The first thing you do is grab two of them. Not three. If you grab three, then go ahead and take a fourth. You just don’t eat an odd number of clementines.
Palpate it. Feel around its lumpy cool surface. Press a little with your fingers to confirm that the rind is only lightly gripping the fleshy walls of the pulp beneath.
Mmm. Yes. That’s good.
For good measure, or maybe to prolong the anticipation, roll it around on the table under your palm. Gently. Every quarter inch of it.
Now, it’s almost time. Aim for the region around the pedicel, the slightly swollen part around where the stem was once attached.
Some will use their fingers for this part. This could leave a zesty residue under your nail. Maybe you like it that way, you silly bean.
But I prefer not to have sticky fingers. Call me dainty; I’ll plead guilty as charged. I use my teeth to break through the skin instead and taste that first spurt of citrus.
Then, peel. One long strand. Some will make an orange-peel flower and that’s good too.
Now you have it, that soft, bulbous, delicious fruit. Halve it with both hands. Pull a segment off. Put it in your mouth. Bite and feel the juicy…
SEED!? There’s a seed???
Disappointed? Understandable. The clementine’s seedlessness is one of its biggest draws, after all.
Why do some clementines have seeds and others don’t? The answer is simple. But first, a little history.
Brother Clément Rodier was a French missionary who helped run an orphanage in Algeria in the late 19th century. He introduced hundreds of fruit trees, ornamental trees and rose bushes to the orphanage’s land. He also enjoyed experimenting and developing hybrid plants and fruits. Hybrid plants or animals come from the naturally occurring or artificially induced sexual reproduction of two different breeds, species or genera.
Sometime around 1900, Rodier found a tree with fruit redder than a mandarin orange; not as sweet, but delicious nonetheless. It was the product of a mandarin flower having been cross-pollinated with a sweet orange (or just orange) tree. This new variety of mandarin orange was eventually called clementine in honour of Rodier.
Now, seedless fruits are a naturally-occurring mutation in many plants. It’s even been suggested that certain species have evolved in such a way that seedless fruits serve as decoys to distract herbivores from eating viable ones.
It’s certainly a trait desired by grocers and consumers, since the absence of seeds makes for a better eating experience, as well as a longer shelf-life.
Trees of seedless clementines are reproduced by grafting, which essentially involves sticking a clementine branch into any old stump. These seedless varieties come from being self-incompatible, which is sometimes a side-effect of being a hybrid (sort of like with a mule, which can’t reproduce). In this case, that means that the pollen from identical seedless clementine trees can’t physically reach all the way down to the ovary (plants have ovaries) at the bottom of the flower. The tree still produces fruit, but without pollination, it develops no seeds (sort of like chickens who lay sterile eggs when there’s not rooster around).
But that’s not the whole story, obviously. There is in fact at least one breed of clementine whose reproductive organs are self-compatible. And seedless clementine trees can be pollinated by this breed and by other varieties of orange, through a process called cross-pollinisation. All you need is a bee.
Growers cover their orchards with netting to keep the little buzzers off, but they can never be 100 per cent sure that a pollinator won’t somehow get through. And that means that sometimes, what was otherwise going to be a beautiful moment in your day, becomes a mildly disappointing one.
“Fake news”—that awful, awful term is a meme that has hit its mark, proven its fitness, and is gaining traction due to misunderstanding, division and lulz that we are all guilty of spouting. We are feeding it every time we utter it.
And we should just stop using it.
Fake news generally refers to information that is false or misleading, often sensational, and masked as news. It is a term that is shouted, spouted, typed and copy-pasted a great deal. It’s even associated with a specific voice in my head—can you guess whose?
Now, when I refer to “fake news” as a “meme,” I don’t mean those tacky time-wasters we should all ignore on the internet. I’m writing about the original definition of meme as coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene.
The book itself presents the view that the gene is the agent of evolution (as opposed to the individual or the group). In the last chapter, Dawkins explores the idea of a unit of cultural evolution that works kind of similarly, though also differently. The meme, as he named it, is an idea, behaviour or style that exists in human minds and persists because of its sticking power and ability to spread. “Smoking is cool” is a meme that receives help from nicotine and the tobacco industry.
