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P.K. Subban, hockey's Jackie Robinson

May 8, 2013, 9:58 am
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   I watched Game Three of Montreal's playoff series with a white anglo-Montreal woman in her 60s. The woman was purportedly supporting the Canadiens but had no shame in singling out P.K. Subban for various alleged sins, which she had a hard time describing.
   She was apparently oblivious to the awkwardness of the fact that she has singled out the only visible minority on the team.
   I wanted to suggest that she put herself in his place, being the only white competitor in a group of blacks, whether she'd be impressed when the black onlookers singled her out for harsh invective.
   Later I went onto a YouTube video of Subban and noticed countless commenters unhesitatingly using the 'n' word and other insults towards him. It made me wish that there was some sort of filter I could click on to not have to see that horribleness.
   This crazy reaction to this beautiful hockey player saddens me tremendously, as Subban is not just obviously a helluva player and passionate competitor but he's a lot of fun to watch, not just for me but for countless hockey fans.
   So why the widespread resistance to the top-notch, artful display that Subban puts on every night?
   I imagine that when certain hockey fans see Subban skate by top white players with relative ease, it provokes the fear of hockey becoming a black sport, or exposes them to the notion that NHL players are inferior athletes to those of the NBA and NFL, which are dominated by Afro-Americans.
   Subban, being the first bonafide black hockey superstar, has to bear the brunt of these anxieties through not fault of his own.
   Sixty years ago Jackie Robinson played in this city and broke down some important barriers of racism and prejudice. The same thing is playing out before our eyes, as this beautiful young player fights similar battles, cloaked in different forms.
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Nancy Donais' two home heartbreaks

May 8, 2013, 4:21 pm
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Nancy Donais and the burnt-out home
Diane Pomerleau
  The home at 571 Honore Beaugrand, pictured at left, is a wreck because last year single mama Nancy Donais neglected to pay her insurance the joint burned down, leaving her and her five kids scrambling for a roof.
  Friends attempted to raise cash to help her fix the place but I'm not confident that succeeded, because the phone line remains disconnected.  
  Now, there's another newer home-related heartbreak involving a Nancy Donais that I'm confident is the same person.
   Nancy Donais' mother Diane Pomerleau was a stripper and escort for many years. She claimed in court documents that she was making a lot of cash money in the sex trade in the mid-90s but at age 53 after disappearing in the east end on January 17 2008.
  Prior to her death, however, Pomerleau launched a lawsuit against her ex-boyfriend Richard Boisvert, with whom she went out between 1987 and 2001.
   Pomerleau said she gave him $40,000 cash - money she earned from the sex trade -  to buy a cottage in Lac Alphonse in 1996.
   After they broke up Pomerleau sued to get the cottage back but on March 28 Superior Court Judge Thomas Davis ruled that Donais - who inherited her dead mom's claim - has no claim to the cottage.
  The judge ruled that the lack of her mom's name on any of documentation made it impossible to reward her the home. 
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Scenes from a Wednesday in May

May 9, 2013, 9:33 am
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We see this countless times at intersections every day - pedestrians forced to start dashing while crossing at a light which is starting to turn red. Younger people have no trouble dashing those three or four extra steps but older individuals don't necessary have what it takes to suddenly accelerate in order to survive oncoming traffic. My Romanian nanny Minna drove me nuts when she insisted we "wait for a fresh green." But many local geriatrics have been killed in Montreal by such red-light-tick-tock doom. The red-switch issue will worsen with the ill-conceived upcoming terrestrialization of the Turcot Interchange, as pedestrians will be forced to walk across eight lanes of traffic now sitting currently blissfully overhead. Big prize to anybody who concocts an innovation that permits pedestrians to be able to cross without suddenly being forced to start running.

 What do you see in this photo? I see someone who's wearing a helmet that should not be wearing a helmet. Half of the fun of riding is to feel the wind in your hair. The insurance industry will eventually pressure city administrators to force every cyclist to wear a dorky shell on their dome and that will be a tragic day for all. Personally I rode a bike throughout all the seasons for about 12 years and never felt the need for a helmet. The trick to safety is: drive slow. Slow down on your bike and you'll be fine.


