Several months ago, shopping centers that belong to the Cadillac-Fairview group extended their weekday shopping hours to 9 PM. According to a recent article in La Presse (in French), this decision not only made the life of store employees much more complicated but the increased costs has caused their profits to drop by 2% compared to stores with “normal” business hours.

Does anybody really need to be able to go to the mall 6 evenings per week?

I’m trying something new today. While surfing the local blogosphere I occasionnally come upon entries that are especially funny, clever and/or thought-provoking.

The AD HOC YULBlog 5th Awards: Many have commented on last weekend’s most excellent party but Nika’s take on it is especially original.

Ok, classes are not actually over, but the whole university is on strike. Apparently, it’s the first time ever that every students in UQAM are on strike. After almost a month of strike, a few deals have been suggested by the government and none of them involve the whole 103 million CND which is pretty much the pivot of this event. Despite those deals, there isn’t much progress on any side. The governement hasn’t done anything since March 18 (around that date). Students are still manifesting the same way they were since the beginning. So like I said not much change. As for me, the egoist person that I am, I’ve been thinking, if only I took a trip somewhere during the last month.
By the way, I’m checking the news as I am writing this and the government actually hasn’t done anything since March 17. On March 18, it just let the students think about the offer. I wouldn’t count that as doing something.

The groundhogs are awake. I saw one earlier munching like crazy but it was gone when I returned with my camera. My lab enjoyed watching five “babies” grow big and strong while living under that tree last summer (see images).

Upon our return from the yulblog party, I turned on the bedroom tv to catch the last few minutes of Saturday Night Live and caught a glimpse of Gwen Stephanie. This encouraged a pair of alcool-soaked neurons to lock themselves into a perpetual embrace and I have had Rich Girl playing in my head ever since.

If I was a rich girl
nanana nana nana
nanana nana nanaaaa

Not the most dignified song to be humming when you’re a middle-aged man.

So, what’s in your head?

Congratulations should go out to Patrick, Zeke and everyone involved in organizing the yulblog fifth anniversary party. We had to be good parents and split around midnight but getting up this morning to go to a conference was not fun.

Some notes from the evening:

Howdy!

In case anybody is interested this is part of the article that appears in today’s Gazette. And I’ve made some comments as well to what I think are appropriate links. It was written by Sarah Musgrave.

On the first Wednesday of every month a stuffed cow appears atop a table at Bar La Cabane on St. Laurent Blvd. It looks on languidly as beers swill, cigarettes smoke and conversations swirl around it, courtesy of two dozen people gathered for drinks and discussion.

They talk about computers, corporate corruption and even chili-chocolate recipes, switching seamlessly from French to English to something in between.

Staring out nice, giving some atmosphere as to what a YULBlog meeting looks like.

“I don’t usually post about politics, mais Bush, la …”

Unfortunately the quotes are not attributed, which given the nature of the article would have been nice.

The diverse group milling around the cow has one thing in common: blogging. This is a monthly meeting of Montreal bloggers. Those coming for the first time, use the cow as a beacon.

They are cyber chroniclers who self-publish all sorts of information on the Internet, some of it intensely intimate, some of it international in scope.

Ms. Musgave then goes in to some background about blogs in general, which as you’re reading this, probably is best cut.

La Cabane is home to the kind of scene that is playing out in cities around the globe – minus the franglais.

The Montreal bloggers brave winter weather to meet at La Cabane even as they straddle languages, interests, backgrounds, ages and genders. They’ve all registered at an umbrella site called YULblog.

There’s a significant number of female faces in the crowd, “which makes it less geeky,” quips Michael Boyle, 37.

He was the first to round up like-minded people for a get-together in the Plateau five years ago. “In 2000, there were only a few bloggers in Montreal that we knew of,” he recalls. YULblog membership is about 250, and Boyle figures blogs in the urban area number close to 1,000.

“There’s pretty much everything out there,” says YULblog administrator Patrick Tanguay of the Montreal scene.

“You’ll find someone who writes about furniture and design, there are academics who talk about their studies, there are live journals, which are more like personal diaries.”