To be clear, internet memes aren’t quite the same. As Dawkins put it in a speech at Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors’ Showcase 2013 in Cannes in 2013, “instead of mutating by random chance and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, they are altered deliberately by human creativity.” Internet memes are mere playthings for humans, and while real memes are created by humans, they evolve naturally.
Fake news is a meme in the original sense, and a strong one at that. It survives because it’s based on truth: false news is a real problem. It thrives by latching on to our fear of being lied to, the belief that people of opposing views are more likely to spread or believe lies—our fear of journalism’s demise, and the mix of humour and outrage we feel when Donald Trump uses it as a slur.
Sure, disinformation has always existed and will always exist—much like the people generating it, believing it and the journalists fighting against it. It’s a never-ending struggle. But this fake news business has gotten out of hand. It doesn’t simply exist to refer to disinformation in one form or another anymore.
The Washington Post and BuzzFeed News were among the first to use the term in October 2016 to describe how false news articles on Facebook had influenced the US elections. That put the seed in people’s minds. Then, President Trump threw an all-caps FN-bomb at CNN on Twitter in December of that year, which was the water that nurtured the meme’s growth.
Columnist Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post actually warned us a couple of weeks later, calling the term a label that has been “co-opted to mean any number of completely different things: Liberal claptrap. Or opinion from left-of-center. Or simply anything in the realm of news that the observer doesn’t like to hear.”
To my liberal friends, stop using it ironically. To my conservative friends, stop using it so angrily. To my journalistic friends, stop using the term entirely. After this article, I will also stop using it. That’s the only way to kill a meme. Because we’re not really using it. It’s using us. Stop saying it. Stop writing it. Let it die.
“The one from ancient times?” my friend asked across the table. “Why write about that?”
Because, old friend, the plague lives. It never left.
Only three weeks ago, a hunter from China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region north of Beijing caught and ate an infected rabbit, and also caught the bubonic plague.
The plague has a long and terrible history of killing people and rodents. It has killed 10s to 100s of millions of people over three pandemics. Estimates say that up to 50 million people may have died from the plague over a seven-year period nicknamed the Black Death in the 1300s.
So … should we be worried today?
Meh. Maybe.
An average of seven people a year are infected in the southwest of the United States according to the Center for Disease Control. And the Canadian government says that the first and only case up here was in 1939.
And apparently, it’s easily treatable with antibiotics if diagnosed early on, according to the World Health Organization.
That said, the two main forms, bubonic and pneumonic, are pretty nasty.
You catch the former from an infected flea or louse or by eating raw, infected meat. Bacteria in infected fleas create a biofilm that blocks food intake. When the fleas bite you, they regurgitate your own blood back into you with plague bacteria. Over a few days, you develop swollen, pus-filled lymph nodes before you start vomiting blood and developing gangrenous extremities. People can survive this form without treatment, but lowkey, I don’t think that’s recommended.
You catch pneumonic plague like you catch a cold, through droplets in the air. It’s 100 per cent fatal if you don’t get treatment within the first day. As the saying goes, “If you’re coughing up blood … go to the doctor.”
So it’s probably wise to check beforehand if plague bacteria are present in rodent populations in a region your visiting.
Anyway, the plague has been in the news recently, which might have worried some. From 2010 to 2015, an average of 100 people a year around the world died from the plague, and that’s awful.
But it’s not Black-Death-horrible, which is something.
The Diving Bell Social Club hosted a night of pressure-free retro merriment
On Nov. 15, I got a free pass to Live Art & Synthwave in exchange for guarding the Nintendo. The mini classic Nintendo Entertainment System was set up in a nook with a projector, couches and all the old games on the drive. I had to make sure no one got into any fights or hogged the controllers.
Thankfully, the crowd didn’t need too much moderation. It was a wholesome group, everyone taking their turns to play and otherwise happy to sit down.
With everyone so well behaved, I could ignore my responsibilities for most of the evening. I proceeded to wander, admire the art, bask in an electronic music bath and eat cookies.
