Moncton's chocolate river

This is the Petitcodiac river. Just around downtown, the river takes a bend from east to south. Sooky and Beebee are at the very bottom of that "bend", where downtown Moncton becomes downtown Dieppe and Halls' creek meets the "river that bends like a bow".

Even though the river goes through urbanized territory, the water would be brown anyway because the river flows in the Bay of Fundy. The tides there are so strong that twice a day they send a wave upstream called the tidal bore. That wave also carries sediments from the Cap Enragé cliffs (the ones on New-Brunswick's medicare card) up the river, hence all this mud. A Causeway between Moncton and Riverview blocked the flow of the river between 1968 and 2010, had devastating effects but and now that the floodgates are open, the river (and its tidal bore) can be enjoyed by a new generation!

I drew this in november. Actually, if I had seen the river as it is now (first time I've seen it in winter, post-causeway floodgates), I should have drawn it in winter! The tide in the river just won't let the ice sit, plus that muddy water doesn't freeze easily so the sides of the river are continuously re-shaped by the action of water and ice and mud. Where lake Petitcodiac used to sit, early in the morning you can see huge chunks of ice left there by the tide.

Wikipedia insunuates that the very name "Acadie" comes from the Mikmak name of Hall's creek; Panacadie. Truth is, many places in the maritimes had mikmak names that end with -adie. It is safe to say that the creek runs through the heart of modern Acadia though. Even if it's between a freeway and Champlain mall when it meets the Petitcodiac, it runs along the University of Moncton, the George Dumont hospital (biggest hospital to acadians!) and the CBC/Radio-Canada building.

On parle la même langue qu'en France sauf que Tour Eiffel, en chiac, ça donne Tour BellAliant!

Acadieman s'est balancé dessus et même si son nom a changé trois fois en quarante ans selon les compagnies, c'est le symbole de Moncton. Quand on l'a bâtie, en 1971, c'était pour faire passer les ondes radio par-dessus la place Assomption. À l'époque, il n'y avait même pas de téléphones cellulaires.

Je déteste les grosses compagnies autant que tout le monde, mais tant qu'a se retrouver avec un paquet d'antennes en ville, je trouve que la tour au coin de Botsford et Queen a au moins un certain charme. On aurait franchement pu avoir plus laid! Quand elle était encore illuminée le soir, elle me faisait penser aux phares de nos histoires de marins mais beaucoup plus authentique, en pleine ville et à l'ère des smartphones.

En 1999, quand toute la grande famille francophone mondiale s'est réunie à Moncton, je me demande si quelqu'un ne s'est pas demandé si notre tour-marque de commerce n'avait pas un cousin, ou une mémére restée en Europe, beaucoup plus grandiose- parce que les maudits français font toujours tout plus gros!- mais qui transmettait la première guerre mondiale en radio bien avant internet...

Elle ressemblerait peut-être à ça, la mémére à notre tour...

Okay, j'exagère peut être...avec la tour du CN dans la parenté en plus notre tour est un peu petite. Dans l'univers de Sooky, les chiens pissent et renifflent comme forme de télécommunication entre eux, il me semblait logique que ce Poteau parmi tous les Poteaux de téléphone soit celui ou tous les chiens veulent laisser leur trace...

Okay, this is not Paris, but we're still part of the enlarged family and we have the tower to prove it!

To any monctonian, the landmark doesn't need any presentation, or does it? When it was built, it was called the NBTel tower, when all the maritimes joined their phone companies together like twelve years ago it became the Aliant tower, and now it's the BellAliant tower, as part of the gigantic Bell Media empire...
It was built in the early 1970's because the construction of a new high-rise in the area could disturb radio wave transmission. Our french cousins from across the Atlantic had already been trailblazers in the art of rigging antenaes to fancy towers, it was just a matter of time before someone on this side tried to follow the family tradition...

Pictured above, the "cousins". Yes, they always do everything way fancier than us... 

 It out-skyscraped the now Assumption Place by about 40 meters. It sits just across Botsford street from our city hall and even though I hate corporate Canada as much as anyone, the thing gives a nice little touch to our city skyline.

