Archive for March, 2007

Et l’autobus

Published
by
Mark
on March 26, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcC31r1BxBY[/youtube]

Il fait beau dans l’métro! Peut-tu en dire autant dans ton auto?

Qui a pu croire que tout les monde était tellement gai dans les années 70?

Update: OK, I needed a break, so I’ve decided to try my best at translating this suspiciously cheerful song. Some of it was a little hard for me to understand, so I can’t vouch for my translation accuracy… But here you are: the result of listening to this thing over and over again!

It’s beautiful in the métro
Everyone is gay
Everyone has hearts of sunshine

It’s beautiful in the métro
The faster it goes, the more beautiful it is to our ears

It’s beautiful in the métro
There’s blue sky in everybody’s happy eyes

It’s beautiful in the métro
Because, today, our métro is the most beautiful in the world

It’s beautiful in the métro
And on the bus, its little brother

It’s beautiful in the métro
(And the bus)
Can you say as much in your car?

Ah ha ha ha ha!

It’s beautiful in the métro
Our métro is the most joyous and as it sings it’s even better—

Long live the métro!
(And the bus)

Yes!
It’s beautiful in the métro

Another Update: OK, I found some more accurate French lyrics in the YouTube comments and used that for the translation. My original was pretty close, but I definitely wouldn’t have guessed some of the faster lines. These people sing too quickly. ;)

Incidentally, “il fait beau” usually refers to the weather, so as a non-native speaker, I’m not entirely sure what it means in this context.

Minor Horror Show

Published
by
Premee
on March 22, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

I normally wouldn’t post so soon after a recent post, but I had a bit of a shock today – and a bit of a revelation, in that an observant naturalist is ever-gratified by the little dramas of suburbia. It seems, a few feet from our front door, the melting snow revealed a dead bird of the grouse family (I can’t ID it even after several strenuous minutes with ‘Birds of Alberta’ – it looks like a gray partridge, but what’s a gray partridge doing in Regency Heights?). Except it didn’t, in fact, die last winter and it wasn’t revealed by the snow. Close examination suggested it had died about ten minutes before I walked up the steps. The body cavity was a pool of nail-polish-hued blood, vampy scarlet, not a hint of oxidized brown in the sad bowl of its chest or in the spots of blood haloing it. So there is something in this neighbourhood that kills birds and leaves them in the front yard.

Suspects:

1. Housecat

2. Merlin or peregrine falcon (which we see regularly around the place)

3. Coyote (ditto)

4. Dingo

Aging At An Unusual Rate

Published
by
Premee
on March 18, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 5 Comments

Yesterday I was about fourteen.  I have this brand-new killer infatuation on someone I met in September, so I was sitting on my bed eating Nibs and reading Asterix and Obelix comics and listening to the Rolling Stones in an effort to distract myself from thinking about the guy all day.

Today I went out shopping for a dinette set for my Calgary apartment.  Furniture store after furniture store and how much are these chairs and can I get that in glass and what colours of melamine do you have and when can this table be delivered?  April tenth, you say?

I feel about forty.   Jesus.  Growing up is the pits.

Ah, Déneigement

Published
by
Mark
on March 9, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 3 Comments

Quelle horreur! C’est Bonhomme! Il va se vengé!

Let me talk a little about the snow removal process in Montréal. Not to bore you, of course, but rather because I’d like to share what has to be the most efficient and annoying process I’ve witnessed in quite some time.

It starts, of course, after a large snowfall. (Locals believe this is caused whenever Bonhomme Carnaval journeys away from Québec city only to be hit by numerous oncoming vehicles, sending his carcass flying over Montréal where it breaks into millions of unique snowflakes. He’s later re-assembled and shipped back to Québec, I assume.)

Now, in removing the scattered carcass of Bonhomme, Montréal has adopted a process unlike anything I’ve ever seen. City workers erect signs notifying people to not park on the streets during certain hours on certain days. After everyone has ignored or forgotten the signs, special annoyance trucks arrive to annoy everyone. (This isn’t hyperbole. The trucks have one purpose: To annoy the hell out of everyone until they move their bloody vehicles. To give you a good picture of what this sounds like, think of what every car alarm in the city must sound like… sped up, then amplified.)

These alarm trucks will come into your neighbourhood without respect to the time of day or the number of people living along the block. My apartment complex, for example, has over 600 units, and we’re one of maybe 8 along our downtown block. Since this is downtown, the snow removal happens at the earliest possible time allowed: 7:00 AM.

Now, after everyone has been woken up by shrill sirens, the tow trucks come and haul all the remaining cars away. Snow pushers then move all the snow to the middle of the road instead of the sides. Special brushes clear the sidewalks.

Once all the snow is in the middle of the road, the biggest mother of a snowblower you’ve ever freakin’ laid eyes on drives alongside an even larger dumptruck and spews all of Bonhomme’s remnants inside. The snow is then trucked off to many of the city’s fine snowdumps, where playful children who disobey warning signs get severe chemical burns, and where the meltwater (which comes early thanks to no shortage of salt) is collected, decontaminated, and dumped into the river.

So, there you go. Montréal’s snow removal process. Even with the unrelenting aural torment trucks, it sure beats Calgary’s old system: wait for a mythical “chinook” to melt everything and use the snow budget to chisel new potholes in liberal-leaning (i.e. not hardline Reform) neighborhoods.