Updates from March, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 21:35 on 2024-03-25 Permalink | Reply  

    The sports facilities at the Olympic stadium will be closed till April 2 following a fire.

     
    • Kate 20:31 on 2024-03-25 Permalink | Reply  

      The city has put up the southern part of the Îlot Voyageur up for sale, but with some pretty stringent strings attached.

       
      • Kate 15:49 on 2024-03-25 Permalink | Reply  

        The preliminary hearing has begun on Pierre Ny St‑Amand, who allegedly drove his bus into a daycare in Laval a year ago, killing two kids and injuring others.

         
        • Kate 10:52 on 2024-03-25 Permalink | Reply  

          24heures looks into the building on St‑Dominique completely destroyed by fire on Saturday morning. A mural on one side has also been lost.

           
          • Kate 10:01 on 2024-03-25 Permalink | Reply  

            Shots were fired at a parked car in Rivière‑des‑Prairies on Sunday night, but the man inside was not injured.

            A man was stabbed on Côte‑des‑Neiges later. It wasn’t fatal.

            A café-bar in Anjou was set on fire early Monday but put out by a passerby.

             
            • Blork 10:55 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

              Well I can think of one person who won’t be up for the “Arsonist of the Year” award.

            • JP 22:30 on 2024-03-26 Permalink

              That last story is a bit weird, the part about a passerby…is there something I should be reading between the lines or can we assume that’s what happened….

            • Kate 10:00 on 2024-03-27 Permalink

              I agree it seems odd. Most people, if we saw a fire starting in a business, we’d call 911, we’d hardly wade in there and try to put it out ourselves.

          • Kate 09:12 on 2024-03-25 Permalink | Reply  

            Bernard Drainville – there are times I think François Legault is actually a comedian, and has enjoyed the sheer chaos created by putting his most inept minister in charge of education – has changed up his orders for eclipse day and now says he wants kids kept inside school buildings and locked down so they can’t look at it.

            But many schools have already made arrangements to close for the day so parents can decide individually how to proceed.

            Update: Excellent Chapleau cartoon on the subject.

             
            • Myles 09:56 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

              Are Legault and Drainville medieval peasants or something? This panic over an eclipse is the strangest thing I’ve seen in a while.

            • Kate 10:08 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

              It’s got to be worries over legalities. They know that a teacher in charge of 30 kids isn’t going to be able to make them all use eclipse glasses throughout the entire eclipse, or stop all of them from looking directly at the sun.

              Anyway, locking them down is not new. In a thread last month about the eclipse, regular commenter Nicholas says his class was locked in during the partial eclipse of 1994.

            • bob 10:31 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

              When I was a kid long, long ago there was an eclipse one summer while I was at a day camp. Our counsellor was something of a science dude, so he used an old cardboard box and a sheet of paper to build us a camera obscura so we could watch it. All but two of us were instantly blinded for life. A girl in a different group caught fire and died.

            • Ian 10:34 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

              Well played, bob. genuine LOL.

            • walkerp 10:56 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

              This is like they are deliberately planning to re-enact Ray Bradbury’s painful short story “All Summer in a Day”.
              Or maybe they know they are screwed for the next election so just want to go out in a full on car crash.

            • EmilyG 11:45 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

              Keeping the kids in school later because the eclipse ends after 4 PM, is weird.

            • Kate 12:33 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

              walkerp, exactly what I wrote in a comment in February!

            • Nicholas 12:45 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

              Hahahahahahahahahaha only thing that would make this more perfect is if we had a province-wide curfew

            • GC 13:13 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

              walkerp, I wish I were as confident as you that they are screwed for the next election.

            • jeather 13:18 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

              How do they think the schools can just change their plans at the last minute? Even if the plan weren’t deranged (close the blinds and have the kids turn their desks?) a lot of parents have now made plans based on schools being closed, there are 8 school days left, including today.

            • Blork 17:43 on 2024-03-26 Permalink

              We chuckle at how stupid people would have to be to stare at the sun during an eclipse. But have you met people? They’re friggin stupid. Almost all of them!

              But seriously, it would be nice to know if this is a real threat or just an abstract theoretical one. A bit of Googling around reveals plenty of stories of people who harmed their vision during eclipses, but what kind of numbers are we looking at? Given that hundreds of millions of people have been in the path of solar eclipses over the past century, how many have been injured? A dozen? A thousand? Tens of thousands?

              I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, just that it’s frustrating to have these discussions when you don’t have any real data.

              And the internet doesn’t help much. Among other things it surfaced was a National Post article lamenting all the car deaths that are caused by people driving to places where they can see an eclipse. FFS, abstract enough for ya?

            • CE 21:22 on 2024-03-26 Permalink

              If you think the average person is stupid, remember that half the population is even dumber and there’s a 50% chance you are too.

            • Ian 08:17 on 2024-03-28 Permalink

              You have a 50% of being smarter, too ….

              Or maybe there’s a bunch of really out-there people skewing the average one way or the other …

              ..or maybe this is another tempest in a teapot our paternalistic overlords can’t figure out how to best mon-oncle through.

          • Kate 09:07 on 2024-03-25 Permalink | Reply  

            The South Shore has seen a rise in armed violence which a major crimes investigator in Longueuil blames on criminal elements moving off the island of Montreal onto his patch.

            (In a striking case of nominative determinism, this investigator’s name is Jean‑François Lapolice.)

             
            • Uatu 10:16 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

              Bonjour lapolice! Lol

            • Nicholas 12:43 on 2024-03-25 Permalink

              I’m sure his second career choice was typesetting.

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