Left, that's Assumption place. Middle, that's the tower and right, that's the Blue Cross center.

It sits bascically at the geographical center of the Maritimes and in a city that's about thirty percent bilingual and fifty percent call centers, I think it's a symbol that fits. A few years ago with the lights on top it looked like an old time lighthouse in an age and city of fibreoptics and Wifi. In Sooky's universe, dogs seem to pee and sniff around as a form of telecomunication. Seems logic that the biggest telephone pole of them all is where every dog wants to leave his mark.

Well, that peice of already-outdated technology sure has left its mark on Moncton...

Make no mistake, though, the Petitcodiac will never be that clear. More on this next post....

I'm a poor lonesome cowboy
I'm a long, long way from home
And this poor lonesome cowboy
S'got a long, long way to roam
Over mountains, over prairies
From dawn 'till day is done
My horse and me keep riding
Into the setting sun!

This little guy here, I grew up with him! It's the cartoon cowboy created by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. His name is Lucky Luke and he shoots faster than his own shadow! It the Cowboys vs. Indians cliché, Lucky Luke often comes up as the voice of reason. I'm not sure if the books are available in english in your area, but "Canyon Apache", "Chasseur de Primes" and "Le Vingtième de Cavalerie" and the awesome, marvelously well-done western cartoon, Daisy Town, which I've seen in english on Youtube.

There are guys who, go figure, 
Have a problem with a gun
And a finger on a trigger 
Can be dangerous, hurt someone
But problems solve much better
By keeping calm and true
My horse and me keep riding
I ain't nobody's fool

Saddly enough, for a pretty young generation of kids in Canada, this is as close as we got of native american culture in our early years and that cartoon came from Europe! I'm preparing a longer article on this as well as similar stuff on Astérix and Tintin, it's like homework about cartoons but it's going to take more time and I know you guys are here for the cartoons above all, so enjoy the rottie in a cowboy suit.

On le connait tous...

On l'appelle Lucky Luke, de l'est au far west!
Il arrive au galop, le cowboy, hello!
Son tire est plus rapide, plus rapide que son ombre.
Et ron révolver va plus vite que l'éclair
Oh, sacré Lucky Luke!

Oups, pendant un moment j'ai pensé aimer la musique country, moi là! 
Franchement avec les crises qu'on connaît dans le coin actuellement, on aurait besoin d'un justicier à tête froide comme lui! Je prépare un article plus long là-dessus. En attendant, enjoyez l'hommage au cowboy solitaire préféré de la francophonie. Je prépare aussi des hommages à Astérix et à Tintin.

I guess it is time for me to stop abusing the comment widget at gocomics.com and start posting my stuff here. Two square inches are not very handy to write stuff! I'm going to add more stuff to this like character information later on. I've drawn more strips based around real places as well, and I'll post pictures of those places now and again. Also, the strips will also always be bilingual here.

What was to say of 2013? The pope resigned, that only happened a few times in centuries. Liberal catholics (like me!) view this new, fresh pope as the symbol of a religion that's (finally!) more about how people treat each other and less about what they do with their privates! I was given a copy of the New Testament when I was ten and I remember seeing the word "pharisee" more often than the words "adulterer", "born in sin", "homosexual" and "abortion" combined! In short, Jesus condemned hypocrites.

What else? The native canadian awakening of Idle No More. That's, among other things, Theresa Spence's hunger strike in Ottawa, a trip that took some teenagers on a trip from northern Quebec to Ottawa but Harper could not meet them, he had to go greet pandas that had been given to a Toronto zoo by China. That was also the blockade of Elsipogtog on shale gas. This time everyone, including english canadians and acadians, was on the side of the Natives. Nobody wants shale gas to start drilling in New-Brunswick now! But by the past, similar events (like the Oka Crisis) forced the intervention of the army! Needless to say, New-Brunswick was a pretty nervous place in October and November. The RCMP came out of this as a foreign company's henchmen, puppets instead of the community pillars that they should be (and that I've seen them be at times).
Eventually, someone somewhere along the chain of command came to their senses and the drilling company (SWN) got out of the area, and is not supposed to return until 2015. Next provincial elections are this year and this issue is going to sink Alward: If we are stupid enough to reelect the guy after this, then we probably do diserve to have our darn water poisoned! My instincts tell me it's too early to say this chapter is closed, though...