I don't give to beggars because I think it erodes their legitimate claim to equality. As long as they can get a couple of squares and a roof that should be all they need. But I can understand their sense of isolation and boredom, which forces them to want to interact with other and sometimes even entertain. This high-heeled Inuit cup-holder spotted yesterday on Berri and Dorch was vamping with the strut-pout-put-em-out in a rather entertaining way. Go girl!



How how was it in Montreal Wednesday? The Rose Bowl thermometer suggests it was 34 degrees. That's pretty darn hot for May. No complaints here.

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Ethan Allen Capture Park. Are you kidding me?

May 9, 2013, 10:56 am
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   Parc de la capture d'Ethan Allen, aka, Ethan Allen Capture Park, ever heard of it?
   I have, probably because I live next to a park that was given a dumb name when nobody was paying attention so I've developed an ear for such things.
 That's the new name of an east side park in Montreal, so named in 2008.
  There's plans to put a beach just around there and so it's an increasingly-important area on the river.
  Here's a few reasons why it doesn't make sense as a name.
1-Ethan Allen did not surrender at that spot in 1775. The building where he signed his surrender treaty now sits nearby. The structure had been preserved and transported to that location from further west but it's currently being used as a daycare, so it's not a place you can even really go. There's just a plaque.
2- It celebrates a minor skirmish, won by Guy Carlton, aka Dorchester, a Brit, whose team had recently beaten the French.
3-It's a tasteless insult to Vermonters, (not that I'm too upset with insulting Vermonters, they are very nice people, I'm told, but the ones I've dealt with have always been strangely unpleasant).
4-There are much worthier locals to celebrate, such as Sarah Maxwell, the schoolteacher who saved all those kids on Prefontaine St.
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Miss Montreal beauty pageant - good times were had!

May 10, 2013, 6:24 am
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   I think I must have some sort of brain ailment, (I'm blaming it on the cat-brain parasite that maybe I got from reading cat-brain parasite defender Kate's site) because I can't look at an old photo like this shot of the Miss Montreal beauty pageant in the 1940s and simply immerse myself in the event portrayed.
   Instead, my brain makes me wonder where they all are, if they're dead, if I could reach them on the phone and so forth.
   The absolute worst is when I see photos at the hockey rink of young athletes from 10-15 years ago. Rather than allowing the image to come alive again, I ruin it by asking myself: how old are they now? what sort of work did they get as adults? did they stay in the neighbourhood?
   I just wish I could let an old photo come back to life.
   The Miss Montreal beauty pageant lasted decades but effectively ended sometime. And yeah there are still beauty contests here and there but they generally run by carpetbaggers who force the girls to pay big money to join and often don't even reward the promised prizes.
   Some say beauty pageants are demeaning, but so what? What activity isn't demeaning. If the same young women were standing behind a counter at McDonald's would they be totally undemeaned? Digging a hole? Coding a website? Every activity is demeaning, so let them stand around in bathing suits and be what they want to be.
   In the photo above, the four contestants on the left are all holding a small trophy and other seven are looking over at them. I think the ones on the left are being politely eliminated.
   The two at the far left are no great shakes, the one after is a chinless big bird and the the attention-starved fourth one is just generic and insipid.
   The seven other candidates are all pretty solid but look a little dour. The tall one has the leggy gams and the one in the black negligee to her right could probably squeeze your head like a chestnut with those muscular thighs.
  My vote goes to the middle-candidate of the seven on the right because she looks a little drunk and fun to be with and her costume is a bit more see-through.
   The great Rene Ferron did an exhaustive 10 minute report on the Miss Montreal in 1989, when politically-correct thing made it all about who could talk the best.
   Eighty percent of the marks were based on interviews with these young women which is way too much. The girl in the freeze frame thing below, Edith Fortin, (appearing at around 3:00) couldn't compete in Miss Montreal 1989 cuz she was only 17 but man, she was ambitious, she went on to do a ton of such contests and eventually became one of main dancers in Starmania.
   But there you go, I'm doing it again, where are they now? Let's just try to focus on where were they then.



