Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Diesel Spill in eastend Sunocor plant (Montreal)

                                            This story has been updated. Click here to view our gallery for more photos from the scene.

MONTREAL – As efforts to contain a major oil spill into the St. Lawrence River continued Wednesday morning, the stench of diesel permeated the air around the Suncor refinery in Montreal East.

One worker, his face covered, is using a vacuum-like apparatus to remove the fuel from the water as oil the colour of molasses extends about 500 metres down the beach.

The spill also was being contained with booms and Suncor officials said the leak at the former Petro Canada refinery at 11701 Sherbrooke St. E. has been stopped.

But Environment officials and Suncor are still trying to assess the extent and danger of what firefighters described as a “major” spill of diesel fuel near the Suncor plant in an industrial area of Montreal East.

Suncor spokesperson Michael Southern told journalists the spilled material was a mix “of diesel fuel and water” that was noticed at about 10:30 Tuesday night.

“We don’t know how much leaked at this time, but we are in the process of containing it,” Southern said. He added the source of the leak was still to be determined by an investigation by Suncor officials.

The spill was reportedly extending half a kilometre wide in the river.

Montreal Fire Department chief of operations Benoit Fleury said there is no danger to the public.

Suncor officials and Environment Quebec officials are now in charge of the cleanup, Fleury added.

Fire officials said they were called to the corner of Marien and Notre Dame Sts. on Tuesday night where they noticed the presence and odour of the unidentified substance.

Firefighters were deployed in boats to determine the size, nature and origin of the spill while waiting for officials from Environment Canada and Environment Quebec to arrive at the scene.

Montreal Fire Department operations chief Francis Ruest said the spill was located near port and oil refinery facilities in the area.

“Right now, we have personnel in boats out there trying to assess the size of the spill,” he said.

More details to come.                                                  -------------------------------HF&RV-------------------

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

to shoot or not to shoot ------------------in the low 80's preferably

                             Seems the 'borrough' of Verdun has issued an ultimatum for Nuns Island Golf Course

MONTREAL - The borough of Verdun said Tuesday it intends to give Pierre Émond, operator of Golf Île des Soeurs, 90 days to conform with environmental regulations and other commitments - "failing which he will be liable to lose his entitlement to operate the golf course."

The nine-hole course, on Nuns' Island, had been opened in late July.

Among the points of contention, the borough said, protective netting installed to catch errant golf balls on the seventh hole encroaches "on the territory of a green corridor set up to ensure the passage of birds from the St. Lawrence River to the Bois St. Paul," a wooded area, with the eighth tee "definitely encroaching on the green corridor."

In addition, "a water retention pond installed along the eighth hole is connected directly to the storm sewer, without storing any water."

Émond also hasn't submitted a tee-time reservation policy that would give priority to borough residents with a valid Access Verdun card, a borough statement added.

"I can't tolerate a developer acting in such a brutal way, by always confronting us with a fait accompli," borough Mayor Claude Trudel said.

Émond wasn't immediately available for comment.


.........................HF&RV..........................

Gunman Dead after Shooting at U of Texas

                  AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) — A man killed himself after firing shots at the University of Texas on Tuesday but officials said they feared a second gunman was on the campus.

"This individual was carrying an automatic weapon, fired it briefly but did not harm anyone," university spokeswoman Rhonda Weldon said.

Austin police confirmed shots had been fired on the campus but gave no further details.

Weldon said the gunman shot himself to death on the sixth floor of the sprawling library complex but witnesses reported a second suspect in the area.

It seems the good news here is that the idiot doing the shooting is the only one dead....perfect. This university is the same one that we heard of the 'nut' shooting people from the bell tower,that had to be one of the first times I had ever heard of a nutbar shooting at a school, that was a big deal in thosse days.I wonder what possess's some fool to want to shoot innoncent students.(mind you the National Guard did it in OHIO)                       A Reuters correspondent visiting the university for an energy conference said buildings were still locked down and that alarms had sounded.

"I can hear helicopters overhead," Reuters correspondent Eileen O'Grady said.

The University of Texas was the scene of a mass shooting in August 1966 when Charles Whitman, a student and former Marine, barricaded himself inside the campus clock tower and fired his rifle at passersby, killing 14 people.

Whitman, who had killed his wife and his mother the night before, was shot dead by police

.........................................................................................................................................breaking news

;72 Summit Series ,decided by Paul Henderson 38 years ago today - YIKES

         Paul Henderson, a member of the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, became a Canadian sports legend on September 28, 1972. His goal, with 34 seconds remaining in the final game, lifted Canada to victory in the “Series of the Century”, against the Soviet Union.

