Twenty years ago today, I went to my first baseball game. The Expos had the NL East lead, a half-game up on the Pirates, and it was half-price ticket day for under 16s, so I convinced my parents to drive all the way to the Big O with the family.
The Meech Lake Accord had failed the day before and it was St-Jean-Baptiste Day, so for the first (but not last) time in Expos history, many in the large (for the Expos) crowd of 25,000 booed Canada's national anthem. Anytime the Expos played at home on St-Jean-Baptise Day after that, they played the anthems during the warmup so that no one would be there to boo.
We sat in the first row of the upper deck, right behind home plate. Dennis Martinez had a solid start, but the relief was weak and the Pirates won the game, retaking the NL East lead (which they kept for the rest of the year). Disappointing, but I'll never forget how awesome it was to eat peanuts and ice cream and watch the Expos in the Big O on a hot summer day, during that brief time when the retractable roof actually worked.
I've travelled a lot, and so have read quite a lot of hotel reviews. But Montreal's very own Hotel Eureka has the worst hotel reviews I have ever seen.
Congratulations, first of all, to Hamid Karzai and Gérald Tremblay for their re-elections. For those of you who do not know these two men, one is a corrupt, weak leader in a land controlled by druglords whose re-election was made possible through a farcical, sham process, while the other is the president of Afghanistan.
Congratulations also go out to newly-acclaimed Mayor Gisèle Chapleau and the six acclaimed counsellors of L'Ile-Dorval (results available here), a city with no residents.
The Bitter End is at Mainline for another two nights of its last two live improv shows. Sept. 25th and 26th at 9pm for $8. We have a great Mirror cover story and the first internet webisode.
