Quote of the week

“If Mayor Tremblay did as much as I did in my borough, there wouldn’t be any problems left in Montreal.” —A modesty-challenged Ville-Marie borough mayor Benoît Labonté, announcing his candidacy for the city’s top job on Sunday.

Life match

Hey, are you of Afro-Caribbean descent? Got any extra bone marrow you feel like donating to one of your brothers, Emru Townsend, a 38-year-old former Mirror writer recently diagnosed with leukemia who, along with his wife, friends, and seven-year-old son, sure would be happy if you did?

Finding a suitable bone marrow donor is tough for anybody, but even tougher for people of African and Afro-Caribbean descent, because they’re so vastly underrepresented in bone marrow registries worldwide, with many Caribbean countries not maintaining registries in the first place. Nearly 85 per cent of the 227,000 potential donors in Canada’s bone marrow registry are Caucasian, so Townsend and his family are urgently calling on the Afro community to register with Héma-Québec (www.hema-quebec.qc.ca) or the Canadian Blood Services OneMatch Stem Cell and Marrow Network (www.onematch.ca).

“The registry needs to be diversified, and that will only happen if people are armed with the facts surrounding it. I don’t think that there would be less than 1150 potential donors in Canada who are black, if everyone knew about it,” according to Townsend’s sister Tamu.

All you need to do to register is fill out a form, provide a small blood sample or cheek swab, and yes, after that you could indeed wind up saving Townsend’s life, or one of the countless other people of African descent waiting in vain for a matching donor. For more information on Townsend’s plight, go to
www.heal-emru.com.

Sauveur shakes

If terms like “jibber” and “20-foot booter” mean anything to you, or if you’ve ever wondered what a few handrails would look like in the middle of a ski slope, you might want to head up to Mont St-Sauveur this weekend (Friday, April 4–Saturday, April 5) for the seventh annual Empire Shakedown snowboard contest.

The largest event of its kind in Canada, this year’s Shakedown promises $20,000 in prize money. It will differ from previous Shakedowns mainly in how spectators will watch it—from beside the obstacles, where they’ll see all the action, rather than from below, making it “much easier to understand the level of snowboarding that’s going down,” organizer Brendan O’Dowd explains.

On Friday night, riders including Chris Rotax, Keegan Valaika and Charles Reid will compete in a rail jam, hitting a “very creative” array of handrails that O’Dowd swears he can’t describe beforehand. During Saturday’s main event, the pros will hurl themselves off a 20-foot jump before contending with the rail set-up. And at Saturday’s after-party, to be held onsite, they’ll probably stumble around the base of the mountain.

“It’s kind of a good way to wrap up the season,” O’Dowd says of the weekend.

For more information, check out www.shakedown.ca.

by LUCAS WISENTHAL

Laughing with Al

What could be less funny than environmental devastation, global warming and impending planetary doom? Al Gore, maybe?

Environmentalist and former almost-president Gore will be in Montreal Saturday, April 5, along with a troupe of CanCon comedians to help laugh away those record-breaking-winter blues.

The event, to be held at Place des Arts (7:30 p.m., $85–$113, www.admission.com), will mark the end of a week of festivities to celebrate the launching of the Canadian arm of Gore’s latest venture, the Climate Project.

“Here in Canada, we get away with a lot because we’re seen as a bastion of sanity [compared with the U.S.],” says organizer Clayton Peters, whose brother, the comedian Russell Peters, will be hosting the gala. “But Canada is a sure-fire polluter.”

The Nobel Peace Prize winner will personally train 200 Canadians between April 4 and 6 to deliver seminars based on his award-winning PowerPoint-presentation-turned-film An Inconvenient Truth.

Russell Peters will share the stage with six other comedians, including Mark Critch of 22 Minutes fame. Also performing will be 13-year-old jazz diva Nikki Yanofsky, and the ubiquitous George Stroumboulopoulos.

For more info, see www.climateprojectcanada.org.

by MATT JONES

Reading
and rocking

Illiteracy’s no joke. It limits a person’s employment opportunities, ability to communicate, read traffic signs and understand emergency safety procedures and literature. Then there’re the embarrassing social occasions, like being unable to order from restaurant menus or passing on games of Scrabble.

According to the Reading Council for Literacy Advance in Montreal (RECLAIM), a non-profit organization providing adults in need with free English literacy training, 30 per cent of adults in Quebec struggle with varying degrees of illiteracy.

On Friday, April 4, you can help RECLAIM continue to fight against adult illiteracy by coming to the Barfly (4062-A St-Laurent) for Literacy Rocks, a concert fundraiser featuring the music of Ancient Rhymes, Megalove, Broken Hearted and Freelove Fenner. There will also be a raffle draw for a chance to win movie passes, gift certificates and other prizes.

“Besides being a lot of fun, we thought that a concert would be a great outreach opportunity,” says RECLAIM chair of public relations and fundraising committee Adrienne Smith. “It’s also a terrific way to celebrate Quebec’s Adult Learners’ Week,” which wraps up Friday, April 4.

The show starts at 5 p.m., $7 entry, $2 raffle tickets. For more info, see www.reclaimliteracy.ca and www.semaine.icea.qc.ca.

by STEVE ZYLBERGOLD

Rear-view mirror

13 YEARS AGO - APRIL 6-13, 1995

On the cover: Cecil Seaskull and Corpusse, for the first annual Montreal Independent Music Industry Awards (MiMi’s). Dan Webster, credited with coming up with the idea, says the awards “give [artists] recognition, it gives them something to aspire to, and it brings about a sense of community and a little more identity to a Montreal music scene.”
•“Who’s going to pay $15? I mean, it’s cheaper to go see the Melvins,” says Laverne’s P.J. Kennedy, about the MiMi’s cover charge.
•Despite a campus-wide ban on journalists, Mirror investigates the mood at Vanier College following a much publicized stabbing. “When people hear that you’re going to Vanier College now, they say you’re crazy,” says one student.
•The Street Seen column reports that “The mind-altering set has reached an all-time low,” with reports of people “in a desperate search for an eternal buzz, have gone off the deep end, resorting to sticking their heads in functioning microwaves in order to get high. Head fryers hold their fingers on lock-latches” to keep microwaves working.

Angel >> Vimy Ridge Day Next Wednesday, April 9, Canadians are supposed to observe Vimy Ridge Day, commemorating the Canadian-led WWI victory over the Huns and considered one of the country’s defining moments. But the Conservative government says it won’t lower flags to half-mast anymore, saying they’re going to abide by an advisory board’s recommendations to lower the flag only on Nov. 11 (another half-mast day casualty would be Dec. 6, the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women). This government already cancelled half-masts whenever a Canadian soldier is killed overseas, deflecting attention away from the Afghan war’s increasing toll.

Insect >> Filibusters All politicians can be childish, but for some reason, Conservatives seem more childish than others. On Monday night, Conservative members of the environment committee yakked long into the night in order to kibosh an NDP bill on new greenhouse gas reduction targets after the Kyoto Protocol expires. Environment Minister John Baird’s parliamentary secretary chose to read from the Conservatives’ “Turning the Corner” climate change initiative, itself widely panned by opposition parties and environmentalists. Liberal House Speaker Peter Milliken recently called for more civility in committee hearings, saying they are becoming anarchic and lawless. Not to mention childish.