Incredibly, Paul Henderson scored the winning goal in each of the last three games of this historic first series between the two superpowers of hockey.

That magical moment in Moscow is still considered the greatest in hockey history. In 1997, on the 25th Anniversary of The Goal, Paul was immortalized on a postage stamp issued by Canada Post and a silver coin by The Royal Canadian Mint.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Oh No ! Say it isn't So, -Quebec Corrupt..............thanks for the news flash. lol

            So Macleans thinks Quebec is the most corrupt province,...come on we are trying here in BC ,.......& how about Ontario their pretty good at thievery too........what about Alberta (paid off with Oil Dough).................that Quebec gets all the good headlines...lol

Marc Bellemare isn’t a particularly interesting man to look at, so you’d think the spectre of watching him sit behind a desk and answer questions for hours on end would have Quebecers switching the channel en masse. And yet, the province’s former justice minister has been must-see TV over the past few weeks, if only because of what has been flowing out of his mouth.

Bellemare, who has been testifying in an inquiry into the process by which judges are appointed in Quebec, has particularly bad memories of his brief stint in cabinet, from 2003 to 2004. The Liberal government, then as now under the leadership of Premier Jean Charest, was rife with collusion, graft and barely concealed favouritism, he says—the premier himself so beholden to Liberal party fundraisers that they had a say in which judges were appointed to the bench. “It happened in [Charest’s] office. He was relaxed, he served me a Perrier,” Bellemare testified. The two spoke about Franco Fava, a long-time Liberal fundraiser who, according to Bellemare, was lobbying for Marc Bisson (the son of another Liberal fundraiser) and Michel Simard to be promoted. “I said, ‘Who names the judges, me or Franco Fava?’ I was very annoyed. I found it unacceptable,” Bellemare recalls. He remembers Charest saying, “ ‘Franco is a personal friend. He’s an influential fundraiser for the party. We need men like this. We have to listen to them. If he says to nominate Bisson and Simard, nominate them.’ ”

Judicial selection may be a topic as dry as Bellemare’s own clipped monotone, yet the public inquiry currently under way has been a ratings success. It has veered into bizarro CSI territory, complete with testimony from an ink specialist who discerned that Bellemare had used at least two different pens when writing notes on a piece of cardboard. And despite his reputation as a bit of a crank, and the fact his supposedly airtight memory is prone to contradictions and convenient lapses, Quebecers believe Bellemare’s version of events over that of Jean Charest, the longest serving Quebec premier in 50 years—by as much as four to one, according to polls.

Part of the reason for this is the frankly disastrous state of Charest’s government. In the past two years, the government has lurched from one scandal to the next, from political financing to favouritism in the provincial daycare system to the matter of Charest’s own (long undisclosed) $75,000 stipend, paid to him by his own party, to corruption in the construction industry. Charest has stymied repeated opposition calls for an investigation into the latter, prompting many to wonder whether the Liberals, who have long-standing ties to Quebec’s construction companies, have something to hide. (Regardless, this much is true: it costs Quebec taxpayers roughly 30 per cent more to build a stretch of road than anywhere else in the country, according to Transport Canada figures.) Quebecers want to believe Bellemare, it seems, because what he says is closest to what they themselves believe about their government.

This slew of dodgy business is only the most recent in a long line of made-in-Quebec corruption that has affected the province’s political culture at every level. We all recall the sponsorship scandal, in which businessmen associated with the Liberal Party of Canada siphoned off roughly $100 million from a fund effectively designed to stamp the Canadian flag on all things Québécois, cost (or oversight) be damned. “I am deeply disturbed that such practices were allowed to happen,” wrote Auditor General Sheila Fraser in 2004. Fraser’s report and the subsequent commission by Justice John Gomery, which saw the testimony of Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, wreaked havoc on Canada’s natural governing party from which it has yet to recover.

MORE TO COME…

CLARIFICATION: The cover of last week’s magazine, with the headline “The Most Corrupt Province in Canada,” featured a photo-illustrated editorial cartoon depicting Bonhomme Carnaval carrying a briefcase stuffed with money. The cover has been criticized by representatives of the Carnaval de Québec, of which Bonhomme is a symbol.

