Today was Jacques Parizeau’s funeral. Lest you forget who he was we will jog your memory and remind you that he was the author of the 1995 referendum that nearly broke up Canada. Standing by and making sure nothing went wrong were the Montreal police who have been in a contract dispute with the city for months. As they are not allowed to strike, they have taken to not wearing their uniform, instead opting for army pants and baseball caps, which they wore today.
This past December Jean Beliveau passed away. At that funeral the police force donned their regular uniform as a sign of respect for the city’s most beloved ambassador. The mayor was not happy with how the police were dressed today. Here’s a newsflash: One has to earn respect. It cannot be commanded. Jacques Parizeau earned the respect of a few diehard separatists. It is pretty obvious that even with a ‘state funeral’, the majority of the population wwhileas not overly fond of him, including French Canadians as everyone was witness to today when the police made their very obvious statement.
Those two scary dudes who escaped from Dannemora prison are still on the loose, but not for long. Slowly the story is trickling out as police speak to different people who worked inside the prison walls. It seems that there was a woman who was supposed to pick them up when they emerged from the manhole but panicked at the last minute and never showed up, leaving the men to their own devices. Dannemora prison is very close to Plattsburgh New York, a sleepy town 45 minutes south of Montreal. To say that the people who live there are nervous would be a gross understatement.
They are sleeping with guns, shotguns, knives, swords, bows and arrows – you name it they have it. A lotta them folks are huntin people and know how to shoot a deer from far way. If those two men are roaming around corn fields in the rain with no food they are going to be mighty hungry and desperate pretty soon. But they best not mess with those small town people and find a way outta Dodge real quick. In case you have nothing to worry about, we’ll help you. There could be an egg shortage due to the bird flu. Seems that 40 million chickens have been infected and many of them cannot be used for anything, especially eggs.
So while there will be eggs in the stores, they will be much more money than we are used to paying. Eventually the hen population will be replenished, but until then don’t be shocked by the prices. Toronto is a very large metropolitan city with a very old subway system. No one every bothered to upgrade it. On Sunday night there was a nasty rain storm and the Toronto Transit Company (TTC) transferred its communications system to a backup power supply. Problem was that while the TTC was able to move all its communications systems to backup power, the backup power system itself failed for ‘unknown reasons’. Uh oh. Dat doesn’t sound good.
When it failed, it brought down everything. Not just the TTC’s radio communications with trains and stations, but also the TTC’s email and telephone systems, too. So with one faulty circuit board, the TTC basically lost all of its ability to communicate with its subways, and then lost the ability to communicate with itself and the public, too.
Then they couldn’t get the buses up and running fast enough so about 1.3 million people were left stranded for a few hours until things started working again. Makes Montreal look like nirvana.
Imagine our surprise when we checked into one of our favorite sites only to find a non-Jewish jockey praying at the holy resting place of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Why? Well, unless you have been living on Mars or under a rock somewhere, you must know that American Pharoah won the triple crown, a feat not accomplished in over 37 years. The man asking for Divine intervention was the jockey.
So what exactly is the triple crown? It is when one horse wins the three top races in America: The Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes. American Pharoah, who happens to be a stunning horse, is owned by Egyptian Jews. We caught the family on Morning Joe Monday and found all of them, the four children, husband and wife – as excited as a schoolchild who had won the spelling bee. You get the drift. Nice to see normal on what is often beyond the pale.
We’ll talk