“I’m not a snitch.” — Bonnie Jean
The official line is that the event was produced and organized by Artwave MTL, a new “volunteer-run Montreal project aiming to get local musicians, artists and friends together through live performance events.”
The truth is that this whole affair was dictator-ed into being by an event planner and jam night aficionado who goes by the name Bonnie Jean.
“I actually had friends who tried to throw events and they sucked at it and they would never take my advice and it bothered me so I’m like f*ck you imma do it my way,” said Bonnie Jean in half the time it took you to read it.
“It’s going swimmingly.” — Mr. Mulgrave
There was a volunteer tasked with taking polaroids in exchange for Packman stickers that people purchased at the cookie and tortilla chips table. He introduced himself only as Mr. Mulgrave, though you can easily track his real identity down on the event page.
Other volunteers took pictures, filmed, checked the door and manned the coat check and ticket counter. It was a labour of love.
Maya Brobove, the official photographer, gave me one of the few unironic statements of the night. “I think it’s really interesting to see live painting happening in a space where live music is happening because it’s not an art form that we see the process of,” she said. “So it’s really nice to see different art forms being celebrated.”
DJs Tryptish and ELIAS kept the room cozy with warm lo-fi (low fidelity, if you didn’t know… I didn’t) lounge music throughout the evening.
This was intercut with moody and exciting synthwave acts by Bashu, NAHJI and M.M. Crone, all big deals and worth a trip across town.
While the three bands played, three artists painted away, though the symmetry was accidental. One of the acts had to cancel at the last minute.
Bonnie Jean took it in stride. “Adapt and overcome, I always say.”
The three artists chose acrylic as their medium, which doesn’t have to mean anything. Although, if I had to make something up, acrylic’s fast drying and permanency of colour, mixed with its crisp edge and flexibility could seem appropriate for an evening obsessed with an 80s aesthetic.
“I like to paint animals.” — Elizabeth Sorokina
Elizabeth Sorokina, a fashion designer, was painting a rhinoceros and her calf.
I was staring mesmerized at it, picking cookie dough from my teeth, when suddenly she stuck packing tape over the mother rhino. She explained to me that it created an effect when you took it off later and pointed to her other paintings hanging on the wall. I saw it. I thought it imbued them with a strange brightness.
“National Geographic does amazing images of these animals, of a really peaceful moment in the wild,” Sorokina said. “It’s always unpredictable, so it’s always a really rare moment.”
“I’m probably just going to smoke some weed and come back.” — Andres Granados
Yoga teacher and musician Andres Granados’s painting embraced the night’s theme. With his dreamy accent, he described it as a Roman statue in a synth-futuristic-neon-80s style. “I’m doing a paperweight-themed painting,” he said.
Andres’ other work was also quite funky, like the floating multicoloured elephant head and the surreal black and white ink giraffe/goat/fish.
“I seem to have a Montreal theme going on.” — Chris Roy
Beside finished pieces featuring construction cones and the Couche-Tard owl, Chris Roy was painting what I initially thought was a block of swiss cheese covered in red arrows. “Straight lines, no blending of colours, just very clean-cut,” is how he described his work with satisfaction. When I arrived he was adding clean black letters and numbers that referred to significant elements of his life growing up.
I dared to ask about the swiss cheese.
“Do you remember the old STM bus transfer?” was his answer.
Ohhhhh. The holes…That was way better than cheese, I thought.
“We take debit or credit.” — Elena Blanco Moleón
The star of the evening, in my opinion, was Elena Blanco Moleón. The chocolate chip cookies she baked were both rich and sickening. I had four, which was no mean feat.
“They’re all coming back and saying, ‘Oh my god they’re awesome’,” Moleón said confidently. “So I’m really hopeful that the word will spread.”
While art and music were an excellent pretext to leave home, nostalgia, comfort and acceptance were the real themes of the evening. You could draw on the art wall, dance awkwardly to the synthwave, stuff your face or simply sit alone in a corner, absorbed by the rad sounds. It was an event/show/expo/bake sale that gave you permission to miss being a kid for a few hours and I’m looking forward to the next one (looks like it’ll be in early February).
