A little off my beaten track, but this Taylor C. Noakes piece on the shaky state of Canadian health care in the hands of right‑wing, privatizing provincial premiers is an excellent read.
Updates from June, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Radio-Canada profiles Matt Soar, who has made an avocation of saving commercial signs from the dump.
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Kate
The Pussy Patrol is seeking new people to foster rescue cats. If you’re interested, you can comment here or look them up on Facebook.I did some fostering for them after my previous cat died of old age, and it was an interesting experience, but I adopted a rescue cat a couple of years ago – not the cat in the picture – and she doesn’t like competition, so I’m not fostering for now.
EmilyG
I’d love to foster a cat, but I hope to move back into town from the suburbs soon, and I don’t think I’ll be able to find a place that allows pets.
jeather
Depending on how long soon is, you might be able to foster before you move.
Right now I am full up on cats, plus they all actually like each other for once and I don’t dare disturb the balance.
Kate
The Patrol mostly focuses on central Montreal – the Plateau and Rosemont. But there would almost certainly be other cat fostering groups in the suburbs.
EmilyG
We already have a cat at the family home in the suburbs, and aren’t really in the position to foster another.
Kate
That’s the difficulty of finding foster homes – people who like cats usually already have one, if not more.
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Kate
Workers at the Casino are threatening to strike during Grand Prix weekend, which must be one of its more profitable moments of the year.
Ephraim
Am I the only one that thinks that maybe the experiment is over and it’s time to just shut it down entirely? Does it really bring in all that much money? Can we just licence a company to pay us that amount of money and let them run it instead?
qatzelok
Ephraim, letting organized crime run the casino would probably kill any union that is currently active in protecting worker’s rights there.
Is that realy what you are prescribing?
Ephraim
As usual, you see things that aren’t there. Corporations are NOT organized crime. Ontario has casinos and they are run by corporations instead of the provincial government. The government regulates them and make sure they are organized crime. The same way as they are in Nevada. The Quebec government is not a efficient operator.
Ephraim
They are NOT organized crime. That’s the point of the regulators. Gov’t gets their money from the fee for licencing and lets the corporations do the rest, like figure out how to get people into seats. I’ve been to good casinos and bad casinos and the slot machines here don’t draw people and there are empty tables when there are people to play because they won’t lower limits to get tables active.
Joey
Obviously organized crime has never succeeded in infiltrating gaming corporations or regulators…
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Kate
It’s an appalling tale. Last December, a bar worker admitted to lifting $40 from tips, so his boss and several other workers spent a night torturing him in a cellar. They’ve just been sentenced.
What’s most horrible in this story is not just that it happened, but how the other three guys obeyed their boss in injuring and torturing their colleague. It’s the Milgram experiment in capsule form. Just following orders.
shawn
and while none of the alleged perpetrators appear to be Russian, fittingly, in keeping with current torture-related developments, it’s called The Little Moscow.
Meezly
Quite disturbing! I thought that maybe it was some dive bar in the outskirts, but it’s a trendy bar in the Latin Quarter affiliated with two other trendy thematic bars: Little Cuba and Little Mexico.
Blork
I long ago learned that there is no correlation between the shadiness of a bar and its popularity. For the most part, bar patrons (especially those who frequent “trendy” bars) are oblivious to who owns the place or what nasty shenanigans the owners might be tied to.
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Kate
The city is moving into letting the grass grow long in parts of some parks, to support insect and bird life.
shawn
That’s great. Even on that a little strip along the middle of Saint Joseph by me, they let the grass grow high and there’s all kinds of interesting variations. I mean, I suppose some of it may be weeds, but it looks wonderful imo. And while I don’t think the article mentions it, I feel like those patches help to cool the area down a little more than short grass.
Kate
Well, define “weeds”. A lot of the “weeds” which will grow here are specifically the plants on which local beneficial insect species will thrive!
A good example is milkweeds, which grow wild here if you let them – you can see them all over in wild spaces through July and August after which they go to seed. They’re necessary for monarch butterflies and bees like them too. And there may be many other examples of mutualistic plant and insect species here that are not as well known.
dhomas
It’s too late for this year, but for next year this might be of interest. You can usually get free milkweed seed in an effort to help monarch butterflies thrive. I plant them in planter boxes so they don’t take over the rest of my garden.
Here’s where I got mine:
https://escarpment.ca/ebc-news/save-the-monarchs-plant-free-milkweed-seedsshawn
BTW according to this article today in Ars Technica, the steepest drop in world bird populations are among “grassland birds, which have suffered from habitat loss and our use of pesticides.” https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/a-shocking-number-of-birds-are-in-trouble/
Kate
I’ve always been convinced it was pesticides and deforestation that have been damaging bird populations, and not the domestic cat.
Blork
All it will take is a few tick bites to turn that around. (Life is complicated.)
Kate
I don’t think people are meant to tread through the un‑mown parts of these parks.
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