Quote of the week:

"Individuals don't know where their ice scrapers, snow shovels, winter boots and hats are." - Environment Canada climatologist David Phillips, explaining the inexplicable chaos in Calgary and Toronto caused by the cities' first snowfall of the season, in Tuesday's National Post.

Roadsworth busted

The zipper on Parc above the interchange, the light switch on St-Laurent and St-Viateur, the vines at St-Urbain and St-Joseph; these are some of the unique signature pieces by Montreal stencil artist sensation Roadsworth. While widely praised for bringing some life onto Montreal's otherwise drab and potholed Plateau streets, Roadsworth's popularity didn't save him from being arrested last week by Montreal police.

The artist is laying low and is not speaking to the media, although he has spoken to well-known human rights lawyer Julius Grey. Luckily, Chris Hand, better known as Zeke of the eponymous St-Laurent gallery, is ready to act.

Hand, a longtime Roadsworth admirer, contacted the Mirror in a fury late last week with plans to get a charge-dropping campaign on the go. He has since written to several highly placed Canadian art figures urging them to write letters of support on Roadsworth's behalf. The reaction, he says, has been "supportive but cautious."

"The basic idea is to ask the cops very nicely and very politely to drop the damn charges," he says. He feels that Roadsworth's work puts the city on the art-world map and that the artist himself will "go down as the first Montreal stencil artist to do it right and to do it with a definitive style." » Patrick Lejtenyi

Rock against fascism

Local white supremacists may not be wearing their white-laced Doc Martens and bomber jackets in public as much as they used to, but they're still out there, says Alex Foster. The lead singer of the Montreal-based band In This Life and an outspoken critic of the white power movement says they've just traded their brutish image for something more polished and presentable.

"The new face of the extreme right is wearing a tie," the 29-year-old says. He's in a position to know. For several years Foster was a leading ideologue in the city's burgeoning white power movement, until he left it 10 years ago. He emerged later totally changed, dedicating his life to fighting the ideas he once held. This Saturday, Dec. 11, he'll be hosting the second Rock 'n' Rights show, where six bands, including his own, take to the stage on an anti-hate crusade, with all proceeds going to Amnesty International.

One of the topics Foster brings up is Project Schoolyard USA. The Minnesota-based white power music label Panzerfaust Records is distributing 100,000 CDs nationwide of "pro-White" music aimed at teens. After denouncing it, he says he received a threatening call on his cell phone from Minnesota, warning him to cease and desist. "If people in the U.S. are afraid of this, it shows we can have an impact," Foster says (coincidentally, Anthony Pierpont, Panzerfaust's co-owner, was arrested on Nov. 30 on drug-related charges).

Rock 'n' Rights, with Grim Skunk, In This Life and others, takes place this Saturday, Dec. 11, at Café Campus (57 Prince Arthur E.), $12 in advance, $15 at the door, 7 p.m. » Patrick Lejtenyi

Aquatic invaders
threaten river

The discovery this September of a single Chinese mitten crab muddling around our St. Lawrence River isn't necessarily a big deal in itself, but elsewhere such a find has preceded a disastrous influx of the invasive pest, Environment Canada warns.

"It's too early to judge whether we'll have an established population," says Yves de Lafontaine, an aquatic ecosystems analyst with Environment Canada, "but every case it's taken over, one individual crab was found a year for several years and then suddenly the population exploded." He notes that each year from 1992-1998, a single crab was found in London's Thames, but then suddenly, the crabs "took over the river."

The crab, which eats away at riverbanks, clogs water intake pipes and is considered too teensy-weensy to make for an enjoyable human snack, can trek 500 kilometres from its salt water spawning grounds and could easily inhabit our river. Aquatic biologists might be excused for being particularly crabby about the find, as they're already at wit's end with the ongoing round goby problem. The goby feed off other fishies' eggs and now threaten to wipe out the river's yellow perch population. Lafontaine says that about 70 per cent of all fish caught in Lake Erie are round gobys. The inedible fish is now rapidly colonizing the St. Lawrence as well. Unlike the Chinese mitten crab, which the Chinese have used as an aphrodisiac, the goby has no upside. "It's truly a pest, it has no fun uses," says Lafontaine. » Kristian Gravenor

REAR-VIEW MIRROR

14 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK
Dec. 6-Dec. 13, 1990

On the cover: Peter Falk, starring in Tune in Tomorrow…, a romantic comedy. He tells Martin Siberok that in high school, "I thought I'd be a spy in the CIA. It was the McCarthy era and I went to Washington, but couldn't get a job."

• Grey Nuns founder Marguerite d'Youville, who is about to become the first Canadian saint, was in fact a "slave owner who may have financed her religious career through the sale of alcohol to natives," writes Eleanor Brown, citing the research of Vancouver-based historian Howard Adams.

• Richard Stanley's dystopian sci-fi film Hardware is described as a "post-punk feast for those who grew up on a diet of comic books and thrash metal."

• "Desert City Radio is perhaps the best representation on records of [William S.] Burrough's apocalyptic, dystopian vision of a rotting, right-wing America," reads Andrew Jones's review.

• Miniature slinkies, the Leatherman multi-purpose toolkit, a zoetrope, Druidic runes and stretch velvet lingerie are some suggestions from the Mirror's annual Gift Guide.

Angel >> Saying no to the missile shield Former Canadian and American arms-control negotiators and the Union of Concerned Scientists warned Canada about joining the ballistic missile defence (BMD) shield this week, saying it will lead to the weaponization of space. It's not a new argument, but evidence suggests it bears repeating. Critics say that, far from providing purely defensive (and theoretical) capabilities, BDM technology can be effectively altered and used offensively - something the U.S. Air Force is already considering. Having already announced its doctrine of seizing the "high ground of space" and to "destroy adversary space capabilities," the Pentagon plans to test components for a space-based weapons system in 2006.
Insect >> The Parents Television Council The million-member group of conservative American TV watchers certainly have Federal Communications Commission chief Michael Powell's ear. The nine-year-old organization filed 99.86 per cent of all indecency complaints last year. That's 201,765 out of 202,032. They expanded their efforts this year, filing 99.9 per cent of the 442,899 complaints up to October (these figures exclude the Superbowl wardrobe malfunction, which generated half-a-million complaints, 65,000 of them from the PTC). Considering the recent tightening of Powell's ass, this relatively small slice of TV viewership seems to have an awful lot of sway over what is and isn't acceptable viewing.