The meat of the article, with lots of quotes to keep everybody happy.

There are some periods Tanguay, a 34-year-old Web developer, updates his blog as many as four or five times a day.

Like many Montreal francophones, his site alternates between languages, blurring linguistic lines with an ease that defines the city’s blog community. “Quite a few switch between French and English, so it’s hard to say what the percentage is,” he muses. “It’s pretty close to half and half, I think.”

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the Wednesday rendez-vous, earning Montreal another distinction.

“This makes it the longest continuous-running face-to-face meeting of bloggers in the world,” Tanguay claims.

The numbers in attendance at La Cabane swell and shrink, but the watering hole on the Main is the group’s headquarters – at least in the earthly realm.

And finally she got around to a mention of why this is important.

“The idea of a Web log is that you find a trusted interpreter of news to tell you what you should look at,” Boyle says. “There are Web logs in the U.S. that totally rival their local paper. For the most part in Montreal, the issues aren’t as political.”

American blogs have longer track records, Tanguay points out, mentioning New York-based Jason Kottke, who had a blog-like site before the term even existed.

“He can post about something and within one day he’ll have more than a hundred comments about it,” he says. “It gives him a lot of weight. Someone posting about the equivalent thing in Canada would get like 20 comments, maybe.”

Then, after more background info on blogs in general, the bestest part of the article…

Ed Hawco was at a meeting of YULbloggers when he found himself next to an early blogger, Martine Page. Sparks flew.

“Basically, we talked to the exclusion of everyone else,” he remembers. A week later the 44-year-old left a response to one of her posts only to discover that she’d commented on his site at the exact same time.

“Many people would say we fell in love online, although we fell in love face to face. But we both like to read, we both like to write, and we’re both easily smitten by the written word!” he says.

Now living together in Longueuil, the transplanted Maritimer and the Quebecoise spend hours each week updating their blogs under the same roof. Page, 38, says she still reads Hawco’s entries, and he still checks hers.

“I think bloggers are fundamentally curious people, always on the lookout for new info, new angles on news and events,” she reflects.

“It’s a great bunch of people from all ages and ethnic backgrounds who tend to share a great intellectual curiosity that is very stimulating. It’s not easy to find this kind of stimulating environment – outside of college – in our adult lives.”

Overall I’d say that is was a nicely done article, a little on the cheesy side – but that’s what makes it so much fun. If you get a chance go see the real version in order to take a gander ant the photo!

With news like this, the strike is not reading to come to an end. By the way things look like, this strike will go on for at least one or two more weeks. In only a few days, it will have been a month since students stopped going to school. As for me, on a personal level, my Spring Break is only starting at the moment I am typing these lines. No you’re not suppose to feel sorry for me. You’re suppose to feel sorry for those involved in the strike; that includes the gorvernment and the students and the teachers. Let’s get real, it’s true that we’re all working for a better future, but until that better future is reached, we’re all losers.
I suppose we all have our definition of “better future”. To me, it means a future in which everyone is a winner.

Howdy!

Le Devoir – 03.12 – by Bernard Lamarche: 987 Words on Ana Rewakowicz at Plein Sud. I’d give the review a grade of A. Nicely done, not too over the top. It gives a nice background on Ms. Rewakowicz’s work along with some faitly descriptive paragraphs about what you’ll see.

La Presse – 03.13 – by Jerome Delgado: 627 Words on Jocelyn Robert at Vox and galerie de l’UQAM. I’d give this review a grade of B. It is always easy for a reviewer to lump a couple of shows together – but when one is already limited in the amount of space allowed, it effectively cuts the space for each show (in this case to 313 words each, not good). Nonetheless with what little space allowed M. Delgado does a pasing job of describing things.

More of a pointer than a review. Radio-Canada does a 19 minute discussion with Mathieu Beaus

I wouldn’t have known it was St Patrick’s Day without making a search on google.ca. Here are two links telling about this day. It seems that only a few countries including Canada and Ireland celebrating this day. This day might not be well known because no one has a break like for Thanksgiving.