 
 

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Terrebonne tenant ordered to pay $14,000 for six month nightmare

May 10, 2013, 9:16 am
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  On July 1, 2009 Serge Lescault was moving to Winnipeg for a while so he rented out his house at 1700 des Bernaches in Terrebone to some guy named Nicolas Desjardins for $900 per month.
  The new tenant decided he was going to do car repairs in the basement, so he pulled out the carpet, yanked out doors, demolished part of the house and started fixing cars and dripping oil into the basement.
   Desjardins eventually just took off in January 2010 without paying the rent.
   So Lescault tracked him down and slapped him with a $28,837 suit at the rental board, the highest number I've ever seen at that joint.
  The Rental Board ordered Desjardins to pay Lescault $13,737.
   Whether he ever will or not is another question.
  Lescault's insurance company also refused to pay for the damage which they estimated at $9,200. They said it the damage was caused by natural degeneration of the structure.
   A judge noted, however, that it was clearly vandalism and that wasn't exempt from the policy so the judge ordered Union Canadienne to pay him an additional $7,000.
  So Lescault won both court rulings but had to deal with a ton of headaches. Keep an eye on your house when you rent it out.
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Quebec women tend to dye their hair red more than blonde. Why is that?

May 14, 2013, 10:30 am
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  The photo at left, taken at the Super Aqua Club, a former sand quarry-turned beach at Oka, (or more precisely Pointe Calumet, just before Oka) demonstrates that Kweebeck wymyn lurvve to dye their hair red, rather than blonde, which is the primo colour of choice for damsels outside of this province.
  And so why is it that they do this and what does it tell us about Kweebeck demoiselles?
  You'll have to read through, or jump over a couple of rambling parantheses to find out.
   (Firstly, ever notice that nobody dyes their hair brown? It proves that as a colour, it sucks for hair.)
   (Citation: I read this factoid about Qc women preferring to go red in an article article about 10 years ago that proved fridge-sticking-worthy. I tried to relocate this information in the newspaper data banks but failed to retrace it, so I'd have to go to the landfill and find it to find said fridge to learn what exactly the article said, or else call a hair dye company to ask if it's indeed still true).
  Anyway, the reason women dye their hair blonde? To look younger, as pigment only starts to come in stronger with age.
  In contrast, women dye their hair red to look sexy, as it's known that red makes men think about sex. In fact, studies show that men rate women wearing red clothing as prettier, so the Lucille-Ball look is easy points on the scoreboard of seduction.
  So that is tells of the psychology of ze women hauling those Clairol boxes to the cash at the local Gene Cooto and Shoppers Drugge Marte in Laval, Repentigny and Ville-Emard. 
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Metro riders: beware of shoe thieves

May 14, 2013, 6:01 pm
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   Those who dare taking the city's metro system already expose themselves to countless risks, including potential exposure to lunatics, felons, hipsters and other hopeless miscreants but the previously-unknown shoe thief, who descends on people that cross their legs is a new one. As you can see, you barely realize that your boot is gone by the time he's out the turnstiles. I'm thinking that the thief sells them to amputees around the world, people who only need one shoe.
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You still can't bring your wine home

May 15, 2013, 8:36 am
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   You still can't bring your bottle home when you go to a restaurant in Quebec, a policy that puts property rights into question and that government officials had promised to change.
   The Liberal government, which had vowed to slap down the rule, was voted out and nowadays many diners believe that the law was already changed, so these days many-an-awkward moment is playing out at various eateries in the province, as waiters have to tell their customers to leave the damn bottle on the table.        
   A restaurant can technically lose its right to serve wine if the waiter allows one to get away, so expect a fight if you try.
  The current practice also increases the chance of drunk driving, as people would likely rather finish their bottles than just leave them.
  Waiters have the difficult task of policing the rule, but on the other hand they often drink the unfinished wine after the restaurant closes, so they're rewarded both ways. If you're a real smart cookie, you'll just get your wife, girlfriend or lesbian lover to put on a wine rack bra and you'll drink from your own supply.
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Sam Fattal's anti-Westmount crusade comes to screeching halt

