Carpe Diem and Rain Boots : Notes on the Mois des morts

"Henry Pharris, ring bearer, wore L.L. Bean rain boots with his navy blue blazer and khakis." The Daily Star, November 5, 2007

This is a rainy day when we will attend the funeral of a good friend and neighbor Michel Freitag. November, they say here, is the mois des morts, partly because it begins with All Souls' Day, and partly because the weather is usually gray and the days are growing very short. This year we have had record sunshine, but death is closer than usual. Besides Michel, this week has seen funerals for our brother-in-law's mother as well as that of the best friend of another neighbor.

Against this somber background, it was a delight this morning to find the account of the wedding two years ago of Christian Monberg and Michelle Lafrance. I stumbled on it following a track back from this blog: it's amazing where lateral thinking on the net can lead you. At any rate, here is the link to the account of their wedding, which sounds as if it were lovely. And Henry Pharris must have looked marvelous! (I remember when Lukas, aged three or so, insisted on wearing his red rain boots everywhere too.)

Best wishes to the whole Monberg-Lafrance-Pharris family. To the Freitag-du Pasquier family also. Carpe diem!

More Proof That PPPs Are Bad for Health--and Many Other Things

Public private partnerships (PPPs) to build mega hospitals were foisted on Quebec by politicians and bureaucrats who made biased calculations, the province's auditor general says.

In his report, released yesterday, Renaud Lachance reports that planning and building the two super hospitals (one based on the Université de Montréal medical school and the other, on McGill's) would have been cheaper using methods used to construct major projects in the past. The arguments for PPPs were deeply flawed and PPPs have cost far more than conventional project management, planning and financing would have.

Lachance also revealed several instances of collusion and lack of oversight in the awarding of contracts for highway construction and repairs. His careful study adds ammunition to growing criticism of how the current Liberal government has run things in recent years. And the way he demolishes the arguments for PPPs should lay to rest any idea that using the partnerships profits anybody but the people hired to consult, design and build the projects.

His report comes too late to do much about the hospital projects, but it should be read with care by anybody who wonders about how to manage a society. Never forget that private companies are ALWAYS in business to make a profit, and far too often profit comes not from efficiency but from getting all that be gotten from the public purse.

Tremblay Acts Like a Good Christian in Appointing Bégeron to Montreal's Exec Committee?

A bit of drollery from Radio Can this morning:

Apparently newly re-elected Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay’s spiritual advisors are very happy with his decision to include Richard Bérgeron, leader of one of two opposition parties, on the city’s executive committee.

After all the Sermon on the Mount says: "If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also,"(Matthew 38) and Tremblay's made that a lot easier by putting his leftist adversary there.

Going to be some fights, do you think?

Recycling Household Waste Is Going to Be Tough, and It's Not Clear Whether They've Got That Leaf Thing Right

The Quebec government says it wants to ban "green" and recyclable waste from landfills within a decade, starting with paper and cardboard with the aim of lowering average household waste from 810 to 700 kilograms per year. It announced Monday that it will be earmarking $650 million over the next ten years for projects, including new recycling sites.

That’s good news in the main, altough as always the devil will be in the details. If we’re talking mostly about things like garden waste and grass clippings, there should be few problems. But when it comes to kitchen scraps, I can see major difficulties.

Let me say that I’ve been composting ever since we move in this house, more than 30 years ago, so I know just how scraps can stink if you don’t handle them right, and also what a mess you can have if you spill a container full of stuff ready to go on the compost heap. By now I’ve got the hang of it, so except in years when we have so many pears that they ferment in the compost, we don’t have smell. That's the result of trial and error, though, and I don't think it would be wise to leave much to chance if you want to get everyone recycling kitchen waste.

What will be needed is a concerted campaign to educate people on what they can compost—egg shells maybe, but no meat scraps, for example. And the pickups have to be absolutely reliable, otherwise people are just going to bundle things up and put it all out for the regular trash collection. We have run into that this fall, when pick up dates for leaves have been unclear: it seems that most folks have either just raked everything into the street, or put leaves in garbage bags. That's no way to solve a problem.

The Power of Song II: Scenes from Portugal and Brazil

More Portuguese music today: The first is "Fado Tropical," by Chico Buarque de Holanda. It's sung and played against the background of newsreels from the Portuguese Carnation Revolution in 1974 where that country peacefully overthrew a dictatorship nearly 60 years old. At the time, Brazil was also under a military control, and the song caused great waves there, since it was seen as a protest against what was going on there.

The second clip is from a multi-part BBC documentary on Brazilian music. Its history is far more than "The Girl from Ipanema", and, like Pete Seeger, it demonstrates the Power of Song.

Saturday Photo: Fall in Kamloops, an Old Railroad Town That's Now a Regional Centre

Last weekend I was in Kamloops, British Columbia, a town on the confluence of two branches of the Thompson Rivers. Its history as a settlement goes back to fur trader days (although the First Nations were there long before then) and at the end of the 19th century it became a major railway center.

Those days are past: the major employers now are a pulp mill, regional health facilities and Thompson Rivers University. The scenery is spectacular in that pared-down arid, Western way, and while I was there the weather was wonderfully sunny.