WTF: The rest of the week in news

Wondering WTF happened this week? In this week’s Wednesday-thru-Friday round-up, we’ve got doomsday scenarios of various sorts, Monsieur Trottoir, student unrest and more.


One of many eminently entertaining meteor memes. Thanks, universe!

Good news! Our country’s zombie apocalypse, which drew international attention, has been cancelled! Actually, that’s not true — it’s been replaced by the government with a flood. How will you ever know if you’ll outlive the zombies now? Unless the apocalypse is brought on by the seafaring undead, that is. Then you’re set.

Oh, hey, with a Quebecer in the running, did you want to, like, bet on who will be named pope? Well, you can’t — at least not through Loto-Québec. Per a spokesman for said gambling authority: “Betting on a religious event, we’re not sure that would be the best way to go.”

Next week, the ever-entertaining Chabonneau Commission will welcome Monsieur Trottoir himself, Nicolo Milioto, to its proceedings. Milioto, who earned his nickname by winning many sidewalk contracts for his construction company, was captured on video producing wads of cash from his socks at the old Consenza Social Club, where Montreal’s foremost underworld figures once went to kick their heads back and shoot the shit.

But on Sunday, while He of the Sidewalks prepares to be grilled, some of Montreal’s aging activists will be taking a walk down memory lane as they protest Bill 14, the Parti Québécois’s attempt at clamping down on English in the workplace and on access to English schools. On hand will be Darryl Gray, Jimmy Kay et al — in short, guys who some question will be able to draw that critical segment of the population whose hair hasn’t begun to grey. Like others, we wonder whether their retrograde rhetoric, that of the angryphone, will do anyone any good.

ASSÉ, the Association pour une solidarité syndicate étudiante, will not be attending this month’s higher education summit. According to spokesman Jérémie Bédard-Wien, the group feels betrayed by the PQ, which seems set on indexing education to the cost of living. But guess what? Marois and co. don’t care about threats to take to the streets again or whatever else.

Whatever is right, though. A meteor hit Russia. Hundreds were injured. Doomsday shit. But don’t let something as negligible as human casualty stop the flow of memes from, er, exploding all over the Internet, as the tasteful bros at Mashable put it. ■

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