May 15, 2013, 8:40 am
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 Samir Fattal, aka Sam Fattal, was recently judged a vexatious litigant, seriously compromising his longstanding battle against the City of Westmount, which he feels has made his job as a landlord difficult.
   As a result of the April decision, Fattal has been banned from launching any new legal action against the city or its employees.
   The bad blood started around 15 years back when Fattal transformed an industrial building on St. Antoine in Westmount to residential, without the proper permits.
   Westmount then shut the building down for code violations and Fattal started sending the city mail accusing Westmount administrators of anti-Semitism, complete with concentration camp and Gestapo references.
   He jammed up their fax machine, stalked staffers at their homes and put up denunciatory posters and flags at his building and home on Edgehill in Upper Westmount.
   According to the court document, "On a number of occasions, Mr. Fattal faxed gruesome photos of himself, bare-chested and gagging.  One photo showed a tortured Mr. Fattal, with bulging eyes, and an iron bar across his mouth." And: "A further incident in the autumn of 1998 alarmed Westmount’s building inspectors.  One day, Westmount’s employee, Mr. Michel Poulin, was performing an electrical inspection at the Saint Antoine building.  Mr. Fattal suddenly appeared behind Mr. Poulin wearing a Saddam Hussein mask and brandishing a baseball bat.  Mr. Poulin was frightened, but Mr. Fattal later called it a joke."
    He even launched a series of small claims court suits for $7,000 each - all quickly rejected -  against various inspectors, which seems pretty clever but ultimately jams up the system for legitimate litigants, who currently have to wait about two years to get before a judge.
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Will Anticosti Island make Quebec rich?

May 16, 2013, 11:33 am
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   Quebec could be in line to become considerably richer if estimates of an oil deposit prove true. The claim was made two years ago concerning oil riches reaching up to massive 300 million barrels of sweet crude in and around Anticosti Island, an almost-uninhabited government-owned island off the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
  Premier Pauline Marois recently gave a speech in which she gleefully attempted to mobilize this news into support for separation, as she pointed out ruefully that under the current Canadian structure, a share of the future oil windfall would have to be redistributed to poorer provinces. She omits the fact, of course, that Quebec currently receives something in the area of $7 billion per year from the Alberta oil fields.
    Whether or not the 200-300 million barrels of oil said to lie around the island are indeed really there is another question, but previous attempts to make the island profitable have always ended in fiasco perhaps best symbolized by the shipwrecks that the island is known for.

   The companies that have suggested the possibility of great oil wealth from the island are Corridor (CDH - currently trading at .73 cents in a 52-week range of 48 to 87 cents) and Petrolia (PEA - currently trading in the 60 cent range after being up to about $1.50 last year at this time).
   Repeated attempts through the ages to turn the island into a forestry resource have failed and the province has loaded it up with deer - which now number a staggering 160,000 -  and yet no wolves or bears or other predators prowl around to limit their population. 
   So anybody who pays for one of the government's pricey hunting trips to the island will have an easy time gunning down the gentle beasts, which are known to walk right up to tourists when not stripping every bush dry of its fruit and eating every new sapling dead.

That's your Anticosti Island right there
    The deer have a reputation of being quite small, alas.
  French industrialist Henri Menier bought the island in 1895 and established a bunch of crazy rules, residents were not allowed to wear white or own dogs, but he gave up on his attempt at building a feudal settlement. He sold it to Consolidated Bathurst in 1926. Their longstanding attempts to exploit the lumber proved too costly and they solid it to Quebec in 1974 for around $25 million.
  Quebec immediately tried to make it into a hunting and fishing tourist destination but it was a money-loser, gobbling up $5 million a year from the start, so they handed it over to five outfitters to manage.
   One of the older claims had it that the island had no mosquitoes or flies.
   The first thing I would do to the place would be to drop a few wolves into the forests and a few bears while you're at it.
    Also, according to the rules of the inevitable, there will be several highly-unanticipated black swan events occurring around within the next few decades, which I predict will include one that requires a mass exodus from a country or two.  
  These environmental refugees could use a place like this to settle and I would say that we could fit something like 2 million people on Anticosti. 
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Bees and frogs unleashed at Dupuis Freres- a photoshop re-enactment

