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 OH JOY, WINTER'S HERE: St-Laurent and Pins are snowed under Monday afternoon shortly after the first big snowfall of the season. Montreal was on the receiving end of between 15 and 20 centimetres of snow. — Photo by Rachel Granofsky |
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Quote of the week: “I’m not losing business, I’m gaining business from people who used to stay away because of the smoking.” — St-Lazare bar owner Richard Chartrand, after a patron ejected for rowdy behaviour, including smoking, fired a bullet through the bar’s door early Monday morning. No one was injured, and one man was arrested. Plateau Speeding It’s been a year since le Comité circulation du Plateau Mont-Royal, in conjunction with la Maison d’Aurore, launched Maximum 30, their campaign aimed at reducing speed limits for cars passing through the small side streets of the Plateau and other downtown neighbourhoods. And while the group reports some modest progress, Maison d’Aurore spokesperson Lorraine Decelles says cars are still regularly spotted racing up and down otherwise quiet Plateau streets, blissfully unaware or uncaring that these roads were originally designed for the residents living alongside them, and not as motorways for suburbanites seeking a faster route home to Laval. I
The men wrestle with trauma, addiction and poverty while telling stories, laughing and creating remarkable murals on the walls of a tiny apartment. Also remarkable is that they helped edit the film, having final say over how they were portrayed. “If anything comes from this film, it is a world view, an outlook of the mind that the Inuit seemed to have retained despite hardships,” he says. “How can Canada move forward with the challenges it faces in a way that draws on this aboriginal wisdom? For me, that would be the most
satisfying outcome, to re-orient people’s thoughts, not only towards
two guys living in the street, but towards their culture within our own
culture.” Be Smile will be shown for the first time Monday, Jan. 22 at
7:30 p.m., in Concordia’s Rm H-110 (1455 de Maisonneuve W.), as part of
the Cinema Politica series. Discussion follows. View the trailer
at www.cinemapolitica.org. Teenage Frigo bash Having been in the business for 15 years now, the Frigo Vert
has
proved it has the ability to stay open through good and lean
times—a testament to the Concordia-based non-profit vegetarian coop’s
good management and quality of food, says Frigo worker
Ambrose Kirby. Only the Frigo Vert, which started as a buying
group for bulk foods, has no management,
really—it is run as a
worker’s collective.
Sweat for Malawi Some people like to sweat. And
some people like to do charity work.
For those of you who like to do both,
this Saturday, Jan. 20, the Montreal
chapter of Dignitas International,
a Canadian medical humanitarian
organization headed by Dr.
James Orbinski, the former head of
Doctors Without Borders, will be
holding a stationary bike-a-thon at
the McGill gymnasium to raise
some much-needed dough for their
Malawi-based field project, and a
little awareness about the raging
HIV pandemic in southern Africa.
REAR-VIEW MIRROR
• A story from the Pacific News Service examines the influence of Kuwaiti petrodollars in the West. “Years of prudent investment of those petrodollars [between $100-billion to $250-billion U.S. into the American and British economies] have bought the [Kuwaiti royal family] al-Sabah extensive political influence in Washington and elsewhere.” • “It took three listens to warm up to If There Was a Way,” reads Eleanor Brown’s review of Dwight Yoakam’s latest album. “The whine is not quite so nasal, the stripped-down hillbilly sound has a bit more swing, the honky tonk is a bit duller-edged, but it’s a respectable album, given perhaps unreasonable expectations of excellence.” • Marian MacNair writes about tai chi in the Mirror’s Fitness supplement. “Self-defence is not the goal but one of the results,” says one master.
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On
the cover: The Kids in the Hall,
whose CBC-TV show is being described
as “the future of comedy.” “We only take
that stuff seriously when we’re drunk,”
says troupe member Mark McKinney. “Then we regret it.” 
Angel
>> Protecting weired creatures A
new
conservation
program by the Zoological Society of London
is trying to save the world’s strange, unusual
and endangered species from becoming mere odd
memories. The politely-named Evolutionarily Distinct
and Globally Endangered (EDGE) project is to
encompass animals that have few close relatives, are
genetically distinct and face extinction—animals
like the long-beaked echidna, the Bactrian camel, the Hispaniolan
solenodon, the golden-rumped elephant shrew and the Slender loris
(pictured). Many EDGE animals aren’t protected under existing
conservation
projects, and although some 564 species fall under the new definition,
the project will focus on protecting 10 “focal species” a year. Many
of the species are threatened by human activity.
Insect
>> Same old, same old in the war on drugs A
new report to be
published in the HIV/AIDS Policy and Law Review excoriates the federal
government’s continued get-tough policy of failure regarding illegal
drugs. By emphasizing law enforcement—a tactic that, pursued by
itself, is wasteful, useless and even harmful—and ignoring treatment,
prevention and education, the Conservatives are going to continue years
of frustrating imbalance that has so far yielded
no significant reduction in the amount of drugs
available on Canadian streets, and has done
little to help addicts recover their lives. Law
enforcement, according to the report, consumed
73 per cent of the national drug strategy’s
$245-million budget, with no demonstrated impact on drugs consumed. |
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