While Maclean’s recognizes that Bonhomme is a symbol of the Carnaval, the character is also more widely recognized as a symbol of the province of Quebec. We used Bonhomme as a means of illustrating a story about the province’s political culture, and did not intend to disparage the Carnaval in any way. Maclean’s is a great supporter of both the Carnaval and of Quebec tourism. Our coverage of political issues in the province will do nothing to diminish that support.

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------HF&RV.........

            ....Hey baby tell us something we don't know,Quebec has always been corrupt & that's not about to change.......................HF&RV

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Rues and Ruelle (streets and lanes) Could easily be a Verdun Story Too

               We all grew up playing in the streets and lanes,those were the days of our youth,much history & many people have come and gone ,all with that same common denominator ,Streets & Lane ,regardless of where we lived in Montreal,all of it's (borroughs ,I hate that term) have the same type lanes and neighbourhood streets,albeit I suspect there were a lot more kids using them when we inhabited the areas.

        - Here is a story from todays Gazette titled,    "Rues and Ruelles"

THREE YEARS AGO, visual artist Loren Williams set out on a voyage of discovery of the Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood she and her family call home.

Her journey took her around the block and into a dozen families’ lives. And it all began with a photograph.

“Our neighbour gave me a photocopy she had of an old photo of a tiny restaurant that had once been on our street,” said Williams, who has lived with her husband and children on St. André St., in the Plateau’s south end, since 2001.

“On the front of it was written ‘Chez Lucienne, restaurant de quartier des années ’30 à ’60.’ I recognized it – that restaurant today is my husband’s drawing studio. We had no idea it had a past life.”

But it was the man in the photo that intrigued her the most.

“There’s a young guy with a camera, and I was told his name was Émile Garcia and that he lived in the area a long time – still did, in fact. So I just went and introduced myself to him,” Williams recalled.

“He had a fabulous memory of the neighbourhood. His father owned a dépanneur on the corner of Cherrier that’s now a bicycle store, then he left that and set up one a few doors away on the corner of Bousquet. Émile grew up delivering groceries for his dad and so he knew all the street numbers and all the people living there – the whole neighbourhood, really.”

Best of all for her, Garcia had been taking pictures all his life, and had preserved all the negatives and prints. As an artist who works with photos, Williams knew she had found a gold mine.

“He had a lot of photographs, so that’s when I got the idea. I thought it would be fun to scan the photographs and do something with them so everyone could see. That was really the beginning of the whole project.”

The project is called Laterna Magica, an installation of photos and lightboxes inspired by the history and residents of St. André and de Mentana Sts. For the next two weeks, 20 black-and-white photos donated by 13 families and blown up to different sizes are on display in windows and doorways in the alley, and are backlit at night. Another 100 photos from family albums are mounted on walls and fences up and down the two streets between Roy and Bousquet.

(For the vernissage that, rain permitting, was scheduled for last night – too late for our deadline – the show was also to feature audio clips taken from interviews with half a dozen participants. They were to be heard in a performance by local artist Christine Brault, dressed up as a red lantern and red veil and walking from site to site in the alleyway.)

The exhibition is being held in conjunction with Quebec’s annual Journées de la culture, a province-wide series of cultural events held on the last Friday of September and the weekend that follows. Supported by a federal grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, the project is also endorsed by the Écomusée du fier monde, a local museum of working-class life in south-central Montreal.

Using “precious images and rich testimonies,” Williams has put together a show that speaks volumes about the unique history of this part of Montreal, according to museum curator Éric Giroux.

“Unlike museums, which often present photographs or artifacts in isolation from their environment or the place they were used, Williams links old images to the very places they originated, thereby encouraging the start of a dialogue between the past and present of a very precise place,” Giroux writes in an appraisal accompanying the show.

The life of la ruelle – the alleyway – is special, he adds.

“As well as being a public passage, an alleyway is also a private space that neighbours share. We walk down it rather shyly, because we have the feeling we’re entering into the intimacy of the people who live there,” Giroux writes. Williams’s show allows us to get over our shyness, he added, making the experience unique and the artist’s work “of undeniable artistic and historic value.”

The show is dedicated to Garcia, who passed away this summer at age 83, having lived out his final year at a Mile End seniors’ home. Williams hasn’t forgotten his legacy. In fact, she’s carrying it on – in the street but, more important, in the alley, where the photos can be best appreciated: protected from the street noise, not drowned out by street lamps, and in a place that is more authentic, less retouched – the true face of the neighbourhood behind the facade.

