Best late-night bus

1. 356 (Atwater-Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue)

2. 365 (du Parc)

3. 363 (St-Laurent)

4. 371 (Décarie)

Honourable mentions: taxi, walk, Greyhound. >> All aboard the Chariot of Shame! Not only is a night bus cheaper than a cab, it's also a great place to spend quality time with other damned souls of the suburbs, sharing green-gilled Chumbawamba singalongs and magic-marker makeovers for those dumb enough to pass out first. Of the many Vomit Comets that criss-cross the starry lanes of Montreal after midnight, the West Island's route 356 came in as the most popular. Which tells us little other than that folks from that part of town are particularly wretched drunks.

1. Jewish General, Montreal General (tie)

2. Royal Victoria

3. Montreal Children's

4. St. Mary's

Honourable mentions: Sona, the NHL.

1. St-Laurent

2. Buona Notte

3. Globe

4. Jello

5. DiSalvio's

6. Wax Lounge

Honourable mentions: Airport, Beaver Club, Cafeteria, Claremont, Crescent St., Euro Deli, Exotica, Holt Renfrew, Le Cirque, Katsura, Milos, Ritz-Carlton, Shed Café, Sofa, Sona, Urban Outfitters, Westmount Square, on TV. >> With a local film scene that is now rivalling Toronto's for American studio film shoots, Montreal is a town just jammin' with celebs. Forget that tired old title Hollywood North. How about renaming our burg The Love Boat on Dry Land or Hollywood Squaresville. Last year's visiting celebs Marlon Brando, Nic Cage and Barney are being matched by this year's Ewan McGregor, kd lang, Jason Priestley, Ashley Judd, Dennis Rodman and Pierce Brosnan. Our readers overwhelmingly chose the city's swankiest/seediest boulevard, St-Laurent, as their numero uno choice for cruising the famous. Notably, the five runners-up consist of restos and lounges that are on or very near the Main.

1. Mont Royal

2. Old Port

3. In the metro

Honourable mentions: Ice storm emergency shelters, cars, cabs, elevators, movie theatres, graveyards on Mont Royal, my house. >> Really, this is hard to understand. Montreal is the most amazing place in the world for crass urban lust, with outdoor stairwells on every street, crooked alleys leading to hidden courtyards, and clubs filled with so many half-naked people you and your lover could start speaker-humping and no one would notice. Yet why do so many of us still seek out the mountain for some sort of primal, roughing-it-in-the-bush experience? Use your imaginations, people! Thankfully, some did. Among the more inventive answers: in the reclining seats on the VIA train to Toronto, the railroad tracks, your favorite Second Cup, any phone booth, any police station, the rides at La Ronde, the stairs at the Molson Centre, and--for the George Michael wannabe in us all--the washrooms at Concordia, Subway, Groove Society, Sky and others.

1. Bathroom/washroom

2. Second Cup

3. Bus/metro

Honourable mentions: Le Cirque, La Cité Gym, Concordia shuttle bus, Copacabana, Jello, La Cabane, Mediterraneo and Shed Café.

1. Plateau

2. NDG

3. Westmount

Honourable mentions: Mile End, St-Henri, Montreal West, Outremont, Côte-des-Neiges, Park Extension, Shaughnessy Village, McGill ghetto, Concordia ghetto, Royal Victoria Hospital, industrial park alongside the Lachine canal.

1. English is spoken here

2. The people are beautiful

Honourable mentions: The sex, DJ Mateo, spoken word scene, CIQC, Euro Deli, Mutt & Jeff Coiffure, Le Cirque Café et Desserts, Russian massage parlours, racism.

1. Cheap rent/living

2. Nightlife

3. Summer

4. Montreal women

5. Jazz Festival

6. Bagels

7. Restos

8. Smoked meat

Honourable mentions: Sex, sex clubs, Canal Indigo, ska scene, spoken word scene, Dollarama stores, pot delivered to your door, my Sony Playstation, I don't speak English, I like torture. >> One of our more observant survey respondents summed it up nicely: "It's bound to get better." How true. In Montreal, everyone seems to be on the road to nowhere: unemployed/underemployed/ underpaid, living on borrowed money and borrowed time. But on a macroeconomic scale, our wont of cash translates into an enticing bonanza: people gather in parks, on streets and other free places, they wear very little clothing, the nightlife and its attendant recreational substances are cheap and, for most, love/sex is the affordable pastime of choice. And somehow, despite all the thin wallets, everyone manages to look like a million bucks. We're all having the time of our lives, slacking the days away in style, and we stick around because "it's bound to get better." When it actually does get better, our heads are bound to explode.

1. Woodland & Highway 20

2. du Parc & des Pins

3. du Parc & Mont-Royal

4. Cavendish & Sherbrooke

Honourable mentions: Jacques-Cartier bridge off-ramp, Dorchester (sic) & University, Rachel & Coloniale, St-Hubert & Mont-Royal, Rockland circle, Pie-IX & Jean-Talon, Côte-des-Neiges & Jean-Talon, Décarie & Jean-Talon, Pierrefonds & Sources, French & English, McDonald's bathrooms, wherever Kenny is standing.

