Honk honk honk! honk honk honk honk! I guess Portugal just won the quarterfinals against England for the World Cup 2006. We have a huge Portuguese community in Montreal, and the team's victories this year at the Cup and in 2004 for the Euro cup have been a huge source of pride. I'm not a big soccer fan, but I do love the fact that Mtl's cultural communities literally fly the colors, packing the bars and cafes and driving around honking after a win (or even a big goal). Italy, Portugal, Brazil (mostly Portuguese again), France... I even saw some cars with Ukraine flags. It's a cool part of being in such a multiculti city.
tags: world cup soccer portugal football fifa italy brazil ukraine
Moving Day
One of the things that's crazy about being in Montreal in the summer is that there's just too much to do. On any given day, there are just a billion jillion activities and things to do.
Around May, the vegetation here just explodes into frenetic growth -- trying to get a full cycle of life in in our small sub-arctic growing season. Quebec's forests are as dense and overgrown as any Amazonian jungle. I think humans' social schedule during the summer is like that, too: trying to get a full year of fun into 4-5 months.
Take today, for example. It may be 13 Messidor to us citoyens, but for the people of the North today is 1 July, officially Canada Day. The national holiday of Canada, it's celebrated from Coast to Coast by lots of people who love Canada and want to celebrate their Canadianness.
And then there's Quebec.
Sure, Montreal has some nice Canada Day events, but there's something furtive about them. Even though somewhere north of 45% of Quebec's population wants to remain in the union, it's still rare to see overt Canada Day celebrations, outside the sponsored events.
But for most Quebecois, July 1 is Moving Day -- the day when everyone's lease is up, by government mandate, and those people who are going to move this year go to their new homes. There are moving vans in the street and people queued up at the rental places -- typical time to rent is 2-4 hours.
We moved on Moving Day last year to our new, great apartment, and it's nice to be here. This may be the first Moving Day we've been here that no one's asked for help moving. That might say something about the stage of life we're in -- people are buying their own homes and settling down -- and it may say something about our reliability as friends since we had a baby. In any event, here's one Moving Day when any moving I do is on my own.
tags: canada canada day quebec moving day montreal
Jazz
There was a Canada Day parade this morning on the other side of town (where the anglophones and federalists live...), but we were too tired to go. So we instead skipped down to Place des Arts to visit the free outdoor parts of the Montreal Jazz Fest.
Case in point with Montreal festivals in the summer: it was big, with tons to do, and we were totally unable to deal with doing it. We had some Molson Dry, saw some music playing and Amita June clapped along (she's a great clapper!), then we had quiche and a salmon wrap and some Molson Dry, then Amita June went and played in the kids' area, then we saw some more music, then some samba, then klesmer, then off to home.
Good time, but tiring. I feel obliged to enjoy Montreal summers, but sometimes it's just too much.
tags: montreal jazz fest montreal jazz festival amitajune klesmer samba
France
Honk honk! Honk honk honk honk honk!! So I guess France just beat Brazil to get into the semi-finals. Is it actually allowed to have a World Cup without Brazil in the semi-finals? I thought it was a rule.
Niko, my French Friend, was complaining last week that the French fans were just loitering around the bars on St. Laurent rather than being boisterous like other fans did when their teams won. Not today: on our way back from Jazz Fest, we saw a huge tow truck with a gigantic tricolor draped from the back trolling up and down Mont Royal.
Kind of a bummer for the Brazilians -- and the rest of us who enjoy Brazil fans' antics. But I guess that's the way it goes sometimes.
tags: brazil france world cup fans
Fancruft
I don't remember what I was looking up on Wikipedia, but there was some fancruft on the page and I ended up wasting half an hour reading Simpsons articles. I want my half hour back, Wikipedia!
tags: wikipedia simpsons fancruft
Marilynne Robinson
When I was a freshman in college, one of my favorite instructors, Michael Near, assigned "Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson as an English 1B assignment. I found the story haunting and beautiful and altogether excellent. I tried digging up more of her work at the UC Berkeley main library, and all I could get was "Mother Country" -- her indictment of stratified society and nuclear energy. In it, she promised never to write fiction again.
So I was stunned to read a quote by Robinson in Shannon's Livejournal. Wow. Apparently Marilynne Robinson has written a book of essays in 1998 and a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel in 2005. Incredible. Why was I not informed?
I've got some reading to do.
tags: marilynne robinson gilead novel
Full-text feed
So I've got a full-text feed now. Hopefully it works for those folks with Planet aggregators or whatever, and especially for Joey Hess, who hates the stuff below the fold.
Some corrections that I made to older posts seem to have fudged up some planets, notably Planet Debian, for which I'm kind of bummed. But I think I've fixed the problem, and this should be the only time it happens. Unfortunately, since I write a lot, it means a lot of scrolling.
tags: rss full text feed joey hess below the fold planet planet debian