May 21, 2013, 11:13 am
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   Sarah Tatigian and Gaby Dionne were arrested for their part at a bizarre labour protest at the Dupuis Freres department store in downtown Montreal in which they and other shouting and singing protesters attempted to unleash three bags of bees and a bag of frogs among the many women who had come to the store to enjoy a 20 percent off sale.
  The sale took place on Saturday May 17, 1954 and the protest was organized by the National Federation of Labour Youth
   Dionne, seen at right, was such a promising rebel that she had been sent for special training in North Korea a year prior. Tatigian is spelled Tattigian in the original article, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong. 
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Who sent the letter bomb that killed Arnold Drapkin?

May 22, 2013, 6:52 am
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Arnold Drapkin
   Next time you roll by the forlorn building at the corner of William and St. Thomas just south of downtown, think of mild-mannered Arnold Drapkin, who was killed by a letter bomb at his office there 1332 Notre Dame W. on 9 a.m. on Tuesday February 19, 1980.
   Drapkin's company, known as Atlantic Vending, managed pinball machines and did sound and light for such nightclubs as 1234, Bogart, Thursdays and Oz.
   He had also gained a reputation as the go-to guy if you wanted to get a booze license for your establishment, as he had apparently cultivated many profound ties to bureaucrats within the provincial alcohol licensing department.
Drapkin with his employees
   Drapkin, 35, opened the lethal missive in the presence of associates Sydney Drapkin and Saul Zuckerman as well as client Gerard Joncas, who were injured in the explosion.
  The powerful bomb had been rigged to explode when opened and investigators likened it to several terrorist bombs they had seen in separate past incidents.
  Zuckerman was the owner of the 1234 discotheque, the hottest thing in town those days and had a small company with Drapkin called Mass Laser.
   Some accounts had it that the controversial Mike Bookalam, Zuckerman's partner in the 1234 disco, was also present but it appears he was not there.
   The four men had been talking about the weather in Acapulco and the Lake Placid Winter Olympics, according to Zuckerman, who sported an eye patch for some time after sustaining his injuries.
     Police suspected a link between the bombing and an explosion inside Arviv's disco at Yonge and Bloor in Toronto four weeks earlier. That bar, owned by Arnold Arviv, was known to be full of drug dealers. Arviv, who knew Drapkin, had been charged, alongside Toronto Outlaw boss Frank Lenti, in an attempted murder/extortion of someone named Jack Mamann. 
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How Serge Joyal derailed his own mayoralty bid