1. Raves

2. Coloured glasses

3. Federalism

Honourable mentions: baby blue clothing, body piercing, breakfast, anti-poverty strikes, '80s comeback, back to '70s, conspiracy theories, coke, cotton Lycra pants for men, crystal meth, death metal, disco, driving home sober, El Niño, funky nails, Gilles Duceppe, glitter, Grease, ice storm, Indian tank tops, Japanese everything, lap dancers, leg warmers, navel rings on pretty girls, New Beetle, noticeable bra straps under camisoles, pothole tire blowouts, S&M, streaking, sushi, talking about AIDS again, topless squeegee punks, track pants, wearing condoms for oral sex, publicly smoking weed, beating one's significant others in the guise of sex play.

1. Opening homes to other people

2. Kindness of friends and strangers in general

3. Help from the army

4. Volunteering

"Two hundred a day" was one person's response to this category. A host of surprising ice storm heroes cropped up here, from Oasis and Megadeth giving money to aid ice storm victims, to a certain man who played Bob Marley in a darkened coffee shop on Sherbrooke. Businesses like the Holiday Inn and Lux-O-Corps Massotherapy Centre were saluted for opening doors to the shower-needy, as well as Air Creebec for offering free flights to people wanting to get out of town. Zellers was lauded for selling hot water (*see also Ice Storm Gouger), and Réno Dépot for "keeping their prices low." CIQC was also highly praised for handling calls from people needing help and offering it.

1. Hydro-Québec, gas stations that raised prices (tie)

2. Ciné Express, WalMart (tie)

3. Candle merchants' markups

4. Zellers (for charging $5 for hot water*), The Gazette (for peddling "I Survived the Ice Storm" t-shirts) (tie) >> Honourable mentions: Battery and wood merchants in general, CJAD, bosses, pimps. Welcome back to the time of $20 flashlights, $5 candles, $11 AA batteries (a dépanneur in LaSalle apparently charged this much for just one), $5 for a piece of wood. A lot of individual businesses were singled out and slagged, but we couldn't confirm their gougery. Suffice to say, you know who they are. >> The Mirror phoned up Ciné Express (1926 Ste-Catherine W.) to find out what earned them such high marks on the gouger scale. A waitress there insisted they stayed open when everything else was closed, didn't raise prices, and only began serving coffee in smaller cups when they ran out of big ones. WalMart's a controversial one too: reports of battery price gouging there were heard, but a WalMart stock clerk wrote to the Mirror saying that the store donated $100,000 worth of goods to the Red Cross and helped out Hydro crews with warm underwear and socks.

1. The Neverendum

2. Pierre Bourque, Jean Charest moves to Quebec Liberals (tie)

3. Gilles Duceppe's hairnet, Louise Beaudoin's OLF (tie)

4. The St-Jean-Baptiste Society's proposal that French mastery be a condition of voting

5. Chrétien's off-mike comments about the seedy nature of American politics, the re-instatement of the Barnabé cops, Lucien Bouchard, Jacques Parizeau, the ice storm (tie)

Honourable mentions: Clinton's sexual proclivities, not immediately switching CJAD to CJFM during the ice storm, Vision Montreal councillor Robert Côté's proposal to ban garage sales. >> The votes this year weren't on individual gaffes so much as they were on embarrassing and semi-permanent conditions of life here in Montreal--the ever-looming Referendum, the OLF, Pierre Bourque, etc. And what about the country's highly-touted saviour? One respondent summed him up with a sort of Beckettian gloom: "Political gaffe of the year," he or she wrote, "is thinking Jean Charest will save the country." Call it a kind of existential hairnet, settled over us all.

1. Stop

2. The English Language. Daily.

3. Slow children

Honourable mentions: L. Berson & fils, Cosmos Famous Breakfast, Car Wash 75 cents, regular 52.9, Urban Outfitters, Toronto 460 km, Welcome to Ontario.

1. The Mirror Online (www.montrealmirror.com)

2. Studio XX (www.studioxx.org)

3. The Habs (www.thehabs.com, www.canadiens.com)

4. Total Net (www.total.net)

Honourable mentions: Playwrights' Workshop Montreal (www.playwrightsworkshop.org), Juicebox-514 Records (www.odysee.net/~tekno514/juicebox), Switch (www.switchmag.com), The Montreal Page (www.pagemontreal.qc.ca).

1. Date/sleep with/marry a French person

2. Move to France

3. Move to the East End

4. Go to school/French immersion classes

5. Get drunk and go for it

It seems the boudoir wins by a landslide. A French-speaking significant other is the tried-and-true way for Montreal anglos to pick up the lingo. Of course, "move to France" came in second. Do we detect a hint of resentment here? Not to fear, other voters suggested such highbrow reading material as Allô Police, French Archie comics and the Berlitz dictionary. A "Two Birds With One Stone" prize goes to the sparkplug who recommended "Bleu Nuit with closed captions."