by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Murder: Voice on the phone says the guy killed outside the west-end Peel Pub last Thursday had lured Lorenzo Fletcher outside his home on Vinet and murdered him in July. Ronald Smith Brooks met a similar fate in September at Campbell Park, killed because he was from "Uptown," as they call Côte-des-Neiges down in Little Burgundy. Dozens of locals have witnessed these and other cold-blooded murders in the last few years and haven't said a peep. Getting these people to take the stand should be an absolute priority. But Montreal is still relatively safe, assuming you're not a dope dealer. Our 50 murders a year is about the same as American cities like Hartford, Connecticut, which has about one-10th our population.

Dogs: Gail Hislop helps dogs in trouble but has never seen anything like what two Toronto skin/crackheads did to their dog before taking off back down the 401. The couple, living at 1280 St-Marc, got a cute little British bulldog which they fed table scraps in their pigsty apartment. Boyfriend regularly blew his top when puppy pooped on the floor. A couple of weeks later, the girl gave Hislop the malnourished pup, near death, covered in unmoistened gauze. The boyfriend, it is believed, doused the dog with boiling oil. "Even in the dim lights she looked blood red," says Hislop. The dog will survive the painful burn but faces a difficult, furless existence. Hislop, who moved here two years ago from Rouses Point, New York, can't believe the animal cruelty we can get away with here. "In New York, it's punishable by up to $5,000 in fines plus community work. Here's it's a $200 fine."

Riverscrapers: Every week almost a million cars crawl over the Jacques Cartier Bridge alone. We haven't built a bridge in almost 50 years. I say we build the world's first horizontal office tower over the St. Lawrence. The dual-purpose structure would measure 10 times the length of PVM and people would be able to drive over or in it.

Girls: Spotted on Bannantyne, three adolescent whitebread girls aggressively hogging the sidewalk hollering the chorus of Khia rap ditty: "My neck! My back! Lick my pussy! And my crack!" And just when you thought old-fashioned caroling was dead.

Desolation: You might reconsider your love for green spaces after seeing the evil forest across from the Lafleur's restaurant on the industrial strip of east-end Notre-Dame. Somebody walking a dog found the murdered body of a 21-year-old woman there last week. It's a scary Brothers Grimm place. Do not go.

Tracks: Trains might help suburbanites but the fenced-off tracks that carve up the city encourage many city dwellers to drive. Example: to walk the one block from lower NDG towards the rest of the neighbourhood requires pedestrians make a major detour to the piss-stained tunnel at Melrose or else over to the paint chipped underpass at Girouard. So they drive instead. The 150-yard stroll turns into a five-kilometre pollutionfest due to the CP's refusal to install level crossings over the tracks.

Update: Remember the case we wrote about in which the landlord made all the tenants into janitors and then fired them and ordered them out? The landlord's efforts failed. The landlord's case was recently tossed out of court.

Radio: Is it me or does Montreal radio mostly consist of bores, blabbermouth lunatics and corporate payola stations that insist on playing that godawful Sheryl Crow? My buddy Bernard DeNeeve, now in L.A., says radio is way better there, "except they play Fleetwood Mac so often you'd think Rumors came out last week."

Veterans: An old newspaper once mounted on the wall of the old Mountain Legion described five Montreal brothers killed in WWII. They lived in a house near my place. Ultimately they died defending a place that they'd never get to enjoy. It seems inconceivable. Behind those and many other doors of this city could have lived those old men, their unborn children and grandchildren. Instead these fearless soldiers died protecting us from highly unreasonable and heavily armed Germans. Next Tuesday, Nov. 11, is a good time to ponder this.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca