It’s worth watching the brief video attached to this TVA item about the dig on Ste‑Catherine where workers are excavating and replacing infrastructure as much as 150 years old.
Updates from October, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
In 2016, Angelo D’Onofrio, a man with no criminal history, was shot dead on a north end café terrasse. It transpired that the intended target was a mobster who looked a bit like him.
The driver and the shooter were convicted in 2019, but the appeal court ordered a second trial because of alleged mistakes by the judge. Now the original verdict has been confirmed. Sentencing is yet to be handed down.
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Kate
Hubert Reeves, celebrated Quebec astrophysicist, popularizer of science and latterly an environmentalist, has died at 91. Reeves was born in Montreal but had lived in France for some time, and died in Paris.
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Kate
Thousands gathered in a pro-Palestinian protest Friday evening near Guy‑Concordia metro and marched west toward the consulate of Israel in Westmount Square. CTV has a striking aerial photo taken from up in the John Molson building, showing the size of the crowd.
Anton
On formerly twitter @Israel is running ads saying they’re the real victims in this.
I wonder who will win the propaganda war.
Kate
The Palestinians lost it a long time ago. People are losing their jobs for making pro‑Palestinian comments.
Meezly
Both sides are victims of their own ideologies, which has become more and more extreme as the conflict wears on. It does seem that Israel winning the propaganda war, though TVA’s headline should be “Conflit Likud-Hamas”.
The optics are not in their favour so soon after the horrific Hamas attack, but if the protest is calling for peace and freedom for Palestinians, then that is their right. There is no justification for the massacre of innocents by Hamas nor the indiscriminate retaliatory bombings of schools and hospitals by Netanyahu and his ultra far-right government.
Knowing both Muslim and Jewish people, I can offer empathy and support, but I can’t choose sides. There is no right side to any of this, just too many horrible wrongs.
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Kate
Seven central boroughs are to be the site of a winter Bixi pilot project this year. Winter bikes will have studded tires and anti-slip pedals but electric bikes won’t be available.
walkerp
Also, disappointingly, it won’t be included in an annual membership. Still, a great initiative.
DeWolf
Interesting detail – Bixi says that regular stations within the winter zone won’t be immediately deactivated after Nov 16, they’ll remain usable until the stations are taken away. So it will be more of a gradual transition towards the winter service.
Apparently the preconditions for being in the winter zone was having enough protected bike paths that are cleared in the winter, which is why Verdun, CDN and PSC are excluded. The stations also need to be off-street and out of the way of snow plows which limits where you can place them.
Marco
I’m looking forward to this. There are only a half dozen days in the winter that aren’t rideable so why not use a bike on all of the other days. I have a winter beater bike but I’ll probably get rid of it because the maintenance is a lot of work.
DeWolf
The extra maintenance is why I’ve never bothered cycling in the winter. Plus, I like the flexibility of Bixi in the summer even when I have two of my own bikes to choose from, and flexibility seems even more important in the winter.
Kate
You need a garage or workshop space if you cycle on your own bike in the winter. They get filthy and it’s not something you want to deal with in your living space.
mare
@Kate Because the ruelle behind my house was so icy you couldn’t cycle or walk there safely I stored my eBike in my house last winter. I put a tarp down and a drop cloth and two large shoe trays. When the bike was really filthy, I first cleaned it outside with a rag and water from a pump spray bottle, commonly used for gardening. The tarp protected the floor against leakage and the drop cloth kept the stray grit in place and absorbed the snow that fell next to the shoe trays. One in a while I folded it up, shook it out outside and swept the floor.
Apart from taking up quite some space it worked pretty well. (I rode almost 1500 km between December and March.)
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Kate
Weekend notes from CityCrunch, Montréal Secret, 24Heures, Sarah’s Weekend List, CultMTL.
Highway horrors for the weekend.
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Kate
The federal government offered nearly $30 million to the city to build a water retention system under McGill College downtown, but the city turned it down.
They had good reasons: the street has already been closed for years to build a REM station, and that area sits over an incredibly complicated underground entanglement, what with the REM, the metro, basements and tunnels. Underground facilities have to be protected from water infiltration, so it really is not a spot where you’d encourage more water to sink into the earth.
As Maja Vodanovic says here, they also didn’t want to turn the street into a construction zone for 12 years.
With the inevitable Ensemble coda, this time from Alan DeSousa, kvetching about Projet but not actually making any useful counter-suggestions.
Joey
I get that the opposition has to throw whatever at the wall to see what sticks, but this kind of attack is so tedious and complicated that it really undermines their credibility. While I am a fan of Projet’s values, I find their approach to governance to be excessively arrogant, and wish we had an opposition that could get them to be a little bit more concerned about what *others* think. But if this is the kind of opposition that Ensemble is going to mount, Valerie Plante will be mairesse for life – or until the Project inner circle decides her time is up.
DeWolf
I agree with Joey. I generally support PM but we need a good opposition and Ensemble is offering precisely nothing in terms of an alternative vision for the city.
Also worth noting that installing a water retention facility under McGill College would likely have meant scrapping the plans for Oscar Peterson Square, because you can’t have trees and water features on top of a reservoir.
Kate
I agree in generally supporting PM and that they would benefit from the honing effect of a smart opposition with its own good ideas. Too bad.
MarcG 08:44 on 2023-10-14 Permalink
Drones have really changed how we’re able to perceive the world.
Blork 12:36 on 2023-10-14 Permalink
Interesting, but what’s with all the rapid cutting? Why show something interesting if you’re going to cut away from it after two seconds? LINGER, MOTHERF**KER!
Chris 12:53 on 2023-10-14 Permalink
Blork, ain’t nobody got time for that. Swipe, next video.
I wonder if anything they’re building now will last 150 years.
Kate 13:15 on 2023-10-14 Permalink
No, but I think modern engineers may have a better idea of the lifespan of their materials.