Quote of the week

“My wife is upset, my kids are crying, this is Hell.” —Sylvain, the father of Samuel, the seven-year-old boy seen in a YouTube video driving the family Honda CRV 40 kilometres an hour along a deserted North Shore road, in an LCN interview Tuesday morning. Sylvain asserts the deserted road posed no danger.

Good eats gets fest

Looking for a way to build your environmental street cred but don’t feel like going on an eco-tourist excursion around Quebec’s organic farms? One way to get the tastes and smells of the countryside without actually going there is to stop by the annual Fête Éco-Bio Paysanne, taking place Friday, Aug. 14-Sunday, Aug. 16 at the TOHU grounds (Jarry & Iberville). The “eco-responsible fair” attempts to bring the farm to the city, with 100 stalls offering samples of organic produce and green technology.

“Most kids don’t know where their carrots, potatoes and tomatoes come from,” says organizer Jean-François Demers. “Here you have the opportunity to meet the real producers making things on their own land. And if you find something you really like, you can actually go to these farms.”

Also present will be RECYC-ORDI, a company dedicated to raising awareness about the one type of garbage that’s been increasing in Canada in the last few years: computer crap, which creates 20–30,000 tonnes of junk each year. The company offers to pick up your crashed laptop, physically destroy your data, sort the plastics from the metals and send it all off to be re-used.

See tohu.ca for details.

MATT JONES

Bikes,
BBQ, flicks

Cycling enthusiast Jacques Gallant is organizing a second year of weekly screenings under the stars called Bike Movies in the Park! at undisclosed parks throughout the city, each night featuring a different bike-themed movie. This week’s offering is 1979’s Breaking Away.

“The principle is a bunch of people meeting in a park, biking for a while, stopping at a dep, biking some more, then ending up in another park where we’ll put up a screen and hang out on the grass,” says Gallant.

Any message about oil dependence or car culture or global warming? “Actually, there is no message,” he says. “It’s just about seeing movies I haven’t seen before.”

What Gallant is excited about for this Friday’s event is the barbecue bike. “We’re going to attach a giant oil drum in front of the bike, light it at the start of the ride, flip your sausages or burgers when we get to the dep and then have a picnic when we get to the park.” All BMITP events meet at Rachel and Berri at 9:30 p.m. except for the last one on Sept. 25, following the monthly Critical Mass.

Also, this year, BMITP teams up with the indie-short-heavy International Bicycle Film Festival, running next weekend from Aug. 14–16. See bicyclefilmfestival.com for details.

PATRICK LEJTENYI

Talking secrets

The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) is one of those trade negotiations that is far-reaching enough to provoke the ire of just about every kind of activist. Intended as a supplement to NAFTA, the SPP is a series of talks between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico that aim to streamline the three governments’ policies on trade, border control and the military. Though not much is publicly known about the decisions made in the talks, the 2008 federal budget found $29-million to allocate to meeting the priorities of the SPP.

The next round of negotiations is taking place this Aug. 9–10 in Guadalajara, Mexico. The Council of Canadians is using the opportunity to try to unmask the SPP.

“In fact, there have been many consultations, but who is being consulted are big corporations,” says Abdul Pirani from the council’s Montreal chapter. “There are 10 consultants from each country, mostly from the oil and gas industries and the big banks. They’re especially interested in opening up water to trade. There’s a plan to build a pipeline to transfer water from the Great Lakes to the U.S. Water is going to be the oil of the 21st century.”

For details, see canadians.org.

MATT JONES

Natives worldwide

This Sunday, Aug. 9, Amnesty International, in collaboration with Quebec Native Women, Wapikoni Mobile and the Montreal Botanical Gardens, will be hosting a series of activities to mark the International Day of the World’s Indigenous People.

“It’s a celebration of Native culture,” says Amnesty spokesperson Anne Sainte-Marie. “All day Sunday, we’ll be having presentations on indigenous people’s culture and spirituality, craft workshops for children, indigenous music and screenings of short films created by young Native people from across Quebec through Wapikoni Mobile, an organization that travels from reservation to reservation training Native youth to make their own films.”

Saint-Marie says she’s hopeful attendees will be keen to sign a petition Amnesty International will be passing around urging the Harper government to sign the International Declaration on the Rights of Native People. “Canada, which originally was very supportive of the declaration, has completely reversed their position and is now one of only three countries, along with the U.S. and Australia, yet to accept it.”

The action gets underway at 9:30 a.m. at the First Nations Garden of the Montreal Botanical Garden (metro Pie-IX), $13.50 for adults, $6.75 for kids aged five–17, $2 for children under five ).

For more details, go to amnistie.ca.

CHRIS BARRY

Rear-view mirror

11 YEARS AGO - AUG. 6–13, 1998

On the cover: A metalhead and his make-believe family, as the Mirror investigates the local death metal phenomenon. “Quebec is probably the centre in North America,” says one distributor. “Here and Milwaukee.”
• Insect: Atom bombs. “Today, 58 years [after Hiroshima], the bomb still sucks.”
•“I don’t even want to say how many keyboards I own, cuz it’s embarrassing,” says “fourth Beastie Boy” Money Mark. “I have, what, 60 or 70. But y’know, I can’t use them at the same time.”
•Anthony Michael Hall, in town shooting Eternal Revenge, says Will Smith wouldn’t kiss him in Six Degrees of Separation. “I was really ready to go for it,” he says. “As it turned out, we used a camera technique and faked it.”
•“The weak-ass production and endless array of ignorant rhymes makes for a colossal stinker,” reads the 4/10 review of Snoop Dogg’s The Game Is to Be Sold, Not to Be Told.
•Motion Picture Purgatory reviews Freaks (1932). Factoid: “Original nixed ending had freaks castrate Mr. Muscles!”

Angel >> The return of the F1 Love it or hate it, the premiere Eurotrash magnet will be returning to Montreal next summer, Formula One despot Bernie Ecclestone declared this week. And whether you dig dodging greasy Continentals bouncing down the Main with peroxide skanks on their arms or not, the event is a big money draw, which, following this year’s crappy tourist season, is just what the tourism industry needs. A reputed seven-year deal is in the works, although the mayor’s office, by press time, hadn’t confirmed it was a sure thing.

Insect >> Tanning beds Perhaps to some, looking orange and leathery is hot. But to other, more sensible people, it’s a flashing siren screaming “Future Cancer Victim.” Reporting in The Lancet Oncology medical journal recently, the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared tanning beds and sun lamps carcinogenic to humans, ranking them right up there with cigarettes, asbestos and plutonium. Tanning bed fans under 30 are especially at risk, having a 75 per cent greater chance of contracting melanoma. Regardless of this summer’s crap weather, here’s another reason to avoid them, if looking tacky isn’t its own deterrent.