“The alleyway is the holder of the secrets of the street, because it’s the last place to be renovated,” Williams explained. “You have all these traces of past functions: windows that are now bricked up, sheds that were torn down, who-knows-what was there before that. The alley has its own personality – a slightly unruly personality – very different from the front of the street.”

Pictures will be illuminated in doorways and windows, low down at alley level or up above where the light casts a wider glow. Some are displayed in the house of the family living there; others are at neighbours who’ve have lent their display spaces for people who’ve run out of theirs. A collection of small photos will be lit through holes in the backyard fence. The original 1945 photo of Garacia – discovered a few weeks after his death – will also be shown, as will a collection of old postcards of nearby Lafontaine Park and the broken pieces of a really old plate dug up in someone’s backyard when they were planting a bush.

That’s how Williams thinks of her exhibit: her name is on it, but it’s really a group show. “It’s a collective archive that’s shown in a bit of a higgledy-piggledy manner,” just like neighbourhood life, she said. “The photos are less posed than studio portraits and they’re displayed in unconventional places, here and there, using the space that’s available for the view.”

Months back, when she began to canvass her neighbours to see who’d be interested in participating, Williams was worried they’d think she was invading their privacy. Quite the opposite, it turned out. They love her project. Little wonder: it’s not just about her, it’s about them, and, more important, their relationship as neighbours.

“At first I thought ‘How am I going to convince an entire two blocks of people to give me their photographs and let me look through them all and put up the ones I like?’ But actually, there was so much enthusiasm – I had an amazing response.”

And she made fast friends. “The usual time it takes to meet someone, that time just collapses when you’re sharing something as precious as old family photographs. I feel like I’m the niece who has just come to visit, because we talk for hours. You just jump right in.”

One neighbour gave her a stack of deeds to the house. Another told of the old days when swans used to swim in the artificial lake of Lafontaine Park and how dangerous it was to go there after dark. Another told of motorcycle gangs disputing turf in the neighbourhood in the ’70s and ’80s. There were stories of well-known Quebec artists and musicians who have lived on St. André or Mentana: sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, singer-songwriters Jean Leloup and Plume Latraverse (Williams lives in his old house), painter Betty Goodwin.

Passing by down the alley last week, longtime resident André Laberge regaled Williams with an account of the time a boa constrictor got loose from the old Jardin des Merveilles zoo in the park.

“The Plateau has changed enormously since I was a boy,” Laberge said in the alley as Williams set up her show. “It used to be a very tough neighbourhood here, with all the gangs. There were lots of kids running around, and that was a big part of my life. It’s a history that should be told.”

His grandfather, Anatole Rivest, first set up shop on the block in 1901. He was a prosperous landlord – 65 rental properties in the neighbourhood. “So our family goes way back,” Laberge said. “That’s why I’m participating in this project, because it’s about my life and everyone else’s around here.”

Ironically, Laberge was in the process of moving out of the neighbourhood when Williams hailed him.

The Plateau has become too expensive to rent, he explained, so he’s moving south to Hochelaga-Maisonneuve – to a place by the river owned by a friend who, in another irony, lives off his rental income ... in the Plateau.

“The Plateau has this mystical reputation now, especially with the people who come here from France to live because they’ve read about it somewhere,” Laberge said. “Why? Why the Plateau? There are other neighbourhoods. I don’t know, I suppose it’s got something magical. That’s what keeps people coming.”

Unfortunately, all that new blood also makes memories of the old days thinner and thinner. All the more reason for the Williams’s memory project to exist, other neighbours said.

“It’s nice for us to get talked about as we really are, not just as the stereotypical petit bourgeois of the Plateau,” said France Plessis-Bélair, 61, who lives on Mentana St. in the house her late father, Jean, was born in 93 years ago. “We’re really just Mr. and Mrs. Everyman, not the nouveau riche and the bourgeois you might associate with this part of Montreal.”

Plessis-Bélair left the Plateau when she was 30 years old, only recently returning to live – happily so. “I had my little suburban kick: a little home, a little white fence and all the petty backyard jealousies that come with it,” she said. “Boy, was I unhappy! Twelve years in the suburbs, and all I ever thought about was coming back to the Plateau. I didn’t realize what I had here, the beauty here. It’s a more freethinking place, too. In the ’burbs, everyone imitates everyone else: a Tempo shelter in every driveway. Not here.”