The falconers of the Montreal airport—along with their deadly sidekicks—are the team outside the fuselage that keeps your flight safe. They patrol the taxiways and runways, keeping the skies, tarmac, and your plane’s turbo-engines clear of meat.
I was sweeping the aviary hallway last summer when a sparrow flew in through the door, which I’d left open to let in the breeze. It landed on the floor, innocently looking for seeds, but absolute horror is all it found. The walls echoed with the cries of the devil, and around every corner sat perched a nightmare darker and more terrible than any feral cat. It promptly flew back into the light.
Of all places, the ickle bird landed in one of the shipping containers converted into the offices of Falcon Environmental Services. It houses a little kitchen, a murphy bed, some outdoorsy stuff and a few sand-covered rooms for our “employees.” The six stone-cold killers in question are named Saguaro, Cayenne, Bazile and Sedona (the Harris’s hawks), Jackie (the peregrine falcon) and Orion (the veteran peregrine-saker hybrid).
The wildlife control officers (WCO) of Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau International are an assortment of biologists (like me), wildlife technicians and falconry nerds. No one calls us wildlife control officers though. In anglophone airports, the wildlife officer is typically called the birdman. In Montreal, it’s le fauconnier.
We wear a khaki shirt — often covered in quail guts — with an embroidered falcon over the right breast pocket, and we sport fashionable accessories at our belts such as a walkie-talkie and a sharp knife. We work solo shifts of up to 16 hours in the height of summer, when the days are longest.
It’s a lonely job, but, unless you’re an astronaut or LEGO set designer, it’s probably still cooler than yours.
I assure you, however, that the phenomenon known in the biz as a “bird strike” is no joke. According to Transport Canada, from 1912 to 2003, reported collisions between birds and aircraft destroyed 80 civil aircrafts, caused 42 fatal accidents, and a total of 231 deaths (not counting the birds). If you’ve seen Sully, the movie about pilot Chesley Sullenberger (played by Tom Hanks), you know that in January 2009, his Airbus A320 hit a flock of Canada geese after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport in New York City. Both engines lost power, forcing Sully to land in the Hudson River, and heroically saving everyone on board. Yay!
Things didn’t work out so well in 1960 for Eastern Air Lines Flight 375. A Lockheed Electra hit a group of starlings (which are, like, pretty small birds) a few seconds after lift-off, damaging three of its four propeller engines and resulting in a crash that killed 62 of the 72 passengers.
The Life of a WCO
Photo by Mathieu B. Morin.
A typical day for le fauconnier involves clocking in a little before sunrise. We load up the modified plug-in hybrid Mitsubishi Outlander with pyrotechnics, firearms and a paintball gun, and take a quick look at our death birds to see if everyone’s still alive and grumpy. Then we meet up with firefighters for the 5:30 runway inspection. They look for FOD (foreign object debris) on the asphalt while we scan the skies and edges of the runways for — ahem — early birds.
Back at the office, we weigh the raptors to make sure they’re at flight weight (which varies between individual birds and seasons), then gut and portion out the food (thawed out quail and baby chickens, yum!). If our birds are too light, taking them out might be dangerous for them. Too heavy and they could get lazy and decide to stay perched on a fence for hours.
During patrols, our hawks sit in a special cage in the back passenger seat of the SUV. They are let loose through the window when we see birds that need to be dispersed. Hawks are not merciful killers, so if they catch something, we run over with the shears to shorten the victim’s suffering. Falcons, on the other hand, knock out their prey first by ramming into them at high speeds, and then they break their necks with a special notch on their beaks called a tomial tooth. They also fly much higher (thousands of feet, even), so we park on a perimeter road far from the runways and let them do wide circuits while we swing a lure on a rope. This makes them visible over a large area and lets everyone know there’s an apex predator around.
In spring, summer and fall, our main prey include gulls, ducks and starlings. Canada geese and herons are also an issue, though they’re a little big for our birds to tackle. We have other means to instill the fear of God in them and other species, such as pyrotechnics, distress calls, laser pointers and dummy carcasses.
Putting aside my sarcastic tone for a second, it bears mentioning that our main focus is to try to scare birds and other wildlife, and to otherwise make the airport as unattractive as possible for them.
