User talk:Montrealais/Talk archive 2

Gay marriage, cats

Hi M, first all been meaning to say - LOVE THE CAT! I grew up on a farm full of moggies, including one that was so bossy she attacked a cow! (The entire herd as a result were so terrified of her they'd run away if she came within 100 yards! You haven't laughed until you've cried your eyes out at the sight of twenty terrified cows, tails in the air, running 'like the hammers of hell' - as we Irish say - away from one tiny cat, who is sitting in the centre of the field, lording it over all and sundry, with a smirk that says 'I'm the boss and don't you forget it. Though she was best buddies with the dog, whom she 'brought' to see her various families of kittens! He became their surrogate father and plaything, lying in the middle of the farmyard with four kittens sliding down his back, playing with his ears, trying to bite his nose, or clinging onto his tail or onto his back while he slowly waddled around the farm yard, as their mother watched in amusement!)

Anyway, enough of the dreaming of days gone by (and 'Furry', the ferocious feline), just want to pick you up on the point you made about the court judgment equating gay and straight 'common law' couples. I'm not sure I would agree that it won't make a difference. It may not have detailed practical benefits now but

It means that no rights can be given to non-marital heterosexual couples without being given automatically to gay couples too, whether that is in relation to property rights, morgages, inheritance, etc. In effect it means that instead of having to fight for non marital gay couples, the gay community has simply to fight for rights for non-marital couples, full stop, forming alliances with other non-marital couples lobby groups. Because whatever rights are given to straights must then be given to gay couples;
It is a critical opening, because having established the legitimacy of gay couples and getting a legal acknowledgement of their existence, it makes the task of getting rights, up to and including full marriage, easier. It may be only the bottom rung, but it one rung up the ladder from before, and once you've made that first step, who knows where it might end. Having acknowledged the existence and validity of gay relationships, it means the law cannot then pretend they don't exist in later struggles.

So endeth the sermon for today. BTW, I'm beginning to wonder, given the number of gay people I'm coming across on Wiki (including moi!) are there any straights on it at all. Or should we coin a new phrase: homopedia: (noun) free encyclopædia on the internet on which the majority of members are homosexual.

Gotta go and write something. Give my love to Ms. Moggy! (It is a Ms, is it?) JTD 05:36 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

IIRC Montrealais' cat is called Zazou. My female American longhair cat is called Mougie (Zazou and Mougie look a lot a like). Oh, and I'm gay too (but be very quiet about our little conspiracy taking over Wikipedia).Shhh! ;-) --mav

Heh. I was being slightly facetious; sounds like I was completely misinterpreted. The article originally said that we had gotten the right to "heterosexual common-law marriage". I meant that that wouldn't make a difference in the sense that I can already get a heterosexual common-law marriage any time I want ;) - what I want is a homosexual common-law marriage with rights equivalent to those of a heterosexual one. The difference is subtle but profound!

Anyway, not to put too fine a point on it, the sentence was simply poorly worded. I reworded it, making a semi-silly comment on what the unreworded sentence really meant. You're preaching to the converted... or perverted ;)

- Montréalais (who is looking forward to making an honest man out of the boyf ;)

p.s. Zazou is a boy cat.

Nice Photos!

Just want to pay you a compliment for the nice photos you took of Quebec City. They look quite professional! --Menchi 16:02 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

Well, thank you very much! ^_^ Here is a list of some other photos I've contributed. - Montréalais

Quebec débâcle II

Please leave things as they are that clarifies to all people on the World Wide Web that it is PROVINCES. QUEBEC by itself is not a country and is part of the proper Canadian list. Thank you....Ron Davis

That has nothing to do with the title of the article. Considering that every page that deals with Quebec already says that it is a province of Canada, I think the reasons I gave for moving the page are sufficient, when applied to every province. I have to wonder if you would be stressing so much if I had begun with List of communities in Ontario. - Montréalais

Oh you brave person, 'tampering' with the lists of DW/Ron Davis. Rising bringing the wrath of that almighty ego down on you. Lock your doors and call an exorcist! JtdIrL 06:57 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)

*puts on Bach's Toccata and Fugue for mood music* - Montréalais

Hah! That is EXACTLY what is playing on my eMac right now!!! JtdIrL 07:25 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)

AIDS

Regarding AIDS: it's my impression that AIDS nowadays with the new drugs has pretty much turned into a severe chronic disease, not necessarily fatal. I just tried to locate statistics at CDC but couldn't find any; all I found was: the drugs "have greatly reduced the number of deaths due to AIDS" and "the drugs do not cure the disease". AxelBoldt 02:21 Mar 3, 2003 (UTC)