The neighbourhood’s streets ring with history – and so do their names. St. André was the French hometown of the Robutel family, who owned a number of farms in Montreal in the late 17th century. Mentana was a village in Italy where French and papal soldiers defeated Garibaldi in 1867, the same year as Canadian Confederation. Bousquet is named after Constant Bousquet, a political prisoner in the 1837 Lower Canada Rebellion. And Roy was named after Marguerite Roy, wife of Jean-Marie Cadieux, the notary who, in 1834, was the first to organize lots in the area and name the streets.

Williams’s own background couldn’t be more far-flung from the neighbourhood and city she adopted. She grew up in the Kootenays, a large region extending to the U.S. border in southeastern B.C. In 1993, she moved to Quebec to learn French and get a fine-arts education at Concordia University, specializing in photography. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions here and in Ontario and Nova Scotia, as well as in Illinois. Other projects she’s working on include a series of photographs of underground rivers in Montreal, a series about moths and other insects, two works based on museum collections that focus on birds and bees, and a project to transform used books into pinhole cameras to take interior pictures at a public library.

But it’s the laneway project that’s – literally – closest to hearth and home. Williams considers Montreal her true home now, as do her husband, Randall Finnerty, a visual artist and animation technician at the National Film Board, and their two young sons.

“Before we moved into this house,” Williams said, “I noticed these pencil marks on a door frame that the owners had left; they’d been marking the height of their son as he grew. I told them how great I thought that was, that in a house you can see some of the traces of the previous owner.

“I suppose that was when I really started thinking about this project,” she added.

“Something accumulates in you at a subconscious level and then you finally realize it’s something you should act on. So I did.”

What: Laterna Magica, an installation by visual artist Loren Williams

When: Sept. 24 to Oct. 10. Illuminated photos from 7 p.m. to midnight.

Where: The laneway running north-south between St. André and de Mentana Sts., bounded by Roy and Bousquet Sts.

                   --------------------------------------HF&RV (Montreal too).........................Cheers !!.................

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Pub Crawl for Mordecai-------------how appropiate:

         In the subterranean Crescent St. bar that was one of Mordecai Richler's favourite haunts, one of his oldest friends last night gave a glimpse into the challenges Richler faced as a young writer.

Holding a sheet of paper with a single-spaced typed note on it, author William Weintraub read aloud from a letter Richler wrote to him in January 1954 while living and working in London.

"The book has slowed down on me," Weintraub read to dozens of people crammed into Ziggy's bar and eating Schwartz's smoked-meat sandwiches "These things happen. I know they happen, but each day to sit vacantly at the typewriter writing nothing, but still a prisoner of that typewriter. Each day like that is a special kind of hell."

Weintraub spoke at a "literary pub crawl" organized to raise money for McGill University's new Mordecai Richler Writer-in-Residence program. Starting next fall, McGill will have two writers-in-residence who will teach, give public lectures and readings, advise students and organize writing workshops. The program will eventually fund eight fellowships for graduate students as well.

Richler's son Noah said he was pleased McGill will split the writers-in-residence positions between fiction and non-fiction writers in a way that reflects modern Canada.

"You might have a novelist such as Rawi Haj, a wonderful Lebanese-Canadian novelist living here in Montreal, at the same time as perhaps a South Asian-Canadian political essayist," Richler said.

"So you don't to have that stubborn French-English thing going on. You can recognize Canada in all it's panoply, which is very exciting."

Last night's pub crawl revisited some of Richler's favourite places, beginning at Winnie's bar on CrescentSt. withthescreeningof part of a new documentary on Richler by Quebec journalist Francine Pelletier.

The crawl wound up at Le Mas des Oliviers, the Bishop St. restaurant where Richler was a customer for nearly 30 years.

Gazette columnist Bill Brownstein and editorial cartoonist Terry (Aislin) Mosher, as well as Toronto businessman and Giller Prize founder Jack Rabinovitch, were among those who remembered Richler last night.

"He had a very deep and passionate love for Montreal," said Rabinovitch, who recalled going to an event at Baron Byng High School with Richler, who was heckled by people in the crowd who called him an anti-Semite who made them look ridiculous.

"He told them, 'You're all wrong,' and he got down from the podium and sat at the table and he wouldn't move. He said, 'Nobody is going to kick me out of my school.' "

So far, $750,000 has been raised for the $2.5-million endowment fund. Last night's pub crawl and dinner were expected to collect $15,000, a university spokesman said

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Son of a Beach.....how'd I miss this story:

                  We here at Green Life try to be non-partisan, but when a party makes a fun promise, and it is something that environmental groups have been supporting for years, we want to let our readers know.