No matter on what side of the national language barrier you were this year, you had a city hall to laugh at. My US readers are already familiar with Rob Ford. He's what you'd get if you called Rush Limbaugh your mayor, with the drug habits of Gregory House. A little further down the St. Lawrence, Montreal's city hall has been a game of musical chairs this year. Mayor Gerald Tremblay resigned, amist an ongoing corruption scandal. He gave his spot to Michael Applebaum, who was supposedly above all suspicion until he got arrested. The city remained without a mayor for a few months until the last election. With a low turnout,  Denis Coderre was elected  the new mayor. Coderre may be one of the few major political characters of the province to be spared by the ongoing corruption scandal,  he's not very popular and his election was greeted with a twittersphere-full of #tabarnak 's.

This year made it official: the west has a new Stalin called Vladimir Putin! He suscpiciously gave Snowden asylum (I hate the NSA as much as the next girl, but Putin's Russia is not exactly a model of transparency either!), he saved Barack Obama another war in Syria and wrote in an american newspaper but that bane of gay rights, canadian ecologists and Pussy Riots wants to get his hands on our North Pole and will host the next Winter Games! His name is also spelled P-O-U-T-I-N-E when translated in French. Sooky and Canada's favourite mixture of french fires, cheese and gravy. I'll give you a moment to fathom all the fun canookie comedians and tv hosts had over poor Vlad in the last 13 years because of that...

On a related note, there were also asteroids falling all over Russia. For a while, we all suspected two things; either Michael Bay took control of God's computer or space decided to send us back all that junk we've been feeding it since the Sputnik.

I'm sorry for bringing you about the tenth allusion to Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball you guys must have seen in the last few days, but Mimi insisted on bringing her up. Many stupid things have been said, people accused her of making money with her charms, other people accused the people around her of making money off her charms. The paradox is, every paid member of the media industry that accused anyone of capitalizing on sex in this scandal has been doing precisely the same thing, using sex to find easy readership.

We've all seen this before with Janet Jackson in 2005, with Britney and Madonna in 2003. Hollywood has been this shallow since there was a showbiz. If this shows anything, it's that of all the buttons it's possible to push, there is still a big red one that's called "sex". If we were as comfortable about it as we pretend to sex would not be exploited for any scandal, people wouldn't pay attention!
A few nights ago, at Radio-Canada's Bye-Bye 2013, comedians Laurent Paquin, Antoine Bertrand and André Sauvé made fun of Miley and Femen (the bare-breasted feminists who distrupted l'Assemblée Nationale) with hardly hidden sexual frustration. the whole idea of their sketch was that to point out that whenever people see some skin, they can't think so don't bother trying to make a point if you have boobies. Even in this day and age, the idea that sexualized people can have an intellect is very disturbing. They already have a very scary power on us, God help us if they start thinking!
In the old times, they told us "sin" was the demon. Now popular "wisdom" assume that men have a "little head" that puts them in trouble all the time and that women never act stupidly, because women never want sex. Evo-psych assume that men are there for nothing else but reproduction but if all logical thinking stopped at the smell of the first hormome, including the few brain cells dedicated to finding food, shelter, water and avoiding predators, the cavemen of evo-psych did not live long enough to have anything to reproduce!

On a less stupid note, two death at the two opposite sides of the political spectrum; Hugo Chavez and Margaret Thatcher. I could not bring myself to be another leftist voice to mindlessly praise Chavez, and I did not like Thatcher's policies, I'm sure they're arguing somewhere on a cloud but it's mean and pointless to bash dead people, even those you don't agree with so here they are, both of them with candles.

...but they pale in comparison to that Candle of candles, Nelson Mandela.

Happy New Year!