I have a vague unease with saying "AIDS isn't fatal." After all, people can live a relatively long time with other chronic diseases we regard as fatal, such as inoperable cancers and degenerative diseases, and potentially die of something else first. But that doesn't mean they're not fatal. To me, a non-fatal disease is one that can either be cured, or rarely-to-never kills the patient. But IANAD. - Montréalais

Talleyrand

Bonjour à Zazou (et vous)! I've left a comment and a question which may be of interest at Talk:Charles Maurice de Talleyrand - Someone else 07:34 Mar 11, 2003 (UTC)

I'm afraid I know nothing about it. - Montréalais

Harvey Milk

Just wanted to say good work on Harvey Milk. I've been meaning to write something about him for months now, but you've done a better job of it than I would have. --Camembert

My pleasure. - Montréalais

List of country name etymologies

Bonjour, I've noticed that you have added etymologies of Canadian provinces in List of country name etymologies. I don't think, we want to set the precedent of allowing the addition of non-sovereign states/provinces in this article. Off the top of my head, I can think of etymologies of 14 states in India. Imagine, if everyone were to add their states, where would it stop? Counties, districts, cities, towns, villages? :-) Gyan 07:00 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)

Whatever, remove them if you want. - Montréalais

Protest photos

Over at Global protests against war on Iraq you asked in an editorial summary if any wikipedians took photos at F15 protests, well I posted some I took over at indymedia - my favorite photo is where a "Stop the war" poster became a "Stop W" poster. See also this collection of over 200 photos from 133 protests.

Handmaid's Tale

Re: Talk:The Handmaid's Tale. After you moved the paragraph to Talk, somebody else came along and moved it back to the article. My comment was concerning my reversion of his reversion. -- Zoe

Okay, sorry. - Montrealais

Administrator

You should express an interest to be an Admin on WikiEN-l so you can edit the Main Page yourself. :-) There is no reason why you shouldn't be one and I predict zero opposition to your request. The Admin/user ratio is way too low at the moment. --mav

Tube station sizes

Re size of tube stations: North Greenwich station "is large enough to contain 3,000 double-decker buses or an ocean liner the size of the Queen Mary within its walls" -- how does this compare with the other metro systems you were citing? Not a quibble, I'm genuinely interested, because if they're bigger they're really worth visiting. The Anome 21:54 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)

I don't know about volume but I have seen Pantitlán station in Mexico City as the largest metro station in the world. As for "most stylish in the world," I'm sure you can agree that that is up for dispute. ;) - Montréalais

Clerical titles, the cat (again)

God I love that kitty pic!!! Re our discussion on naming conventions for clerical titles, I've come across a few more clerical naming problems, including a stub I was going to add to wiki. I've put my opinions and a suggestion on the Naming Conventions (Names and titles) page. Have a look and see what you think. STÓD/ÉÍRE 03:45 Apr 15, 2003 (UTC)

See what I put on Zoe's page about Rachel. They are going to be so mad!!! STÓD/ÉÍRE 05:36 Apr 15, 2003 (UTC)

Punctuation, choughs

I noticed the minor changes you made to chough, replacing some of the punctuation with numeric strings. I'm not a computer buff, so I just wondered what the reason was for this, since it doesn't seem to change the appearance. If it's something I ought to do, where do I find the codes? Merci jimfbleak 05:46 Apr 21, 2003 (UTC)

I didn't make those changes intentionally; it may be a software issue. In any case they seem to have taken place because "smart quotes" were used. Did you prepare your text in Word, by any chance? If so you should turn "smart quotes" off and use simple double " and single ' quotes, which work with everyone's machines. - Montréalais

Susan Aglukark

Re Susan Aglukark page: I don't know what I was thinking, inserting two external links and not including the stub text, eeesh, sorry! - Uyanga

Read my lips

Could you provide a citation for the "I Got Rid Of My Bush! Read My Lips - No To War!" quote over at nudity? I keep having to revert it back in after others remove it, thinking that even reporting it was used as a slogan is POV or something, and that'd be much easier to justify keeping it if I knew where it'd come from. -- John Owens 14:40 Apr 23, 2003 (UTC)

I happened to find a site that mentions part of the quote SchNEWS discusses it near the bottom of the page. It is not the full quote and attributes it to the "Opposition Society", of which I couldn't find any other mention of.

Alexander Wall Aug 30, 2005

Birds

Re Crow: I must admit that I hadn't realised that you had actually created Corvus. Nevertheless, I still think that this merging is appropriate. The Crow article has had a long and chequered history, going from species>genus>family and back to genus. Thanks to you and others, the situation has been rationalise with non-Corvus genus material moved to Corvidae and other corvid groups such as Jay and magpie. However, the consequence of this is that Crow deals with just the genus Corvus, and vice versa. I think you will agree that having two articles covering the same ground is not particularly efficient.

