moving notice

Visit my new blog: Metropolitan News.

goodbye (again) facebook

Steve Faguy has a story in today’s Gazette (and more on his blog) about how difficult Facebook makes it for users to extricate themselves from the “social-networking” site. It’s about Montrealer Steven Mansour, who has documented his efforts to delete his personal information from Facebook’s database. Why anybody would put all that personal information on [...]

st. paddy’s day “too english”

I had a story in today’s paper about complaints by a new sovereignist group, the Réseau de Résistance du Québécois, that Montreal’s St. Patrick’s day parade is too English. The RRQ plans to crash take part in the parade even though organizers say the group is not authorized. RRQ members will be distributing leaflets and waving [...]

reinventing the chain

 
It’s a first for me: a follow to a story that has appeared in the Lee Valley Tools newsletter and on the Home Improvement Show with Jon Eakes show on CJAD. But this school project was too cool to pass up. Here’s the top of the story:
Reinventing the wheel
Teen builds fully functional bicycle made entirely of wood – even [...]

speak what

La Presse columnist Rima Elkouri has a column today with a different twist on the recent language dust-up. She interviewed to Marco Micone, an Italian-born Montreal writer. He has an interesting take on immigrants in Quebec and how statistics are being manipulated. More about Micone here (a bio) and here (a description of his poem, Speak [...]

lost (and found?) in translation

It’s amazing to me that after so many years of co-existing in Quebec, anglos and francos are still involved in a “dialogue de sourds” when it comes to language issues. At least, it’s that way in much of the news coverage and political discourse. Overall in day-to-day life (I think) most people get along quite [...]

mea culpa

I find it annoying when people send me emails containing urban legends even though a quick Google search would have set them straight, saving everybody time and bandwidth. So I should have known better than to write about something without checking the facts first.
Last month, I repeated something I had read online about a way [...]

the mcfanny family singers

I recently met Danny McFanny or was it Curly McFanny? I can’t tell them apart sometimes. They’re both members of the McFanny Family Singers, a little-known local group with four CDs under their belts. 
Among my family’s favourite McFanny songs (these are direct links to the MP3s; save them on your desktop, then click to listen) [...]

franco comme moi

I had a piece in today’s paper about my personal undercover language investigation. I was initially going to write it as a blog item but it turned into a feature for the paper.
Here’s the top of it:
Speaking French in anglo ‘hoods
‘Francophone’ goes on shopping spree
ANDY RIGA, The Gazette
In Quebec’s long, tumultuous history of language squabbles, [...]

a project for the abandoned seville block?

 
(More Allen McInnis/Gazette pictures here.)
In October, I wrote about the old Seville Theatre and the abandoned Ste. Catherine St. West block it sits on. I also posted some comments from readers. 
Well, the theatre is in the news again. I had a story in today’s Gazette about work being done there this week. Since the owner (Claridge Properties Ltd.) isn’t talking, it’s unclear [...]

just what we needed: another reaonsable-accommodation debate

On the final day of the last provincial election, I mused in my campaign column about whether Mario Dumont and “the ADQ (would) have to declare as an election expense the Journal de Montréal’s sensational reasonable-accommodation exposés.”
This week, the Journal set its sights on the scourge of unilingual anglos working in downtown stores, and this [...]

a simple idea for montreal commuter trains

I don’t want to be a party-pooper but shouldn’t the Agence Métropolitaine de Montréal figure out how to open and close doors on its current commuter trains before it 1) buys a bunch of new train cars; and 2) muses about a grandiose train-tram link between Montreal, Trudeau airport in Dorval, and the far [...]

montreal parking anarchy/revenge

UPDATE: I CORRECTED THIS ERRONEOUS POSTING HERE…

I’m a big fan of revenge (see previous posts here). But a site recently featured on Montreal City Weblogseems extreme. It pointed to a local website encouraging Montrealers to seek revenge against parking officials, SUV drivers, parking-spot thieves and other ne’er-do-wells by sabotaging their parking meters. The idea is [...]

ah, that explains it

Last Friday, while working on a story about snow removal after Montreal’s first big storm, I called the opposition Vision Montreal Party to get their take on the city’s progress (or lack thereof). They offered up their snow point person of the day – Mary Deros, councillor for Park Extension.
I was expecting complaints; they are [...]

protection for quebec drivers

Today, an association that represents Quebec snowmobile users (the Association des motoneigistes du Québec) announced that it’s testing the AirBag Hélite jacket, made by a Belgian company.
The association says the jacket (initially targeted at motorcyclists) may help save snowmobilers’ lives by protecting them when they crash, or fall or are ejected from their vehicles. [...]

remembering the seville in the 1950s

Can anyone help this reader (reacting to this article I wrote about the Seville Theatre) who frequented the place in the 1950s and is looking for a comprehensive list of acts that played there?

