a car, so it was never a question of getting picked up. You want to go somewhere, here’s a couple of bus tickets. See you later.
dwgs
Oh, bus tickets!! Luxury!! We used to have to take a flying leap at the bus and hang on to the outside for dear life.
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Kate
It was with a sense of déjà vu that I read the headline about Stastny’s overtime goal – turns out he’s the son of one of the Nordiques brothers, and prolonged the Canadiens’ losing streak to five on Saturday.
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Kate
Curfew is being blamed for a rash of break-ins at restaurants in Griffintown. Owners say that, with no eyes on the street, crooks get away with it.
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Kate
A man was stabbed at 10:30 Saturday night (what were he and his attacker doing out after curfew?) in Montreal North.
Don’t know if it was the threat of a new police squad but no shootings have been reported in days.
Mr.Chinaski 09:40 on 2021-03-01 Permalink
Watching the old reel of his “best” moments simply enhanced even more the widespread view that he wasn’t funny anymore, The live setting and lack of audience simply did not suit him. This ain’t about the man, it’s just about his work.
I pay my SRC taxes to watch the work of people, not who those people are in real-life. It’s a TV show, it’s 24 lies per seconds like Haneke would say.. If they ain’t funny in the context of a TV show, it’s not about the person, He simply did not work hard or well enough to make it work, especially at 10 000$ per episode!!
Blork 12:50 on 2021-03-01 Permalink
$10K per episode? Where’d you see that?