As a general rule, I've avoided articles under scientific names unless there is a clear purpose. Often at genus level there is not, so a redirect or no link is all that is needed. This can occur even at higher levels. Eg Nuthatch=genus Sitta=family Sittidae. There may be other comments on this from Tannin or Steve Nova, who have written several of the Crow articles, so I'm quite happy to go with the flow if I've got it wrong. jimfbleak 05:40 Apr 24, 2003 (UTC)

Coming back to this later, I think that the confusion may have arisen because some Corvus species, such as the Rook and Jackdaw do not have Crow in the English name. However, this is an accident of history, and there is no logical reason to split the genus on the basis of English name. A similar situation occurs with Phalacrocorax, where species are called shags and some cormorants on a more or less random basis. In some cases the same species has both names. P. varius is called yellow-faced cormorant and pied shag. jimfbleak 06:50 Apr 24, 2003 (UTC)

A Jackdaw article will be found by a search on its name, or its genus (as crow or corvus, or indirectly through its family Corvidae.

Since writing the above, I've seen Phalacrocorax. Whilst I would accept that this is not quite the same as Cormorant, it is still largely repeating the information in that article. One problem is that there are another twenty or so cormorants to come, which means that either the genus article will not list them all, or the taxobox will become very large. I think that there is a conscious attempt by those of us writing bird articles to keep taxoboxes manageable in length, and also in width. The latter can be achieved by only giving scientific names in the box, and listing English and scientific in text, or, if you want to keep both putting <br> between English and Scientific. However, that will of course double the length of the table. I don't think I dare remerge this one! jimfbleak 05:55 Apr 24, 2003 (UTC)

I'm not way happy about the remerger of crow and Corvus; I still think they refer to different things. If I wanted to find out about crows, I wouldn't expect to find out about ravens and jackdaws at the same time (except for a mention that they were related to crows). I think asked to name black birds, most people would say "crow" and "raven" as a separate entry, rather than consider ravens a subset of crow in the same way that they're a subset of Corvus.

As for the problem of taxoboxes, I think it is important to have all the species listed in it; we want to be fairly authoritative about taxa. To trim it, how do you feel about [[Double-crested cormorant|''P. auritus'']] (giving P. auritus)?

- Montréalais

More trolls

You might want to double-check the diff of your last edit of this Talk: page, I think you accidentally pasted something in that you didn't mean to. -- John Owens 17:22 Apr 24, 2003 (UTC)

Hear ye. Hear ye. The pain in the Ass formerly known as Adam/Bridget/Vera Cruz/Susan Mason/Dietary Fiber is back to haunt wiki as Shino Baku. Oh joy. ÉÍREman 06:36 Apr 25, 2003 (UTC)

Oy vey. - Montréalais

Go fuddle-duddle yourself

Are you leaving all the links for House of Commons for someone else to fix!? Mintguy

No, I am talking to my boyfriend. I presume I'm allowed to do that from time to time. - Montréalais

There are about fifty links to go. I'll take care of them when I get home from preparing my testimony for a Canadian House of Commons committee. I trust that's all right with you. - Montréalais

Birds II

responding to Crow etc. Double-crested cormorant|P.auritus seems a great solution. Have you read Tannin's comments in Talk: Crow, which at least seems to clarify why there is a problem. My own feeling is still that substantive articles under scientific names (ie not redirects) should be avoided if possible, since there is a high probability of them getting out of step if they list the same data, such as species lists. For example, Cormorant was started by Kingturtle with just US species, extended to a world list by me, and then amended again by me after consulting Tannin on Oz species. The crows (on any definitions) are not yet a complete list, and the same problem may occur here, as at least 4 people are writing crow articles. I don't know why this group is so popular when only one duck article has beeb written.jimfbleak 16:27 Apr 25, 2003 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't understand what you are getting at. Can you clarify please? I still don't see the problem. - Montréalais

Sometimes scientific name entries add nothing and can just be redirects eg Sitta and nuthatch. Sometimes they are essential, such as Corvidae, Accipitridae and Anatidae. The problem comes in between. If the two entries duplicate information, they can become uncoupled by revisions, see Cormorant and Phalacrocorax.

As a scientist, to me Corvus, the Crow genus is a unit, even if not all the species have 'crow' in the name. I can understand why a linguist might have different viewpoint on this, but I find it difficult to agree. I did a family entry on thick-knees, where one species does not have thick-knee in the name, but it is on any scientific basis integral to the group.

I don't want an edit war on this. My objection is not to a Corvus entry as such, but to removing crows-without-crow-in-the-name from crow. There is also the practical problems, if you do a Corvus entry of keeping it in touch with this rapidly changing topic. There are a lot of corvids to come.

