Île-Bizard-Sainte-Geneviève residents are voting in a byelection Sunday to choose a new borough mayor. It’s basically Ensemble vs Projet, and undoubtedly the result will be scrutinized for what it says about the parties, even though the suburban borough is far from Projet’s natural base.
Updates from December, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A city worker was suspended last week on suspicion of being drunk at the wheel of a chenillette. Neither the city nor the blue collar union are saying much about it.
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Kate
Michel C. Auger says our favourite east‑end landmark has too much architecture, not enough stadium. He also ponders the vast sums that would be needed to turn it into a useful, viable asset to the city, rather than a sterile monument.
Kevin
If we can’t tear it down and build something completely new, I think the next best thing would be to put up a cylindrical stadium inside the existing structure and treat the exterior as a facade. Ditch the idea of the roof hanging from the tower because no earthly material can withstand the stresses on such an asymmetrical shape, and if a retractable roof is the goal, build some support pillars that would punch through the facade under the tower.
Kate
Is there room for that inside the existing envelope? It’s quite an idea.
Kevin
Who knows? Nothing about the stadium is logical or reasonable.
For the people who like the look of it, keep a facade. For people who want something that would actually be used for the occasional mega-concert or soccer game, build something functional.
Joey
That sounds like a recipe for two stadiums eventually falling apart, one inside the other.
MarcG
OMG imagine the tourists.
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Kate
Someone’s done a series of imaginary stained glass windows of patron saints of Montreal. Fantastic work. They’re here on Reddit (don’t miss the Sainte‑Flanelle added in the comments) but I’m not sure yet where they originated or who made them.
Update: The artist is Benjamin Tracy and yes, the work is mostly AI, but not the lettering. AI doesn’t have lettering down yet. For example, here’s my Midjourney version of Saint Viateur with bagels. I don’t know what SAX STAN! means. That was the AI’s idea.
MarcG
These made me laugh, thanks for sharing. The architecture in the St-Henri one is all wrong but the dream-of-the-1890s hipster double-fisting coffees is funny.
Ian
“AI” is notoriously awful at text considering it’s glorified autocorrect with a huge dataset. These images are great, though, and don’t have the typical AI-generated plasticky quality.
Still…
“generating an image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone, according to a new study by researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/EmilyG
At least the double-fisting-coffee hipster guy seems to have extra fingers and/or an extra-large hand to hold both his coffees.
Blork
…and his unicycle has no pedals. St-Ambroise hipster on the left has five fingers and invisible thumb instead the usual four (and St-A is spelled “Ambroiise”). But the St-Viateur one is excellent!
Annette
But why is Montreal poaching hipster jokes from 2000s-era Williamsburg?
MarcG
Because Montreal is pop-culturally 10-20 years behind other places? We still had heavy metal dudes with mullets in 2000.
Kate
Annette, those graphics are the work of one artist and reflect the prompts he gave to the AI. They don’t necessarily reflect current realities.
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Kate
A couple of architectural articles caught my eye this weekend:
Here’s a building that used to be a duplex on rue Alma. It’s relentlessly low‑key and beige inside, so much that foliage outside feels like a tasteless intrusion into the colour scheme. And… aha, yes, there’s the breakfast bar.
The ethics of deleting a living space to turn a duplex into a single‑family home during a housing crisis are not raised, as they never are in articles like this.
Construction Canada looks at the expansion of the Maisonneuve library which it implicitly praises for “rejecting the traditional book-centric layout.” But it’s nice to know they went for LEED gold accreditation, with geothermal energy and other energy‑efficient elements.
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Kate
As a non-driver I was unaware of the phenomenon of fake parking tickets, but they exist, and there may be a class‑action suit against several firms which have been raking it in with this scam.
Legally, owners of parking lots can tow vehicles in some situations, but are not allowed to issue and collect fines.
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Kate
La Presse asks a pertinent two‑part question Sunday: who is Québécois and how does a person become québécois?
The answer isn’t well defined. Suzanne Colpron has three suggestions: Is a Québécois someone who lives in Quebec? Someone who lives in Quebec and whose primary language is French? Or can it include someone who lives in Quebec and uses French outside the home? The answer depends on your political and social sensibilities. She gets definitions from several sages.
Then she talks to some people of non-souche backgrounds and finds out what they think. She doesn’t include any lumpen white anglos from here, though. That might involve an entire other article.
Ian
It’s ok, we all know we’ll never be considered “real” Québecois except for tax purposes.
James 09:04 on 2023-12-18 Permalink
According to preliminary results : 78% voted for Ensemble and 22% for Projet. The council was 100% Ensemble before the by-election and remains so. Projet winning would have been big news.
Kate 09:35 on 2023-12-18 Permalink
Indeed. Doug Hurley of Ensemble is the new borough mayor.