Andy,
great article on the Seville – brought back wonderful memories
i’m 70 and spent the greater part of the early 50’s [...]

spacing montreal on the seville

Chris DeWolf, on the excellent Spacing Montreal blog, mentions my Seville story in this post. An excerpt:
One thing that seems clear from the Gazette story is that the Seville block’s ownership is as much a problem as it is a solution. For years, ownership of the block has been centralized under Claridge, which has done [...]

students revive a block of ste. catherine

Here’s an email (in response to this article I wrote about the Seville Theatre block of Ste. Catherine St. W.) from a reader who works near Concordia’s new downtown buildings
I cannot resist commenting on your piece about the black hole downtown…although my comment is not about that block but about the blocks between St. Mathieu [...]

the usual suspects and the seville

Here’s an email from a reader with a complaint about “usual suspects” being quoted in my article about the Seville Theatre…
Dear Andy:
I enjoyed very much your article on the Seville block. I am writing to you because underneath the articles surface I felt a questioning of the urban development framework the Gazette uses, that perhaps [...]

missed opportunities at the seville

Here’s an email from a reader (in response to my article about the Seville Theatre) who has some background on what happened to the Seville in the 1980s and early 1990s…
Andy
Thank you for a great article.
I was a founding member of what became Rocky Horror in Montreal, way back when, and actually moved downtown to [...]

ste. catherine st. w.’s ghost block

I have a story in today’s Gazette about the crumbling Seville Theatre and the ghost block it sits on. Here’s the top of the article:
The outer limits of downtown
Andy Riga, The Gazette
The strip of Ste. Catherine St. W. was once alive with nightlife, full of Montrealers heading for Canadiens games at the Forum, movies [...]

montreal.dumb

The city’s website has long been an impenetrable mess, despite the striking, colourful cityscapes that recently started gracing its front page. I just stumbled upon more evidence the city doesn’t get the Internet.
I thought I’d save some time by paying a parking ticket online only to learn the city charges a $1.50 “administrative fee” for [...]

toronto vs. montreal: a youtube attack ad

let this be a lesson to me

There is a lesson here somewhere.
After all my complaining about evil motorists (myself excepted) and the dangers of not having bike paths, guess who had a bike accident of his own making — on a bike path.
There I was happily riding along on de Maisonneuve Blvd. on Friday after work. I had just passed the [...]

talking to myself in two places at once

 
I just set up a second blog. This one is about the falaise St. Jacques. Take a look here.

save the architecture, spare us the smoked meat

A group called Art Déco Montreal wants to save the Ben’s building. Tomorrow (June 14) at noon, they’re having a demo outside the landmark restaurant at de Maisonneuve and Metcalfe. It closed in December during a strike.
Back in the 1980s when I worked at a newsstand at Peel and Ste. Catherine, I used to enjoy [...]

the case of the missing bike path

While doing some research on another topic today, I think I figured out why that dangerous 400-metre-long bike-path gap continues to exist on de Maisonneuve Blvd., between N.D.G. and Westmount.
The city is expecting the new McGill super-hospital project to connect the two paths. The problem is a borough urban-planning committee doesn’t like the plan (page [...]

bikes: vital appendages in montreal

Barrie Hardymon, a blogger from National Public Radio, visited Montreal and was impressed with the number of cyclists on our streets.
A snippet from the blog item:
But in Montreal, from whence I just returned, it makes you feel like you’re missing a vital appendage (two things you better know in Montreal? How to ride a [...]

battle of the skylines – montreal vs. boston

11 things people are dying to do in quebec

A fat book landed on my desk this week: 1,000 Places To See In The USA And Canada Before You Die, not to be confused with another tome by the same author – 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.
In other words, there are a lot more than 1,000 places you should see but [...]