2013/06/19

• 
  2013.06.13
  Scènes de Montréal – Montreal Scenes
  

  Above

  No need to call the City and ask permission to reserve parts of a residential street when moving. This is how it’s done, preferably late in the day before the move, and preferably also with dangling posters mentioning reason of such. This is high moving season in Montreal, with its peak on July 1, also known as Canada Day. For most Montrealers, those moving or helping those who do, at least, Canada Day sums up to sweat, back pain, pizza and a case of beer. For those not moving, it’s mostly a day off although open businesses are anything but a rarity.

  

  Kling-Ker-Klang

  Monday, I met Oscar. He’s very lively. He’s also very dead. My physiotherapist wanted to show me ‘de visu’ what the exercises she wanted me to do would do to the two long bones in my left forearm, in permitting them to twist on themselves. So what better way to show how those bones articulate than to show them in all their glory. Oscar is a lifesize squeleton. Since he’s got no tendons nor muscles, and frankly is as dry as the Mojave desert, when you touch him the whole thing starts to rattle with a clanging sound like those rattlers that the lepers used in the good old days when they starred in biblical films with Charlton ‘NRA or die’ Heston. All I can say is that an image is indeed worth a thousand words. Now I know how those two bones work when you turn your forearm on itself to send the finger.

  

  LE MUR DU SON (THE SOUND BARRIER)
  by Robert Charlebois
  1972

  I want to break the sound barrier
  And propel this song,
  Mix the rhythms, find the tone,
  The Instruments, the voice, the key

  Give the note that will make
  Three Americas sing in unison
  I want to write it in the sky
  I see all of you with wings

  You listen to me head-high
  Loving one another
  They’ll come from everywhere
  Those who stand up

  I want to be more than a bird,
  More than a plane, a U.F.O.
  I want to be a meteorite,
  Drag you into my orbit.

  I want to break the sound barrier
  And propel this song,
  Mix the rhythms, find the tone,
  The instruments, the voice, the key

  Give the note that will make
  All the universe sing in unison
  We will cease to be mortals
  To at last become eternal
  Eternal…
  Eternal…

  

  Coitus interruptus

  Benji Netanyahou is not happy. Not at all. I’d even go as to say that he is pissed. He has been working for years to build some kind of support for an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Now those Iranian party poopers have sent the overexcited Ahmadinejad back to his formol jar and elected someone who passes for moderate and, oh sacrilege, even says he’d deal with the Americans. BenYamin just doesn’t take it.

  

  Blimps galore

  Google is working on a project that would send a carload of balloons in the stratosphere so as to offer rapid internet connections to isolated or poorly served regions. Excluding any philantropic motivations (we’re talking about Google here), the question that pops up is “Why?”. They are testing this new system in and over New Zealand, basically because it’s in the middle of nowhere so if it is screws up, the damage won’t spread, and also because NZ is part of the anglophone world which would make things easier. At least that’s what I read in an Agence France-Presse article from its correspondent in Wellington, NZ, and which I won’t bother linking here since it’s in French, therefore not GoogleStratosphere compatible.

  

  • 21:29
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