Longtime downtown establishment Chez Parée has lost its permit for two weeks and been fined $30,000 following charges that it’s the haunt of biker gangs.
Updates from January, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Hema-Quebec wants your type O blood.
Ephraim
I’m safe, definitely not O. But I can’t give blood for so many reasons, including the fact that I was in the Dominican Republic.
Jonathan
I’m type O, and what a surprise that they’ve changed the criteria and i’m actual eligible to donate!
Signed up, filled out my profile, click to book and — er — there are no sites near the central area of the city. Over 1 hour to get there and I live in a central neighbourhood!Kate
Hema-Quebec has made something of a tactical error putting their main collection centre at Place Versailles.
Ian
I guess rent must be cheap out there?
jeather
Yeah, I’d give blood, but it’s never near me (I’m central and O+ also). I check periodically, but there’s a limit to how inconvenienced I am willing to be.
Ian
There are lots of blood drives around town – here’s the link to Héma-Québec’s info page. There seem to be regular donation drives in the West island, in Laval, and in Brossard.
To be fair the main collection centre is a 5 minute walk from Radisson metro.
jeather
Cool, and if you live in the West Island, Laval, or Brossard, that’s helpful.
Ian
They have blood drives at the universities and cegeps as well if you aren’t happy with the googling I did for you. In fact, I found the Héma-Québec site through the McGill Students’ Blood Donation Association.
dhomas
From Ian’s link:
Laval : https://www.hema-quebec.qc.ca/sang/donneur-sang/ou-quand-donner-sang/centre-de-donneurs.en.html#n10402462
Brossard: https://www.hema-quebec.qc.ca/sang/donneur-sang/ou-quand-donner-sang/centre-de-donneurs.en.html#n10402470
Kirkland: https://www.hema-quebec.qc.ca/sang/donneur-sang/ou-quand-donner-sang/centre-de-donneurs.en.html#n10444310
All three locations mentioned are right there.jeather
As I said, I check periodically for ones which are near me.
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Kate
Black puppeteer Franck Sylvestre has filed a defamation suit against anti‑racism activist Alain Babineau, who has accused him of racism, because the puppet is something of a caricature. Sylvestre says his reputation has been damaged by the claim – but everyone in this case is Black. I would not want to be the judge who has to decide whether it’s possible that Sylvestre is being racist against himself.
Blork
Oh FFS. (Although dang, that is one ugly puppet!)
Ian
Well if Zionists can call Hassids self-hating Jews I guess anything is possible.
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Kate
Radio-Canada has an audio piece on St‑Hubert Plaza and how it has become San Huberto, with a notable presence of Latino businesses, in recent years.
It’s an easy mistake to assume that the expression “Quartier Latin” has something to do with people speaking Spanish. It doesn’t. Paris’s Latin Quarter, the original, grew up around the Sorbonne and a cluster of other schools and colleges, and refers to Latin as the language of instruction when it was first established. Nothing to do with people from Latin America.
Ian
So I guess the big question is was our ‘Quartier latin’ designated as such before or after UQAM was built?
Lots of Latino businesses all along Beaubien, too.
Kate
Before. Back in the day, before UQÀM existed, the branch of Laval University that eventually developed into the Université de Montréal was in this building from 1895 located near the church which became part of the UQAM campus. The name would’ve dated from around then.
That building no longer exists.
Ian
Excellent, thank you.
DeWolf
St-Hubert right by Jean-Talon is quite the scene these days. Lots of energy. (Also, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say ‘San Huberto’ in real life, but I’ve definitely heard lots of people say ‘Juan Talón’!)
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Kate
Momesso’s is to close on January 27.
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Kate
More than 320 school teaching positions are still unfilled in the Montreal area.
Ephraim
Meanwhile school boards will sometimes play games to keep you from getting certified so that you can get tenure.
Ian
Yeah they like to keep you without a permanent posting so they can put you anywhere in the school board they feel like. With a really big school board like Lester B you could be anywhere from the tip of the west island to just the other side of Outremont on any given day.
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Kate
A lot of people have respiratory illnesses right now, overwhelming hospital ERs. La Presse notes that although there’s a vaccine against RSV, few people are getting it because it costs $300.
Santé Québec established weekly Covid death updates awhile back, usually on Wednesdays. There has not been any update since January 3, and I don’t know whether this is a new policy, or just that the person who gets the fax and puts the number online is still on vacation.
Update: The numbers were updated after noon on Thursday.
Ephraim
There are at 2 vaccines that the government should be giving out. RSV and Shingles. The cost of the vaccine is so much cheaper than dealing with the underlying diseases.
EmilyG
Adding to other reasons ERs are overcrowded – many people don’t have family doctors, or if they do, it’s really hard to get in touch with them for appointments. As well, walk-in clinics almost don’t exist anymore.
CE
From what I’ve heard about shingles, it’s worth whatever it costs to get the vaccine the second you’re old enough to be eligible. It sounds like an absolutely horrendous disease!
JP
Awhile back, a pharmacist friend also mentioned that she’d seen a few more patients than usual with shingles who were in their late 20s or 30s.
Uatu
You’d think that this would be a priority to keep people out of the ER as well as access to primary care. We’ll see if the 500grand salary top gun head of sante QC agrees. I doubt it. Probably too expensive, right?
John B
I had shingles last year, and I’m in my early 40s, so not the age range usually considered “at risk” for it. It sucked, and I had no idea what it was, but because I’m on the waitlist for a family doctor I was able to call the Guichet d’accès pour la clientèle orpheline and get a doctor appointment a few days later, and the doctor recognized it and prescribed a big dose of anti-viral meds. A few weeks later the shingles was gone, which is so much better than the horror stories I’ve heard about it sticking around.
