Rats In New York

What a weird way to take care of the rat overpopulation - scientists are eying (chemical) sterilization to stop them from procreating in the New York City underground. Especially since poison wasn't working all that well...

“This technology, if successful, could complement our current strategies of poisoning and exclusion for rodent management,” Thomas Lamb, the chief of innovation and technology for New York City Transit, told the committee.

For those of you who are wondering:

The authority said that the typical city rat, known as the Norway rat, reaches sexual maturity at 8 to 12 weeks and can have as many as 12 pups a litter and as many as seven litters a year, “depending on refuse and track litter access.” The rats’ typical life span is 5 to 12 months.

Video Of The Week: Chix N' Dix

Chix N' Dix is a terrific Montréal punk band who recently released their first full-length, Zebras In Reverse.

From Kryztera Oi!'s smart lyrics and energetic delivery to Jessica Kaye's reserved guitar virtuosity (the Chix) and a rhythm section comprised of bass player Kyle O'Shea and drummer Tomass Durdon (the Dix) who are smart enough to play frenetically while giving their charismatic female counterparts center stage, the band has often won over crowds of better-established bands by their sheer passion and delivery.

Each year, their hundreds of internet-savvy friends vote them near the top of the Montreal Mirror's list of best bands, giving them an added visibility I hope they will enjoy soon.

In this video, CND are seen traveling (and playing) amidst Montréal's subway system (''metro''), spending perhaps more time at the Crémazie and Lionel-Groulx stations than is advisable for health reasons, but rocking out all the same. I particularly enjoyed the scene where they are filmed in the up-and-down escalators and the time where the train stops at a station and the people there decide to walk into another wagon rather than be subjected to the band - feels real.

And finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Kaye being an important solo singer-songwriter in her own right. And now for the video...

Not My Day

Your boss tells you on Friday : ''no need to show up in the morning on Monday, 1 PM will suffice. Sleep in.'' Sounds like a great thing, right?

But of course Murphy will take exception to this and fuck it right up, evil scheming invisible bastard that He is.

So I go to bed at 10 PM-ish, I think, which is early as fuck for me. My roommate/little brother Yan got home at 3:30 AM and woke me up – and I couldn’t fall back asleep. At least I got some reading done – Pearl Jam Twenty (the book – while I await the arrival of the Blu-ray in the mail, possibly Friday). I’m at the year 2000 – Binaural.

But the worst part was the subway ride to fucking work: squeezed up, like fucking mushrooms in a can, and getting pushed by all those sweaty animals as they take the longest possible fucking route to the train’s exit, by bumping into 20 people rather than 5. For that kind of fucking swine, the fastest way from Point A to Point B is by Texas via the fucking moon, with a pit stop for coffee.

Murder might have been the case they gave Snoop Dogg, but I was tempted to follow that path as well. As a matter of fact, I was abnormally over-aggressive on the mid-day hour, considering.

The evening’s looming and my energy level’s dropping, my vision is blurring, and I know I’ll have to share another ride with those fucking worker bees in just a hundred minutes or so. I recently saw a phrase online, possibly on Facebook, that read ''You are not stuck in traffic; you ARE traffic''. Well, I’m not. Not at all. The 9-to-5 crowd is not my crowd, unless you mean the people who start drinking at 9 PM and only stop at 5AM to shower and start their day. In which case, that literally is my crowd, the one that comes to my fucking shows, the ones I owe a lot to.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

On A Rainy Day In Soho

Don't go chasing waterfalls... let them come to you.

All it takes is a rainy day in NYC...

Fucking Buses (Murphy's Law Part 2)

We've gotten used to missing City Transit's buses, having them not come on schedule - or not at all. So much so that those who complain are viewed as impatient cry-babies or annoying assholes.

Well, I missed one on Saturday night, but I can't blame the STM (the transit 'company'/monopoly) for it. It's more a matter of circumstance, another fine example of Murphy's Law fucking with people's brains.

I was at a friend's house, visiting him for his birthday, in a pretty ghetto part of town that's a bus ride away from a subway station, having a good time, drinking some fine Cuban rum, and actually comparing between two kinds of Havana Club brown rums (5 and 7 anos, respectively). Since he works rather early in the morning at his new job, the plan had always been for me to leave at a relatively early midnight-ish.

Over the course of the evening, plans had developped with a couple of other friends, to meet them at their favourite bar, Le Passeport, smack-dab in the middle of downtown. If I can catch a bus that takes me at the subway station before its closing time (close to 1AM - what kind of self-respecting city doesn't have a 24-hour underground subway service, anyway?), all would be fine. It never happens, I always miss it, but technically, some day, it could.

So we looked at the bus schedules. One bus at 11:55PM, one at 12:27AM, one at 12:51AM. It was 12:15AM. Had we not been in Montreal, I would have done everything in my power to run the 5-minute distance to the bus stop and caught it. But in this city, with the STM's record of punctuality, a 10-minute buffer is nowhere near enough. The bus can be over 5 minutes early, over 5 minutes late, or just decide to not show. We decided it would be safer for me to wait 20 minutes so I could have a realistic shot at the 12:51AM bus, which would lead me to an area of downtown where I'd be a 20-30 minute walk from my destination, or perhaps I'd be lucky enough to have a night bus (what we have to replace the subways at night, which often only come every hour and stop running at 4:30AM) come and take me there.

So I get to the bus stop. There was no way in Hell this was going to be easy. There's a sign that reads ''because of the public works and street repairing, the service at this stop has been moved to the corner of Légaré street''. With no other signalisation, no maps, nothing. I'm not from the area, I have no clue where to go.

So I do the wise thing: stay on the 'main' street, Côte-Des-Neiges, and walk towards where I'm going until I reach either Légaré, or the bus comes back on its route because the repairs zone is done. Cross Plamondon, cross Carlton. Realise Légaré is probably parallel to Côte-Des-Neiges, so I look towards the West for a street big enough to have a bus re-routed there, but the only street worth a light is at least four blocks away. I decide to stay on my path, because four blocks is enough to have the bus zip right past me when I get there, and there is still a chance repairs will end soon and I'll be back on the bus' path. Plus, being on a main street, I can also catch a cab.

It's cold and getting colder. I hail a cab, and tell him to head downtown. Two blocks South, we cross the bus, turning back onto Côte-Des-Neiges. It's already cost me $5 to get into this cab, so I figure ''fuck it'' and stay in it, and head where I'm going directly.

I would never have caught up with the bus on time by walking. But Murphy's Law made it so that by taking the cab, I met up with it. And it's happened so many times with city buses that it feels normal.