Projet Montréal leader Richard Bergeron and the party's candidate for mayor of Verdun borough Yannick Brosseau this morning presented their plan to open a sandy beach in Verdun along the St. Lawrence River.

Bergeron said that if elected, he would pull up the asphalt and concrete of the old marina in Verdun and put in a sandy beach so residents can easily go for a dip in the river.

 "People already swim where there are docks but that is not enough and it is not ideal for families. With the support of Verdun residents, we promise to make a real beach where children can play in the sand and go for a swim in the summertime."

Bergeron said the project would be a good way to revitalise the neighbourhood, especially between the de l'Eglise metro station and the Verdun Auditorium.

Bergeron said a Projet Montréal administration would also build a service bridge linking Ile des Soeurs to the rest of the Verdun Borough. That bridge, which would be closed to cars, would offer easy access for Ile des Soeurs residents to the new beach by bike or on foot, plus a reserved lane for buses and emergency vehicles.

Project Montréal is a new party so Bergeron is unlikely to be elected mayor in the Nov. 1st election (although his party's popularity has been shooting up of late due to allegations of corruption against members of the two leading parties). But Projet Montréal is expected to win a number of seats on city council and several borough councils. If so, let's hope they keep pushing for more beaches. We live on an island, after all, and the water is plenty clean enough for swimming!

                                  ...........HF&RV.........

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Verdun Condo

             The Montreal Gazette has a weekly article named 'shelter' where they review or visit someone's house / Condo & show us the updates etc etc ,.We've posted some before, but this particular one is in Verdun ( although I do not remember this street at all) Do you ? Rue de la Poudriere ???

Shelter

Shelter is a weekly series featuring a conversation with tenants or condo owners.

Occupants: Diego Creimer-Medina, 38, Julie-Audree Marcoux, sons Felix, 7, Gaspard, 2

Location: Rue de la Poudriere, in Verdun

Size: 1,450 sq. ft. on 2 floors

Bought for: $245,000 in 2009

Been there: one year

After living together in three other residences, Argentine-born Diego Creimer-Medina and Quebecker Julie-Audree Marcoux bought a split-level condo in an area of Verdun that started undergoing redevelopment in 1985. The terrain where a factory once stood was gradually transformed into elegant condos, townhouses and co-ops on winding tree-lined streets.

A two-floor walkup brings you to their door, which opens to an extremely high-ceilinged living room. Overhead, the upper- floor bedroom overlooks the living room.

That's quite a high ceiling.

Creimer-Medina: Seven-and-a-half metres. The three-panel bedroom window is almost three metres high.

Your living room furniture is eclectic but seems to match.

Creimer-Medina: It's a mix of IKEA, second-hand and some valuable pieces. The wooden, glass-panelled cabinet goes back to 1870. It's been fully refurbished. It belonged to Julie's great grandmother. That's the oldest piece we have. The chairs are 19th century -refurbished, too. All the rest is inexpensive stuff. But everything on the wall is original even if it's not particularly expensive. The elephant painting is from Uganda. The scroll is from Japan.

Marcoux: I bought it in a flea market in Japan. (Julie, a professional editor/ translator, lived in japan for five years and knows Japanese).

Creimer-Medina: We used to cover the table with an obi, the belt that goes around a kimono.

What are these small antique objects on the shelf?

Marcoux: This 19th century iron was my grandmom's. She used it to iron but also to make thin toast. It served for a while to hold doors ...

Creimer-Medina: The small scale for weighing letters belonged to my father and before that, to a post office in a little town in Argentina.

Was the kitchen always open to the living room like this, with a long narrow wooden bar-table?

Creimer-Medina: It was open but it was useless because it was only the width of the wall. Since there was not a lot of space in the kitchen to cook -and we cook every day - we needed an extra surface, so I made a bar out of pine wood with seven coats of varnish. I call this the 5-to-7 spot. Usually, guests with a glass of wine stand on one side and watch while we cook on the other.

The recessed kitchen lights create a pleasant effect.

Creimer-Medina: All the light sources are hidden. The worst light for creating any ambience comes from the ceiling. (Moving past a full bathroom and washer-dryer niche to one of two back rooms, where there's a child's bed, a crib and a closet, and a large, plastic playhouse.)