Afterward I was doing some reading, and apparently shingles is getting more common in younger people because we now vaccinate against chickenpox. Before, when kids were always getting chickenpox, being around a kid who had it was like getting a booster dose of chickenpox immunity for adults, but now that we don’t have that exposure our body slowly gets less immune to chickenpox, to the point where the virus we caught as kids can eventually break through as shingles.
When I eventually get through the waitlist and find a doctor one of the things I’m going to ask about is getting the shingles vaccine early.
carswell
This is an excellent example of being penny wise and pound foolish, for all the reasons cited above.
Shingles is horrible. If you’ve not got vaccinated, you should, despite the cost and flu-like aftereffect.
Another drug that should be added to the list is Paxlovid. In the States (!), it’s prescribed liberally — in many places automatically — for people, especially the middle-aged and over. Here, despite most provinces having ample, fed-provided supplies on hand* (no figures for Quebec, unfortunately), it’s almost impossible for otherwise fairly healthy COVID sufferers, even those over 65, to get.
When I came down with the disease in the spring of 2022, the onset was fast and severe; it was clear to me early on that I was going to be very sick (knocked flat for four weeks, not feeling much better for another two and left with reduced lung capacity that lasted until August of last year), so I called my physician, my pharmacist and eventually Santé Québec and got the same response: no Paxlovid unless I was immune-compromised, morbidly obese or over, IIRC, 81 (not quite there yet). What if I paid for it out of my own pocket? Nope. The only possible way would be to go to the ER and see if they would prescribe it (but they probably wouldn’t, I was told). ER waiting times were horrendous (16 hours at the Jewish) and the facilities were overcrowded, i.e. hotbeds of infection, so I stayed at home and got sicker and sicker.
This fall, when the latest COVID vax came out, I wanted to get it but wasn’t allowed to because it hadn’t been six months since my last shot. This struck me as ridiculous, as the new variant was said to be “elusive” to antibodies produced in response to earlier variants. So I called Santé Québec again and eventually got escalated to some surprisingly sympathetic official. While she agreed that my earlier bout and vaccines afforded little to no protection against the variant targeted in the new vaccine, she insisted I wait the full six months “because those are the rules.” “All right, what if I come down with COVID again? Can I then get Paxlovid?” Nope. Not even if I pay for it.
Joey
One of the challenges of the health system is that, even internally within the ministry of health, budgets are siloed. So, at a system level, it makes all the sense in the world to expand vaccination for things like Shingles and RSV or to make Paxlovid as easily available as possible.* From an operational/management perspective, the costs/benefits are not so clearcut. If you run the provincial drug plan and are trying to keep drug reimbursement on budget, you (perversely, it must be said) want to dispense as few Shingles vaccines as possible – or at least no more than what’s included in your forecast. If you do oversee a massively popular Shingles vaccine campaign, you will blow your budget – and, critically, you won’t realize or even get meaningful credit for your role in reducing hospitalization and other health system costs, since those costs are held in someone else’s budget. This is a major issue with how we run our health system – the drug plan manager is incentivized to run a lean vaccination campaign, not to generate savings for the hospital budget manager.
To its (partial, I suppose) credit, the MSSS decided to allow pharmacists to both prescribe and dispense Paxlovid, avoiding ER/doctor’s visits – this is especially important given that its effectiveness diminishes quickly following the COVID diagnosis.
jeather
The second I am eligible for the shingles vaccine I will be getting it. My understanding is that you can luck in to a pharmacist who is more lax about Paxlovid and they will dispense it — I know people under 80 (now it’s 70+) who got it no problem.
Kevin
I took my first dose of the Shingles vaccine last Friday (You need 2 doses, 2 to 12 months apart).
I was okay Saturday morning but needed a nap in the afternoon, made the laziest dinner on Saturday and went to bed feeling dizzy and headachy. Absolutely worst experience I’ve ever had with a vaccine but perversely, that’s how you know it’s working well.I agree with @Joey that the modern era of budgeting in silos is horrid and leads to pennywise-pound-foolish decision making across many companies and public enterprises.
But prevention efforts are always a problem for our species — we collectively don’t think things can be that bad unless we experience it personally, and so the people who work extremely hard in the background to make sure disasters don’t happen are often ignored as being inconsequential.
Ian
My GP is prescribing Paxlovid for everyone over 45 at this point. It’s expensive but very much worth it. My grandfather had shingles, my father had shingles.
Kate
OK, you guys have convinced me. Tomorrow I will pass by my usual pharmacy and ask them to get me the first shot of Shingrix.
Ian
Perhaps by way of explanation why shingles is on everyone’s radar all of a sudden …
There is a link between getting covid and developing shingles.https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2022/08/16/If-youve-had-Covid-look-out-for-shingles.html
MarcG
“Reactivation of latent viruses has been linked to the dysregulation of the host immune response during acute SARS-CoV-2 infection, that is, by disabling the host type I interferon response via autoantibodies, resulting in decreased control of these latent pathogens.” (ref).
Paul
I also had shingles in the past few months and am in my early 40s. I was lucky as it was relatively small, but it hurt like hell (I never sought medical insight and just waited for it to subside). It has left scarring as well which is bound to hurt my beach modelling career.
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Kate
Another snowstorm is coming on the weekend, an alert already up on the Environment Canada site.
Basically, it’s January.
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Kate
The REM is running again after a Thursday morning outage blamed on an electrical problem.
Ian 19:10 on 2024-01-11 Permalink
Gangs involved with strip clubs? Next you’ll be telling me this is a problem we can’t solve with clowns OR hookers!
Kate 19:22 on 2024-01-11 Permalink
Have there ever been stripper clowns?
Ian 19:50 on 2024-01-11 Permalink
I have seen some adult Juggalo content but I’m not sure if that counts 😉