May 22, 2013, 10:37 am
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  Now that Denis Coderre is running for Montreal mayor, it's time to have a look at the last time a federal Liberal MP attempted to get elected to the big chair on Notre Dame... an effort dashed by an unexpected revelation.
   Liberal MP Serge Joyal's Montreal Action Group sought to topple longtime mayor Jean Drapeau in the November election of 1978.
   Joyal, 33, was a young lawyer and as hot as could be, blasting through a variety of law degrees and showing great energy in every task he was given.
  Joyal's father had some notoriety as the butcher of Beaubien... literally - his dad had a butcher shop in Rosemount so Joyal came from humble beginnings.
  Joyal was a strong federalist with a lot of energy and appeared exactly what the city needed to topple the geriatric Jean Drapeau whose long reign had shown some wear, especially due to the Olympic fiasco, which left the city highly in debt.
   So the city appeared ripe for Joyal's taking.
   Joyal did a ton of handshaking in the spring of 1978 but then suddenly and disappointingly disappeared for many crucial weeks, a time when he should have been making news and pressing flesh on the rubber chicken circuit, much to the chagrin of his supporters, who had been organizing, meeting, brainstorming very frequently.
  His helpers figured he might be out at the cottage with his knockout of a girlfriend, who would presumably eventually eventually join him in wedding bliss.
   But Joyal returned and announced that he had an epiphany.
   He told his team that he was gay.
   This in itself wasn't necessarily a big deal, as the media remained respectful of his privacy, only making read-between-the-lines references to him being a bachelor, living with his mother and collecting antiques.
   But the revelation was problematic because Joyal suddenly lost his all of his previous feverish interest.  
   Instead of concentrating on his campaign, Joyal appeared considerably more interested in exploring the implications of his newly-discovered self.
   On November, 12, 1978 Drapeau beat Joyal comfortably with 212,000 votes to 89,000.
   Joyal then returned to Ottawa where he became Trudeau's point man on the official bilingualism policy. He also fought hard for the right to air traffic controllers to talk in French in their communications, a bit of a ridiculous issue in retrospect.
   While never, to my knowledge, announcing himself publicly as gay, Joyal fought alongside Svend Robinson many years ago for the right to gay marriage.
   He was eventually named to the senate and has been there for many years.    
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When women kill: the deadly Mohawk cabbie attack

May 23, 2013, 11:06 am
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  Barbara Norton-Homer, 29, and her friends Katy McComber, 19 and Sherry Delisle, 21 were drunk and high and angry and left the Kahanawake reservation to start trouble on October 23, 1979
   They stopped a taxi driven by Fernand Giroux, 49, in LaSalle and beat him bad enough to take out an eye and leave him paralyzed, but his suffering didn't last long, as he died in hospital from his wounds two weeks later.
  The three then spent a couple of hours aimlessly driving around LaSalle and over the Mercier Bridge in the taxi they had stolen from him.
   Cops eventually spotted them and followed them to Khanawake, where they drove after them down a dirt road.
  It was apparently a trap, as the women were trying to lure cops to the reserve.
  When they finally pulled the girls over, another car appeared and its occupants threatened the police with guns.  
   Soon after, official Khanawake peacekeepers arrived on the scene and took charge of the situation, holding the girls in captivity until handing them over to Montreal police a couple of days later.
   It seems that the three were angry that a Kahnawake native named David Cross had been shot dead a couple of days earlier after smashing a police cruiser with a pool cue following a high-speed chase.
  The death inspired the fatal attack on the blameless cabbie. The provincial police officer Robert Lessard was charged with manslaughter but was acquitted in November 1980. 
  Norton, who had a history of mental illness, was seen as the ringleader and was sentenced to seven years in prison, while McComber got six and Delisle got four years, all for manslaughter.
   Fellow cabbies held a small parade for their slain colleague.
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Why Toronto is better than Montreal