Creimer-Medina: We gave this room to the kids because we wanted to be upstairs. We'll put in bunk beds later so we can free space and so each can have a desk for school work. (The neighbouring guest room has a 1920s art deco desk with a computer and Julie's diplomas on the wall.)

Creimer-Medina: This room exits to steps leading downstairs to the garden where the kids play and we have a locker. The parking included with the condo is on the side. (Taking the stairs, we enter the master bedroom, full of light.)

Creimer-Medina: Here's the best view. You're overlooking the living room and outside. (The bedroom leads directly to a large terrace with tables and chairs, a barbecue, and two large potted shrubs.)

Creimer-Medina: We're on the terrace every day when it's not raining. Our apartment faces east. You can see the fireworks in the summer and also, when there are no leaves on the trees, the CBC building where I work.

How did you find this place?

Marcoux: Our agent called us the day it went on sale. We visited and bought it the next day. There were three other interested parties. Places here sell in 24 hours. Verdun still has good places that are comparatively low-priced.

What about local services?

Creimer-Medina: The Atwater market is a short walk -we use it a lot. They have excellent coffee. Metro stop Lasalle is at the corner. One reason we bought here was the metro. We wanted to get as close to downtown as our budget would allow. The metro and bike path are the two ways we get to work. We either drive Felix or he takes the schoolbus. The little one goes to daycare less than two kilometres

                                                                                                  HF&RV                                           

Remember traffic in the old days----

Traffic from the old days

 

 

 

 

 

 

                              .........................................HF&RV.....................................

I Don't Miss This ...Do You?

MONTREAL - Traffic pain this weekend doesn't end with the Champlain Bridge construction. Montreal motorists will face obstacles around Mount Royal, too, during Sunday's Grand Prix Cycliste de Montreal.

The Grand Prix will mainly affect the streets surrounding the mountain, some of which will also be closed Saturday. Bike paths along the race route will also be closed to non-participants. Parking at Mount Royal will not be available.

Park Ave. from Pine Ave. to Mont Royal Ave. W. will be closed Saturday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Côte Ste. Catherine Rd. from Park to Mont Royal will be closed starting Saturday at 7 a.m. until Sunday night at 10 p.m.

Sunday, roads including de la Tour, de la Polytechnique, and de la Rampe will close from 6 a.m. until 5:15 p.m. Camillien Houde Drive, Remembrance Rd., and a section of Côte des Neiges Rd. will close from 8 a.m. until 5:15 p.m.

Vincent d'Indy Ave., Edouard Montpetit Blvd., Gatineau Ave., Maréchal Ave. and Decelles Ave. will close from 11 a.m. until 5:15 p.m.

Road work on the Champlain Bridge will proceed as follows:

Only one lane will be open on the northbound side of the bridge, heading toward Montreal, between 10 p.m. Friday night and 5 a.m. Monday.

The southbound side of the bridge, heading to the South Shore, will use only two lanes between midnight Friday night and noon Sunday. Only one lane will be available along the Nuns' Island bridge in this direction.

Motorists may want to consider using the Victoria, Mercier or Jacques Cartier bridges instead.

For more details on the bridge construction, visit champlainbridge.ca

                                                                            ....................................................HF&RV.............................

A Taste of the 'Main' to Verdun ..............what ?

                                                                       CASA MANOLO

$$

Good bet

4436 Wellington St. (near Rielle St.)

Phone: 514-439-1119

Licensed: Yes

Credit cards: Cash or Interac

Wheelchair accessible: Yes

Vegetarian friendly: No

Open: Sun. and Mon. 5 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., Tues. and Wed. noon to 10 p.m., Thur. to Sat. noon to 11 p.m.

Price range: Appetizers $4.95-$8.95, mains $7.95-$17.95, desserts $5

If Verdun is perpetually "the next Plateau," as has been heralded for well over a decade, the presence of Portuguese restaurants, traditionally concentrated around St. Laurent Blvd., brings it another step closer. So if Casa Manolo feels familiar, that's because it's a typical grill in what until recently would have been considered an atypical location.

Enter the blue-walled space, and check all the boxes: rustic tablecloths, guitarra music, bottles of Super-Bock, sizzling chicken, meaty fries, hot sauce with basting brushes. It's not pushing Portuguese cooking forward, but it's making good use of its charcoal. Opened in January by Manolo Ferreira Costa, who credits his Madeiran mother with sharing her recipes and is helped by his aunt in the kitchen (it would be great to eventually see a few regional dishes here), the story of this Casa is very much the story of Manolo: he grew up on the Plateau before moving to Verdun.