Apart from birds, we might also have to manage the occasional fox, groundhog, skunk or coyote. Obviously, little Jackie won’t be hunting a groundhog (mammals are absolutely savage). Scaring and trapping them can work, though it’s not always a happy ending.
Instead of sharing any of that unpleasantness, however, here’s a wholesome story from a colleague.
Last winter, Nathan Crockford, a young taekwondo coach and avid swing dancer with a nice smile, was called for a coyote trapped in the closed-off area between two perimeter fences. The snow was high, preventing the coyote from digging its way out. When Officer Crockford (if I tell the story, people call us officer) arrived on the scene, the poor beast was so exhausted that it calmly let itself be corralled towards a gate.
“It looked like I was walking my dog,” he told me. He set it free in the woods on the other side of the fence. “What’s interesting is the close proximity to wildlife. That’s what I like about the job.”
The winter months are different. Our birds of prey stay fat and warm in their rooms in free flight. The geese and ducks fly south, but so do the snowy owls. Used to the open tundra, the airport feels like home. They perch on the wind indicators or sit in the snow, waiting for mice to scurry out onto the runway where the surface air is slightly warmer.
Everyone loves the snowy owls because they’re majestic and everything, but to us, they’re a total pain in the cloaca (that’s a bird’s excretory and genital hole). Scare them all you want, they always come back. Because we don’t want to shoot them, we have to trap and release. We use spring-loaded nets with bait, though Julie Lecours, our veteran fauconnière, a lifelong scout and also a ninja, likes to sneak up on them while they’re distracted by a plane and catch them with a hand net.
A Strange and Unique Perspective
Our security access also gives us unique behind-the-scenes experiences. You get to recognize the voices of the air traffic controllers, though you can’t exactly pal around over the radio. During F1 season, you suddenly notice that the general aviation bases are packed with private jets. I saw French President Emmanuel Macron’s official plane, Cotam Unité, parked outside my office with associated pomp and circumstance a couple summers ago.
In July, Mélissa Martinez, the newest fauconnière, happened to be passing by during a bomb alert at one of the general aviation hangars. And Nicolas Casgrain, my supervisor, was working on September 11, 2001.
“The scene was surreal because the planes were landing but never departing, and eventually weren’t even landing anymore, the airport became a vast parking lot for planes,” he wrote to me.
Photo by Mathieu B. Morin.
You come to know every foxhole and swallow nest, and the favourite chill spots of goose couples. Lecours, who knows the place better than anyone, likens it to our very own special sandbox to play around in (with a few restrictions, of course).
Despite the bragging rights associated with the job, death is an inevitable aspect of it, whether it’s dealt by a plane, Saguaro or by a WCO. A vegan flight attendant I stopped following on Facebook would be absolutely appalled to see our carcass-filled freezer. But I bet they’ve never spared a thought for all the birds splattered by the planes they work in, or the raccoon mangled by a small jet exiting on Bravo 2 last spring, or the skunk painted on the North Ramp by a dozen aircraft on a beautiful summer day during my first year. It’s sad — and sometimes downright horrific — but if we want to keep flying, this is something we have to either be okay with, or pretend doesn’t exist.
My team and I also cover Mirabel airport, which has its own special assortment of beasts and challenges. The company I work for and others like it are present in many airports in Canada (including Toronto-Pearson) and around the world. It’s a bigger field than you might think, even though most people don’t even know it’s a thing.
The Montreal airport is one of the places where falconry as a bird-hazing method was pioneered in North America. Falcon Environmental Services was founded in 1989 and began a pilot project with the airport, and has been here for most years since. Before that, trials were being conducted here and there throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s by different airports — and as early as the late 1940s in Scotland — but many didn’t take off. There were a lot of logistical hurdles to get over before flying birds of prey around an airfield could be done efficiently and safely.
It’s not an easy gig — what with working long hours and holidays, Bazile’s constant screeching destroying our ears, and the fact that we can never be sure that we’ve actually saved any lives. But it has its small rewards in things like the successful flight of a bird in training and the most beautiful sunsets in town.