May 24, 2013, 9:35 am
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  I recently spent a few hours poring over hockey statistics with the aim of trying to establish where players were born and raised. What immediately struck me is how few players on the Montreal Canadiens actually came from Montreal. But then a larger fact struck me, P.J. Stock, statistically is surely the least-competent Montrealer ever to play on the Habs.
    Er, actually, the larger thing is this: Ontario has produced disproportionately more NHL players than Quebec.
   The tale of Gary Galley is telling. One day Galley, who lived on Montreal's south shore, was at his dinner table when his dad announced that the family was going to get up and move to Ottawa. The reason? Dad had gone to a grocery store and a cashier had told him to speak in French.
   The encounter had so enraged him that he couldn't live another day amid these ridiculous and discourteous language tensions.
   Gary Galley would later say that he would never have made the NHL had he stayed in Quebec, as the hockey opportunities were far superior in Ottawa than on south shore Montreal.
   The story illustrates the differences in cultures of the two places.
   Montreal, in the apt description of Leonard Cohen, attempts to attain excellence by being a sort of new Jerusalem. Every community fights to get their piece of the pie, so you end up with Greeks working hard together to flex their muscles, Italians, Jews, wasps, francophones, all doing the same and the cacophonous result is one of great achievement, but not so much harmony.
   That approach has been described as ascriptive politics, defined as a system where communities battle to advance their own clannish agendas.
   Alas, the depressing downside to this clan approach is being exposed daily at the Charbonneau commission, which has shown the perils of believing one's personal, family or group interests to be important enough to exempt oneself from the rule of law.
   The current Quebec government, meanwhile, sends out confused messages, stressing the rule of law but simultaneously pushing for a tribal dominance of the francophone clan over the others, making for a discordant societal dissonance that hasn't been embraced by the population, according to the most recent political polls.
   One useful example from the corporate world involves two children's programming animation companies, one in Toronto and one in Quebec that started out at around the same time.
   Toronto's Nelvana and Montreal's Cinar both had some popular fare but were operated in diametrically different fashions.
   I first sensed this in the early 90s when I hosted and organized a cable access TV show focusing on the local TV and film industry.
   I immediately invited Cinar to send someone over to showcase their programs and discuss their company's achievements. My request met dead silence and was ignored.
   Later on, I also asked Nelvana for an interview. I took a road trip to Toronto and was not only offered an invitation to talk to company president Michael Hirsch in his office, he even left us there alone to wander around his private office after he had to depart for a flight.
   It later came out that Cinar had been cheating and breaking all sorts of rules, charges which they stubbornly fought even though the battle was futile. And of course, Nelvana - which had not been gripped by the spirit of mistrust and paranoia so common in Montreal - grew and thrived.
   Meanwhile Montreal has had some success in getting a few blips on the celebrity map, creating such cultural outliers as Celine Dion and Arcade Fire, but Toronto has far outstripped us even at our own game, as southern-Ontario performers Justin Bieber and Drake have far eclipsed our bit of pop culture glory.
   These examples are not definitive proof that Ontario's approach to organizing its society is better, but the fact that it has produced more outliers, while being less subject to poor management is fodder for the argument that a harmonious, rule-of-law approach is a better way to run things than the cultural competition method we have opted for in Quebec.      
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Friendly fire in the Point killed young Carley Gorman

May 25, 2013, 8:52 am
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Gorman, left, and Steczko
   Kevin Steczko, 25, was sitting around at home at 676 Charlevoix on the evening of Thursday Feb. 1, 1980 with his friend Carley Gorman, 20, when he apparently decided to clean his loaded 12 gauge shotgun, which he later said that he believed was not loaded.
   He had bought the firearm four years earlier to go hunting but had never gone yet. Nonetheless he apparently liked to clean the weapon regularly.
  The gun went off and Gorman was killed.  
   Kevin's mother Nellie came down and asked what the noise was but he reassured her that it was nothing.
  Kevin's brothers John and Brian were downstairs watching TV and didn't hear a thing, no idea where sister Stephanie was. 
   The panicked Kevin Steczko dragged his friend's dead body outside about a block away in behind 2340 Rozel and covered it with a plastic tarp and old tires. 
   When the boy's parents asked him where their son had gone, Steczko told them that he had decided to move to Ontario and they'd never see him again.
   But on February 18 someone stumbled across the body and Steczko was forced to confess to having killed his friend. 
   Steczko, who initially lied to police about what happened, eventually told them that the trigger was more sensitive than he had imagined and that he accidentally shot his younger friend in the head.
   Police tested the gun and found the trigger to be quite normal. 
   There was also some debate over whether the rifle was actually touching Gorman's head when fired.
   Steczko was found criminally responsible for his friend's death. 
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Robert Conn: armed and naked in Mascouche

May 27, 2013, 9:25 am
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Robert Conn and his wife sporting matching
white turtlenecks