It's the kind of place you'd be glad to have down the street, and the neighbourhood seems to be on-board. On a Tuesday night, Manolo's terrasse was packed, partly because it was steamy inside (but only slightly more so than the humidity outside). The advantage of the interior tables was the view of the long grill behind the tiled counter, where the multi-generational team was hard at work. The waitresses were enthusiastic and almost too energetic.

We started with some decent sardines, always a great catch on a few counts: they're sustainable, pleasantly oily, moist, and, well, they actually tasted like fish. Soft croquettes stuffed with beef or shrimp were easier to just pop into the mouth, and the clean frying oil suggested an attentiveness behind the scenes.

For main courses, we made like tourists and ordered two combination platters so we could tour as many of the offerings as possible in one sitting.

First, the duo of shrimp and squid. Both elements were standard yet somewhat surprising: the shrimp was generously doused in garlic, and the calamari was gently marinated for an extra layer of spiciness. This was presented as a single unit, trimmed of tentacles, nicely chewy. A small bowl of pan sauce, made on the spot (more attentiveness) with white wine, lemon juice and Portuguese olive oil, was good for dunking seafood or fries. These were the wet, dark, heavy kind -balatas being the yin to the yang of light, crisped bistro frites.

I liked everything on the mixed platter (a reasonable $12.95). It came with a small piece of chorizo, but really, this sausage was so salty that you wouldn't want a lot more -well, you would, but you'd be better not to. Especially when there's a pork filet waiting there -this one was also quite salty and could have used a tad less time. The cooks really went to town on blackening the skin of the chicken -it stood away from the meat and emitted a soft crunch of char that was almost audible as it was cut. It was rounded out with fries and the usual Portuguese salad -pale, crunchy lettuce, tomato and cuke in astringent vinaigrette -that inevitably gets soaked in meaty juices.

For dessert, there was a dense pudding made with three kinds of chocolate, and instead of the usual natas, we had a flan with vanilla and lemon -ending with something cool, smooth and eggy. That was the way to go after a meal of hot, sharp, spicy, salty -and summery -things.


                                                                                                        ....................................HF&RV......................

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Point Saint Charles man stabbed in bar -------no one saw anything,of course

                            MONTREAL - A 26-year-old man was in critical condition in a hospital Thursday morning after he was stabbed inside the Griffin Pub in Point St. Charles.

Montreal police Constable Yannick Ouimet said witnesses saw the man enter the bar on Centre St. about 2:30 a.m. and they saw him leave but nobody saw him get stabbed.

“We have no suspects,” Ouimet said, adding that the incident was being considered an attempted murder.

Montreal police Constable Yannick Paradis said the victim was stabbed in the throat and that the weapon had not been found.

“The man was seen going toward the back of the establishment where the bathrooms are,” Paradis said. “When he came out he was visibly wounded in the upper body.”

The victim, who is known to police and has some type of criminal record – although Paradis could not provide details – stumbled out and collapsed on the sidewalk near Shearer St.

                                                                                                              ---------------------HF&RV--------------

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Metro '77 More Montreal Metro Stations ...these are cool .

                       Montreal's Metro stations are at the very least stylish, I've been in a few different subway systems & these (for their day) were built with style,& not just a dingy feel to them,being brightly lit, and sporting different artwork ,...These pics are from the 1977ish era, with two others more recent......

Friday, September 3, 2010

Metro '72 Nothing Cool about this one

                       This is the aftermath of an accident in Montreal's Metro system ( one life lost) and lots of damage......I believe the photo's are from Jan '72 but i think the accident was in the previous Decmber 9th.???   I will find the newspaper story & post it soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                 .........................HF&RV......................

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Metro 66.............seemed cool to us,.just not inside the cars..lol

In 1966 ,with much anticipation we awaited the 'new Metro subway sytem'    too cool ,travel underground and all over Montreal.....Wow , neat stuff.....

Yikes !! Another Oil Rig Explosion in the Gulf ( deja-vu all over again)

                          There has been another explosion on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

A Miner Energy platford 80 miles off the coact of Louisiana was rocked by an explosion on Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard has said, according to Bloomberg News.

CNN reports that all 13 people on board the rig have been accounted for, with only one suffering injuries. Rescue helicopters were en route to the scene.

There is no word if any oil is leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, but a Coast Guard spokesman on CNN said the rig was not believed to have been producing oil.