Quote of the week:

“He should have looked up and he should have raised a red flag.” —McGill engineering prof Saeed Mirza, on the Transport Québec employee who noticed structural damage to the Autoroute 19 overpass an hour before it collapsed on Saturday, killing five.

Arts get hotspots

Île Sans Fil, the non-profit that brought Montrealers free wireless routers, is launching an art distribution service which the group promises will change “the way Montrealers interact with local artists.”

Hub d’Artistes Locaux (HAL) are hard-drive jukeboxes that are being installed in locations served by the ISF network. Michael Lenczner, ISF project coordinator, says 13 have been installed thus far. The content on HAL is provided for now by ISF partners CUTV, Concordia’s student-run TV station, and UQÀM’s radio station CHOQ.FM.

“[HAL] will encourage citizens to discover the creators among us,” says Lenczner. “It’s a cultural infrastructure. Technology like VCRs and cable have broken down boundaries, and we’re using HAL to make local connections,” he says.

The video and audio content provided by HAL is of high quality because it is streaming, says Lenczner, and is provided on a “geo-locative basis”—each HAL will have content that relates to the hotspot, for example the café or park where it is located.

The launch will take place at Sala Rossa (4848 St-Laurent) on Monday, Oct. 9, featuring film screenings and Afrobeat group Gogojungle. Cover is $3, call e-mail jason@geek4hire.ca for more info. —Samer Elatrash

Welfare reform goes on the road

Fighting for a cause often means taking it to the streets. Next week, those streets become provincial highways, as a group of people from different regions of Quebec are expected to march from Montreal to Ottawa in an attempt to change unemployment insurance laws.

“There have been too many barriers for too long, and too many people are in need of welfare, and are being denied the right to it,” says Pierre Céré, of the Conseil national des chômeurs et chômeuses, which is organizing the protest.

The march begins on Wednesday, Oct. 11 in front of the unemployment office (1001 de Maisonneuve E.) in downtown Montreal, with the final destination being Parliament Hill on Wednesday, Oct. 18. En route, public assemblies will take place in four towns—Huntington, Papineauville, Buckingham and Hull—to generate press and solidarity outside of Montreal.

Quebec has the highest unemployment rate outside of the Maritime provinces, and the CNC hopes to improve the criteria for eligibility, the duration of coverage and the rate of remuneration. —Ben Barna

RIP Myron Galloway

Actor, playwright, and critic extraordinaire Myron Galloway died Sept. 28 from lung cancer at the age of 85.

The Halifax-born Galloway had been a part of Montreal’s theatre scene since the ’50s, when he formed the city’s first professional theatre company, the Script Theatre. He even wrote their first play, Further Than Laughter, which kicked off their 1955 season.

But Galloway will probably be best remembered for his acerbic wit and fine critical writing, which appeared in the Montreal Star from 1973-1979, when the city’s best English-language daily went under. Galloway wrote knowledgeably and enthusiastically about theatre and dance, and also developed the first arts journalism course to be taught at Concordia’s journalism department. In more recent years, Galloway wrote for the Suburban, turning over hundreds of film and theatre articles.

But for those of us who knew the kind and generous Galloway—and I must have attended hundreds of press screenings with him over the years—he will be remembered for his incredibly biting, bitchy, campy sense of humour. Galloway had a dry delivery perfectly suited to the gay sensibility of Noel Coward. He made huge contributions to this city’s cultural scene and will be sorely missed. —Matthew Hays

Online dating not pervy

Several states in the U.S. are mulling laws to introduce background checks on people registered on dating sites. But according to Brandee Diner, who will be running a six-week workshop on Internet dating starting next week, hooking up online is no less safe than whisking home a stranger you just met at a bar.

Safety, says Diner, is probably the biggest concern attached to online dating. “I always hear people are concerned that meeting people online is unsafe,” she says. “But it’s no different than meeting someone on a street or at a bar. There’s always the moment when you’re faced with a stranger, deciding whether you want to interact with them.”

What about the stigma that people go online because they weren’t well endowed by Fate? “It’s less and less,” says Diner. “When I first started, I wouldn’t tell my friends I’m online dating. Now I’m teaching a course on it.”

Starting mid-October, Diner will be giving a six-week long course on online dating. The workshops cover safety tips, finding the right Web sites, and how to write an alluring (yet not dishonest) profile. To register, call 845-8697 or see joytoyz.com/EN/index_ws.html. —Samer Elatrash

REAR-VIEW MIRROR

15 YEARS AGO
Oct. 3–10, 1991

On the cover: Québécois actor and Black Robe lead Lothaire Bluteau, in which he plays a Jesuit bent on converting “the savages.” “I’ve always been interested in people who are so totally convinced they are right,” he says. “Sometimes I experience an anxiety attack just thinking about such people.”

• Kahnawake band council member Billy Two Rivers, who plays an Algonquin chief and served as a Mohawk dialogue consultant, is interviewed in a sidebar. He felt there were problems with Brian Moore’s novel, on which the film is based. “Our concerns were that native people were being depicted as cannibalistic, extremely cruel and unsanitary,” he says. “Our people tell us orally that the cruelties were learnt from the Europeans.”

• Thirty-five people from the Festival internationale de nouvelle danse sign a letter of protest regarding Hydro-Québec’s high-profile sponsorship due to the utility’s Great Whale project.

• “I have a really strong relationship, a three-way thing between the amp and my brain and the guitar,” says the Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood.

Angel >> The Dawson College gun control coalition A group of teachers and students at the downtown CEGEP announced earlier this week that they intend to lobby the federal government to come up with stricter gun control in the wake of Kimveer Gill’s Sept. 13 rampage. With the Harper government vowing to kill the troubled and mismanaged gun registry—itself borne out of the Dec. 6, 1989 École Polytechnique massacre—gun control is a hot button issue, and one the Conservatives don’t seem too keen on pushing. Nevertheless, the coalition has started a letter-writing campaign to members of Parliament, and is endorsed by the Dawson teachers’ and students’ unions as well as the national Coalition for Gun Control. Meanwhile, on Monday night, the Plateau borough council unanimously endorsed a motion calling on the feds to enact stricter gun control measures.
Insect >> Rona Ambrose’s hemming and hawing The Conservatives pandered yet more to their Western base this week and last when federal Environment Minister Rona Ambrose met with car and oil industry execs to discuss Canada’s still-nebulous green action plan. So far, it looks like the feds may target auto emissions by adopting California’s stringent standards after 2010—which would in itself be laudable, if it were backed by other reduction targets. Despite some tough talk last week, however, the Alberta oil patch looks like it’ll be getting a free pass, with Ambrose saying there are no plans to introduce a hard cap on emissions.