One senior? I'm a believer!!

I don't expect a lot of hard news from the Sunday paper. Especially when it's the Halifax Chronicle-Herald.

But when I took a look at this past Sunday's front page, I thought maybe I was reading an edition of The Masthead News instead. That's one of our weekly community papers, given to headlines like Girl Guides to Learn Self-Defence, and serial punctuation abuse: ("... a big, new store.")

The main story is a CP piece about a Montreal woman who has had season tickets to the Canadiens for 55 years. There's a big photo of her above the fold. It's a gentle, boring human interest piece. What really got me was the sub-head:

Montreal senior a season ticket holder for 55 years; believes 2008 team can win the Stanley Cup

Hey, one senior can't be wrong!

Google doesn't know when to be offended

Looking for the number of a researcher I want to interview at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital, I Googled these words: Jewish General Montreal.

The Google ads on the side of the search page were topped by one from Google itself, linking to this page, where I found the following text:

An explanation of our search results.

If you recently used Google to search for the word "Jew," you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We'd like to explain why you're seeing these results when you conduct this search.

A site's ranking in Google's search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for "Jew" brings up one such unexpected result...

We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it.

Two problems. 1) I did not search for the word "Jew." 2) These are the first-page search results Google came up with:

• Jewish General Hospital
• Segal Cancer Centre
• Dr. Clown -- Jewish General Hospital (an outfit that sends clowns to hospitals to entertain)
• Department of Otolaryngology -- Staff
• Two Nurses at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital Have Lost Their Licences
• Example: Jewish General Hospital, Montreal,QC (a page from Cancer Care Ontario)
• Sir Mortimer B Davis Jewish General Hospital (search results from a site reselling papers)

You get the idea. A whole cornucopia of offensiveness.

Montreal round-up

Things I learned on a recent trip to Montreal:

• Xavier Caféine's "Montréal (Cette Ville)" (Chorus: "Cette ville va me rendre fou / Cette ville va me rendre complètement fou") is the perfect accompaniment to have when you drive downtown from the airport, having negotiated the Dorval circle, cars whipping from one lane to the other all around you.
• I have been away from the city long enough to have forgotten the frequencies of all the radio stations I used to listen to.
• The few mini-malls near my house that I consider to be horrendous sprawl would barely qualify as one block in Laval.
• Signage continues to be up to its usual standards. Drop your rental car off at the airport, follow the crosswalk to the terminal, and before you get there you're confronted with a concrete barrier and two signs, one for international arrivals pointing left, and one for domestic arrivals pointing right. Departures anyone?
• Ted Tevan notwithstanding, the meals at Chenoy's seem a lot less impressive than they did when I was a teenager.
• The Reluctants have some great new songs, and the new album they're recording should be a good one.
  

Share the Road

It always gets me when public responsibilities become shifted to individuals. Here's an example.

Andy Riga blogged yesterday and today about his experiences riding a bike in downtown Montreal. The situation is maybe marginally better in Halifax, though Montreal has the better bike paths.

I quit riding my bike to work in Montreal after a car door threw me into the middle of Decarie Blvd at rush hour one afternoon. I loved riding, but I didn’t love nearly being killed.

In Halifax we have a bike path down the St. Margaret’s Bay Road, right as you enter the Halifax Peninsula, that is tiny, narrow and poorly marked. It ends suddenly (for no apparent reason), and the road carries on. The bike path’s terminus is marked by a sign showing a cyclist and a car, and bearing the slogan “Share the road.” Yeah, well it would be a whole lot easier to share it if there were a bike path.

Instead of the municipality taking some responsibility for actually building decent paths for cyclists, they do basically nothing. But drivers and cyclists are asked to "share the road." That's right kids. And if we all hold hands and smile, the world will be a much nicer place too.