Finally, I liked the [[Double-crested cormorant|''P. auritus'']] solution to that particular problem.jimfbleak 19:52 Apr 25, 2003 (UTC)

I'll defer to your authority. - Montréalais

sorry. I am not used to practices here ant

Editing the main page

FYI - There is a good set of guidelines on what to list in the Historical anniversaries section on the Main Page at Wikipedia:Selected Articles on the Main Page. Specifically the entries must have at least one sentence in them that has a date linked that is on or around the current day of the year. This establishes context and tells the reader exactly why that entry was listed in the Historical anniversaries section. You also may not be aware of just how ugly that section makes the Main Page looks on higher resolution screens when the br tag is taken off the first line. Oh and as long as an entry is already linked in the current day page there is little reason to re-list it on the Main Page. I normally only list events that occurred on days previous to the current one in order to summarize the past events. Anyway - power to the wiki! --mav

Handmaid's Tale

Hello Montrealais,

On April 5, you moved a section called Analysis from the The Handmaid's Tale to the article's Talk page, on grounds of its 'unencyclopedic' nature. As I wrote that section, I can not rewrite it: I am not going to guess what you find unencyclopedic, nor am I going to rewrite something in the hope it appeases you.

I asked you and Zoe (as the parties that seemed to understand the section's unencyclopedicness) to rewrite it, but so far you have not done so. I don't know if you did not want to, or have forgotten to, or never got around to.

As I am sure you will agree, removing information from an article amounts to bookburning. It is the worst form of vandalism we know. I goes directly against Wikipedia's 'prime directive', the policy of Neutral Point Of Vision, which states that the only facts we have is the fact that something is an opinion, and that we need to present a balanced selection of opinions. Because of this, I feel really uncomfortable with leaving out a section that could have otherwise been critically rewritten and refined by all who saw it. After all, one of the premises of peer review, is that there is something there to review. That is why I am going to move the section back into the article in a few days, but if you want to rewrite it in the mean-time, please be my guest.

Thanks for your help, branko

"Bookburning"?! Don't be ridiculous. That paragraph is not NPOV because it presents an opinion without any qualifiers. That's not the way things work here.

I'm not prepared to further edit the paragraph because literary criticism is not my field of study. If a scholar has argued this point of view, you should introduce it with an attribution ("In the New York Review of Books, reviewer Adrienne Soandso argues that the book...") Otherwise it has no place in an encyclopedia. - Montréalais 15:02 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

My apologies, but I am not a native speaker of English, and my dictionaries seem to abandon me here. What is a 'qualifier'? branko

"To qualify" in this sense means to make less absolute. I gave an example of the sort of thing we use to do that (i.e. to take the thing down from being stated as fact to being an attributed opinion). The best, to repeat myself somewhat, is to attribute it to someone. - Montréalais

Canadian Alliance

Montrealais, some person at 149.99.16x.xxx is cutting large amounts of content from Stockwell Day and Canadian Alliance. I know you worked on these articles and I am wondering what you think of these edits. Personally I do not much approve of them. SimonP 02:51 30 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Can't say as I much approve of them either. The way to fix an article you don't approve of is not, as you've correctly adjudged, to cut out huge swaths of text. I'll keep my eye on them. - Montréalais

Gay articles at zh.wiki

Hi, I am a new comer here, and I found u at Queer wikipedians. I like your quotation at your main page. I am now working mainly on Chinese verision about gay-related articals. And I like to learn languages too. Hopefully we can be friends! :D --Gboy 04:03 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Hey, wonderful. I wish I could read Chinese... it would be great to see how the translations look! I had noticed the zh: link on Same-sex marriage in Canada. I see you are from China - what is the gay rights situation there? We get very little news. - Montréalais

Thank you! I found that there are so little information about gay in Chinese version that I am so shame of it. I am now planning to translate all the gay-related articles from English into Chinese.Gay can do things perfect too(much better sometimes) ! :D I am now looking for some info about crackdown on gay in any countries, I don't know if you have any? Thanks! It doesn't matter if you could read Chinese or not(if you could read Chinese, you would find out how bad my translation it would be :P) I believe the situation here in China is like the 'don't ask, don't say' policy in American Army: not agree, not against, not advocate(something like that, forgive my bad translation). You can ask me anything you wanna know, I will try to answer u all! Thanks again!:D --Gboy 08:12 14 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Socrates was a giant screaming queen

Earlier I noticed that you had a very strong opinion about Socrates and his sexual orientation. I did not then, nor do I now want to get into an argument about the matter. I hope however, that you will have the courtesy to check and edit (if merited) my article on Symposium, if you think his orientation is irrefutable. I personally have no opinion on the matter, but do think that both sides of the argument have historically had ulterior motives in placing him in one "camp" or the other. Personally I am heterosexual, but hardly adhere to any strictly defined norm of acceptable sexuality. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 05:51 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)