Quebec City is celebrating its 400th anniversary this year, and the people organising the festivities managed to persuade Paul McCartney to come and give a free concert on the Plains of Abraham last Sunday night.
AND IT WAS FREAKING AWESOME!
There were some 250,000 of us out there, and the buzz has yet to die down.
I’ve been a huge fan of the Beatles ever since I was able to buy my own records, and Paul has always been my favourite. This is, I realise, not a point of view that will gain admission to the Hip-and-Chic Clique. The knock against Paul is that he writes sappy love songs. To this charge, I reply: there are any number of hip-and-chic grunge bands who have never been able to summon the energy of this song. And it wasn’t even a hit.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
A huge coup for Le festival d’été de Québec.
Hmmmmm, I wonder, is there such a thing as a free concert?
Perhaps this is evidence that there is?
happyjuggler0: Quebec tax levels are higher.
Compare to the inaugral Pemberton Festival here on the first-come, first-serve Barbarian Coast. It wasn’t free. One journalist walked 12km. There was a fist fight that somehow failed to get reported — which probably means no guns and no knives. Massive line-ups and road congestion that lasted several days.
But don’t worry. A few more years of heady commodity boom along with the prerequisite habitat destruction, and these kind of events will go much more smoothly.