A new restaurant in Montreal, O Noir, offers a pitch-black dining experience. How are you supposed to know if there’s a fly in your soup (well, they don’t serve soup!) or a hair — or hare, for that matter — in your hollandaise? The neat thing is that all the serving staff are sight-impaired, which means they’ll have the upper hand on most of the patrons, who’ll be living a new, disorienting and possibly life-changing (okay, let’s not push it) experience.

It’s located on Ste-Catherine near Guy, in fact, right here.

…besides the obvious 5th anniversary that is all over the news, today is also a nationalistic day of celebration in Cataluña (like Quebec’s fête de la Saint-Jean on June 24), called La Diada Nacional de Catalunya. It “celebrates” (”commemorates” is a better word) the fall of Barcelona to the troops of Felipe V on this day in 1714, and the subsequent loss of many Catalan institutions. It was officially instituted as a national holiday by Catalan Parliament in 1980.

Unrelated (I think) to this, here is a photo I took of a restaurant in Almería (southern Spain) last year. It’s name is — well, read it for yourself! I am not sure what historic event its name refers to, though surely not the New York events since it seems the restaurant was established in 2000 (?).

Ninety years ago was the second (!) collapse of the Pont de Québec, a humbling lesson of engineering failure which is taught to Canadian engineering students. The bridge was long rumoured to be the material from which the original iron rings were made for engineering grads.

One hundred years ago today, in 1906, Mahatma Gandhi adopted his peaceful protest methodology called satyagraha (”devotion to the truth”).

Devotion to the truth. Now there’s something worth celebrating!

Guess who dropped in on the tam-tams today on Mont-Royal? I was just going for a walk in the beautiful sunshine this afternoon when I came across…no, hang on a second. First let me set the scene.

I always tell people: “Every time I wander around Montreal, I see something amazing, something I’ve never seen before.” People always roll their eyes. But it really is true (though admittedly I may have a stronger sense of “everyday magic” than most people, or may be more observant…or, yes, more naïve). Anyhow, often I kick myself for not bringing my camera with me in my wanderings, to document these never-ceasing wonders. I almost left without the camera today. Almost. I lugged it along and expected some variation on Murphy’s Law to kick in, resulting in there being nothing interesting going on in the entire city. Like bringing an umbrella to fend off rain, I thought bringing a camera would “fend off” all the weird and remarkable things that would otherwise have happened.

I got to Mont-Royal and l’Esplanade (just off the north end of Parc Jeanne-Mance) when I saw a minor car accident. A policeman had just shown up to inspect the crunched car. It was not particularly exciting, certainly did not warrant a photo. “Well, that was it,” I thought, “my ‘interesting thing’ for today.”

As I crossed between the busy tennis courts and baseball diamonds of Parc Jeanne-Mance, I noticed lots of fire trucks and police cars on avenue du Parc, and it looked like they had blocked it off to traffic. I thought nothing of the big crowd gathered along avenue du Parc. My first thought was that perhaps it was the finish line of today’s Marathon de Montreal. Or some fiesta or other.

But as I approached I saw something totally unexpected…a plane! It had landed on avenue du Parc not long before I showed up. Of course, like everyone else standing around, I took photos!

“Sir, you can’t park on Parc…!”

From talking to people who’d witnessed the event (and further research once I got home), I learned a few things:

• the Cessna 172 left from St-Hubert airport around 14h45 (that’s according to this tracking site; the news reported they took off at 15h30 and landed at 16h) and ran into engine trouble. Someone told me it was near the Olympic Stadium when the engine cut out, others said Parc Lafontaine, though I’m not sure how witnesses of the landing would know that!
• apparently Dorval air traffic control told the pilot to find a straight, wide street to land on, and he settled on avenue du Parc.
• the pilot glided the plane all the way there and landed in the northbound direction on avenue du Parc, not far south of the crosswalk by the statue and tam-tam spot.
• remarkably the pilot avoided all the cars and pedestrians (I spoke to someone who had screamed at her friend to get out of the road — he was crossing the street and of course the plane was coming in noiselessly! Why don’t they put horns on airplanes? toot-toot)
• he clipped his left wingtip on a sign attached to the traffic light in the middle of the road and bent it around the pole, though incredibly didn’t hit the post itself. The tip of his wing sheared off, and closer to the fuselage the wing had a good kink in it.
• he rolled to a stop a few hundred metres up Parc, where a mob of people swarmed his plane (hey, really smart, people). There were, of course, tons of folks in the park, and some of them managed to capture the landing on their digital cameras. (basically lots of peole saying: “Holy f#ck! Are you shooting this?”) Local 911 operators are swamped with calls.
• for some reason, there was a shoe on top of the wing. I heard that someone threw it there when the crowd mobbed him, but this makes no sense. I have no idea why it was there, but it stayed up for a few hours afterwards, until the pilot finally reached up and took it down.
• there had been the pilot plus two (paying) passengers on a tour, one of them a 10-year-old kid on his first plane trip… (-; He didn’t seem too shaken up (maybe a bit bored with having to stand around for hours afterwards?). When I arrived the police had already pushed back the crowd and taped off the area. Later the Transportation Safety Board guy was clearly interviewing the pilot and walking over the scene with him.

Good fun! No one was hurt so it was actually quite a thrill, and (as I heard echoed about a thousand times by everyone I passed): “It’s not something you see every day!” Perhaps not precisely that, but something incredible is always going on around here, closer than you think. (Hmm, perhaps I’m being affected by my reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude…) All right, cut the blathering — now a few more photos.

Cessna and a fire truck play “chicken”.

The football game must go on! (a different kind of “touchdown”)

Here you can see some of the damage to the wing, and the mysterious presence of a shoe on top of the wing.

The view southwards on du Parc, including the traffic light the plane clipped.

Here are a few news stories that have come out about this so far: TVA; Radio-Canada; a longer story on Monday morning in the Gazette; finally CBC gets around to posting the story; the news story on TQS (video).

More fun: someone’s photos just before and at touchdown! Also, the pilot’s story.

For fun, here is a stereo pair I took of the forest in Cathedral Grove this summer, on Vancouver Island. I am posting the images in the “cross-eyed” configuration, because it seems more people I know can do that rather than “goofy-eyed” stereo (to be fair, many can’t do either — probably for lack of practice). The 3D separation is a bit excessive on this image anyhow, so doing it cross-eyed gives more of a sense of distance, kind of like looking down the “business end” of a pair of binoculars. Enjoy…if you dare can!

 

A big enhorabuena to Spain for winning the basketball world championship today! (English link here)

For those who didn’t even know the basketball world championship was on, here’s all you need to know: the NBA-heavy U.S. team came in (cough) third…

Not that I care about sports much, but…¡qué bien!