Merriam-Webster defines retarded as “slow or limited in intellectual or emotional development or academic progress”.

As I predicted, there were idiots at La Ronde while it was raining this weekend. Okay, it’s not so much a prediction since idiots are everywhere, but there is something I didn’t expect.

When I worked at La Ronde, customers (family with kids) often complained about their kids having to pay a lot for rides for which they weren’t even tall enough to be allowed to get on. Employees all thought about adjusting rates according to a person’s height as other Six Flags park charge.

I didn’t know that was going to happen this year. “Show some humanity” doesn’t mean only showing signs of goodness at all, because people getting angry at anything is part of humanity. This actually makes the world progress (or that might be just me). So some people are angry at the new rates.

A customer said “C’est pas logique. Tu es un enfant, même pas un adolescent, et ils te disent que t’es un adulte”. It translates to “It’s not logical. You’re a kid, not even a teenager and they say you’re an adult.” The logical par tprobably applies to whoever told a kid that he’s an adult doesn’t make sense indeed. A kid can be like an adult, but not be one yet.

In logic terms, there is nothing more logic than charging by height.

I have finally been able to get back on laronde.com and they are so retarded. At the time of this writing, while La Ronde already opened its gates, the map isn’t even updated, online or PDF. As a designer, I know it takes time to do something like that, but it’s not like they decided to add the Goliath and other stuff yesterday and if they did, I am sure there would have been a lot of dead people in that park by now.

By the way, since I am talking about death, only a few years ago (2001) when La Ronde was just owned by Six Flags, when I started working there until when I stopped (2003), La Ronde had and probably still has the lowest number of deaths, basically no dead people. Except there was an employee who died (may she rest in peace), but it wasn’t at La Ronde.

Now, here is a warning for anybody who plans to go to La Ronde.
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You know, when I saw the sun while waking up this morning, I thought I would enjoy going out this afternoon. After being in this house for so long doing my new design, getting some fresh air would be nice. then some dude on Windows Live Messenger (new name for the next version of MSN Messenger, it’s cool when you remove everything that makes it clunky) puts in his display name that it will rain this afternoon. I go check the weather and true enough, there is a 90% chance of precipitation.

Well… I guess I will be wet. After all, it’s just water. It dries.

Oh, and I just noticed that this a tag field at the bottom of this editing page. The field looks functional. I never really took the time to look around here :P I really just type, preview and save. Sometimes I don’t even preview. Well, this will be the first post with tags to it. I ought to tag other posts as well…

Hehe I would add the tag ‘montreal’, but it would have to be on every single post :P

A few days ago, inspectors descended upon my favourite watering hole to berate its owners for offering too generously sized a smoking section. Under the threat of fines, the owners dutifully reserved the front two-thirds of the establishment for non-smokers. This is what the place looked like at 11:45 PM last Friday night:

What the picture doesn’t show is that the remaining third of the bar was standing room only.

Words by themselves aren’t insults. It’s just the way people use them. If you never knew what these words meant, it’s time you do and the Church will help you with that.

It’s not everyday that the Church ends up in the press.

I am sure some kids have been going nuts lately about La Ronde opening this weekend and me, as usual, their website always gives me something to complain about.

Back when I worked there, the employee’s control panel looked so bad. There are things in the world that look bad but at least, they work. In La Ronde’s case, the control panel was so slow and misleading. The website itself is very slow right now. It’s a good thing their main business doesn’t revolve around it.

The new ride this year is Goliath. It’s a very very very long roller coaster that travels for about 3 minutes from one side of the park to the other. There is going to be one hell of a line up when those gates are going to open in a few hours.

It’s too bad there’s a 80% chance of precipitation on opening day. So many idiots are going to expect all rides to be opened. As an old employee, I can say that there are a lot of those idiots. Employee and clients are going to be so pissed at each other.

I love riding on a bicycle even on a rainy day like today. Compared to driving a car and taking the bus and metro, riding a bike allows to notice things more easily and I find myself to have more freedom in my movements.

The city has taken a great initiative that I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t on my bicycle. It’s those little yellow trash bags on Jean-Talon between metro Fabre and Iberville. It reminded me of one of my teachers showing me big green see-through trash bags from somewhere in Europe (I think it was France), that actually made people use them rather than throw trash on the ground.

You’d think see-through trash bags or simply trash bags would look bad, but that really only applies to the big black ones. In green or in yellow, it looks rather nice. Two colors that are completely natural with green being nature itself and yellow representing the sun. They are welcoming colors. The concept actually works; people do throw stuff in those bags instead of the ground. I went accross all of them on Jean-Talon and not one of them was empty.

Part of the reason why the green bags someplace in Europe work is because it’s strange, unusual and also because the bags are emptied quite often. I hope they also do that with these yellow bags and I also hope that it will spread in other municipalities as well.

Montreal is quite clean when compared to other cities in the world. These bags will just make the city cleaner.

Instead of rolling out a list of our names, the authors link at the right now opens a page with the list of all (active?) authors. There is this new thing (on metblogs anyways) called photos of people. Maybe I should put a happier photo…

[update] i switched my photo to something more… i don’t know. i can’t really put one word on it. it’s creepy, weird, sad, happy, angry, fake, freaky, etc.

The Montreal Gazette tells us this morning of a new exhibition appearing at the Pointe-à-Callière Museum from May 16 to October 15, 2006. The exhibition portrays an unknown Japan, much older than the land of samurai and geisha: a prehistoric land, but one that already had rich cultures that produced unique, refined objects. It covers the period from over 30,000 years ago and ends in the 7th century AD, with the birth of the first unified state and the gradual spread of writing. It includes 150 of the most splendid artifacts from the collections of the Tokyo National Museum and ten other Japanese institutions. According to Louise Pothier, the project manager for this exhibition, it is the first time such a prehistoric collection from the Tokyo National Museum has appeared in North America.

There’s a most interesting web page describing it on the Pointe-à-Callière website. Unfortunately I cannot include a precise link for that since the website is in old-fashioned Frames. When will designers realize that you can create much more user-friendly websites with more modern technology. The page will also not be quite so visible in Google. However it’s certainly worth the slight trouble of searching for the exact web page on the website.

Every year some Montreal boroughs offer free flowers to their residents. Towards the end of the month of May you can line up to pick up your flowers… And help embellish the city by having a flowery balcony, front lawn or window box! All of the details for the distribution of flowers is available on this city website page. The only bad thing is that I will miss it… I’ll be in London at the end of the Month! Grrr!

Photo by mricon, flickr.

Jeliel3 posted an interesting piece on his weblog… Here’s it is…

Give Us Your Panhandlers, Your Squeegees, Your Homeless Beggars.
I’m feeling harassed by all the beggars and panhandlers in my town. I can’t make it 100 feet without getting hassled by somebody wanting some spare change or subway tickets. If I’d give a quarter every time someone asked me, I’d be broke by the end of the week.

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