A week after a police raid, the magic mushroom dispensary reopened Tuesday.
Updates from July, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Kate
-
Kate
This is an older piece but I’m pretty sure I never blogged it. A friend who does film reviews mentioned it on Facebook today: Montreal as the creepiest city as captured by David Cronenberg in three early films.
-
Kate
L’actualité has put up a series of lists of summer excursion ideas in Quebec which someone may find useful.
-
Kate
The REM has been running empty for awhile on its planned schedule, but it was stopped during Thursday’s storm, although the official in this story says that it’s ready for snowstorms. We’ll see.
Here’s the Instagram video mentioned in the article, showing the Central Station platform.
Uatu
Yeah I was wondering about that. If there’s a great time for foul weather testing that would’ve been it. But nope. You know what did work? My bus. Air-conditioned with reclining seats and tinted windows. That thing plowed through the rain like it was nothing. Was it stuck in traffic? Sure, but I was too busy napping to notice. This train had better work for the 190$ a month I’m paying.
-
Kate
The smog warning is continuing. I snapped the photo here while walking along Mont‑Royal near Esplanade around noon. I was shocked when I looked up and saw the haze between me and the mountain.walkerp
Yeah, I was up behind UdeM last night and looking east the sun was a hazy orange ball and the horizon looked like LA. Is this still because of the wildfires or just pollution?
MarcG
According to this map the smoke from the big fires northwest of here aren’t blowing this way right now… but basically the whole continent is burning so who knows… https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/
EG
I went out to the store today, and the sunlight had that orange quality we’ve seen too many times lately.
DeWolf
La Presse reported yesterday that this is smoke from Western Canada:
It’s meant to ease up tomorrow. And it’s supposed to be sunny for the next couple of days. Maybe we’ll actually have a couple of days this summer that aren’t smoky or raining?
Chris
So the air is considered dangerously unhealthy by the government. And what do we do to mitigate this? Basically nothing. Do we implement a congestion charge on smog days? No. Do we allow only odd number license plates? No. Do we offer free public transit? No.
No doubt we’ll end up like China, and just wear masks outside routinely. Anything but give up our precious automobiles!
Kate
You can take the bus for $1 in Laval on smog days.
I venture to guess that the action is still too remote from the result for any change to be accepted by the public. “Leave your car at home today and the forests will stop burning tomorrow” might work. Might work. “Leave your car at home forever and the forests might stop burning in 10 or 20 years” doesn’t have the traction.
MarcG
Handy tool for finding an air filter to suit your space https://filters.cleanairstars.com/
MarcG
Also to Chris’ point about wearing masks outside routinely: this is how my wife and I have been rolling this summer. Someone yelled at her last night walking down the sidwalk (the yeller flying by safely on a bicycle, of course) “Ooh, I’m scared of the air!” and we’d have a few funny looks, especially with the P100s when it was really bad a few weeks ago, but otherwise people don’t seem to care… but they also don’t wear them themselves, which I find is a big problem. A child asked their parents “Why are they wearing masks?” after walking past us and the parents said “Because the air quality is bad”. You’d think one thing would lead to another but it doesn’t always for a variety of reasons. In this case, I think that a lot of it is social pressure to pretend things are normal and masking being stigmatized in North America. I read it somewhere suggested that it’s related to anti-Asian sentiment and that wouldn’t surprise me.
Chris
Kate, yeah, agreed. But still, I was astounded how accepting, mostly, the population was about all the drastic measures during covid. Perhaps they would surprise us again if drastic climate measures were invoked now.
>I read it somewhere suggested that it’s related to anti-Asian sentiment and that wouldn’t surprise me.
Seems unlikely. If it were so, why did so many wear masks during covid, even before/after compulsion? The simpler and more likely explanation is that their risk calculation, right or wrong, deems it just not worth it.
SMD
Chris, you might appreciate this thought experiment about cars that I came across recently:
“What if I were a scientist and I announced that I had invented a form of instantaneous transport. Anyone could lease a unit for about $200 a month, plus the cost of energy. And it would allow you to travel between any two points in the US instantly. The dream of teleportation realized. The only catch, I announced, was that in order for everyone to use their units, 100 random users would have to be sacrificed to the machine every single day. Their deaths would be painful and bloody, but it would keep everyone else’s machines humming along. Could anyone seriously support such a proposal? It’s madness to even contemplate it. And yet this is the Faustian bargain we have struck with the automobile.”
-
Kate
La Presse looks at the various pieces of mural art by the MU collective around town. The styles vary a lot and include a Picasso pastiche at #7.
frank
Why would you expect or want murals done by different artists to be in the same style in the 21st C?
Kate
I didn’t say I did. It was just an observation.
-
Kate
Is there any way to come to a resolution between industrial development and biodiversity preservation? Le Devoir asks the question relative to the dwindling green space in the West Island, where a company wants to build its new headquarters on a piece of land that it owns.
Nicholas
The article notes that there are 20 hectares of rarely or never used parking in the area, right near a future REM station. If no one wants to sell their unused parking lots nor develop them, the city can help them along by imposing a higher tax rate on surface lots near REM stations in industrial zones (or all REM stations). $100 per parking spot would bring in $2 million a year in taxes just on those unused spots. If that doesn’t do it, just keep raising the rate until it gets redeveloped.
Michael
More Taxes =/////= More development.
The higher interest rate costs has frozen new apartment construction. It takes 1.5 years to get a permit to build a building + all the taxes involved.
The city of Montreal needs to be progressive and aggressive and push for easier ways in order to get development going.
Nicholas
If you tax non-development (parking lots) more than development (buildings), people will develop parking lots into buildings. The developer has its permits (on its land), so that’s not the problem. The issue is they can’t even buy nearby parking lot land. I guarantee that if you taxed parking spots at $1 million each spot, the parking spots would quickly disappear into either grass or development. That price is obviously too high for an industrial park next to the airport, they will need some parking for trucks and you don’t want them all moving to Mirabel, but there is a lower price that will get some movement.
walkerp 07:29 on 2023-07-19 Permalink
It’s because of all the rain.
Ian 19:36 on 2023-07-19 Permalink
Haha well played