   Robert Conn, 34, was naked in his bedroom late at night with his wife Denise Conn, 31, when he heard a noise outside on January 9, 1980.
   He saw people monkeying around with his Jeep, so he brought out his 22 and ran outside armed and naked.
 He encountered young Pierre Lesage, Andre Lauzon, 20, and Serge Lavigeur, 18, in the midst of trying to steal his wheel.
   After a hard day's drinking and getting stoned in a Terrebonne bar, the three had to get home but Lesage's tire was flat.
   One of the three had suggested they go to steal a wheel from Conn's car, as one had a prior history with him.
Andre Lauzon, 20 and Serge Lavigeur, 18
Pierre Lesage, dead by gunfire
   Andre Lauzon and Conn were involved in a road rage fight on Gascon Rd. in December 1979. Conn, the larger of the two, had lost his glasses in the scuffle and had to concede. Lauzon apparently held a grudge.
   Before attempting to steal Conn's wheel, Lauzon smashed the mirrors on Conn's jeep.
   After Conn came out with his gun, the three fled in their vehicle. They heard gunfire but only once they were on the road did they realize that their friend Lesage had been shot in the head.
   The two stopped and left the vehicle by the roadside on Ile St. Jean and hitched home.
   Conn, after the shooting, went inside and wept. He was dazed and speechless.
   He was investigated but my information doesn't include what, if any, penalty he was given.

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Escaped murderer Duclos - where is he hiding?

June 3, 2013, 2:22 pm
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Jean-Pierre Duclos
   Jean-Pierre Duclos has been on the lam for six days following his dramatic escape on a visit to the Verdun General.
  Actually was his escape dramatic?
  Nobody has bothered to go down and find out how exactly Duclos got away from his guard but I think it's a question that bears asking.
  Presumably Duclos tricked the guard somehow but who knows, maybe he's very sick with only a few days to live and the guard looked the other way to allow him to go out on one last great big Verdun drug binge.
  Anyway, thankfully Duclos didn't have to kill anybody to get free, unlike Gilles Hebert who shot his guardian to death when he escaped on a visit to St. Mary's in 1975.
  The other great out-of-prison visit escape story that pops to mind is that of Wayne Boden who took off and hit the Kon Tiki with an American Express credit card sent to him in jai.
  So where is Duclos?
  Now, let's consider that the last time he fled justice he got all the to Colombia for three months before being captured.
  But that was when he had a passport.
Jean-Pierre Duclos, in this six-day
age-enhanced image
  Duclos has no access to money, as he is not eligible for welfare, being an escaped prisoner but y'know he wouldn't look out of place at the always-crowded welfare office on Galt just south of Champlain, it couldn't hurt to try.
  We know that he used to be a hard-core drug addict and claimed to have the ability to speak something like five languages, but the same could be said for just about half the readers of this site as well.
  We can logically deduce that Duclos is not driving around, because even if he stole a car, it would eventually be reported and he'd likely just get pulled over.
   So he's most likely lying low in an urban area.
   My best bet would be that he's sleeping among other vagrants on the banks of the St. Lawrence in Verdun. Homeless people and or squeegie punks are also said to sleep in the fields around the Turcot yards, or some place such as the chronically empty fields near Pullman and Ste. Anne de Bellevue Blvd.
   Now if in fact you are Jean-Pierre Duclos and you are reading this, I invite you to drop me a line on my gmail and we'll negotiate the terms of your surrender, I'll make sure they give you the cucumber sandwiches with the crust cut off.
   The irony is that Duclos's sentence was very near its end anyway, so he might have some extra time to do when he is finally captured.
   Duclos was in a provincial prison, which often houses murderers near the end of their sentences.
   I once went up to a prison in Laval to interview prisoners and was put in with about six inmates, many of whom had committed murders, but they didn't want to talk about their misdeeds, only what they were going through now.
   Several of them had the too-much-eye-contact thing going on, which is the sign of a sociopath, as we know and Duclos might be in that same boat judging by his photo.
   
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Photos from around the Montreals

June 3, 2013, 6:53 pm
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Montreal cops have been wearing ironic patches thanking their employers for
screwing up their schedules.  

Luckily someone has change for the meter, or something like that, helping out others
in NDG Park. 
A bike monument to a fallen cyclist on Wellington, a Verdun bank clerk, Sunday workers
on Ste. Catherine near Viau and a guy leaning against a tribute to workers in the same
area.

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