Goon sequel in the works

American Hostage stars recall warmth of Winnipeggers during brutal winter

TORONTO — When you stream the eight-part series American Hostage, a sense of familiarity may strike.

That’s because the show was shot in Winnipeg — especially in the Exchange District — from November of last year to the beginning of February, with Winnipeg portraying Indianapolis circa 1977.

The whole world seemed to be watching that midwest American city that year as a hostage crisis unfolded involving one Tony Kiritsis, an angry man who goes ballistic when a mortgage brokerage was poised to foreclose on property he had dreamed of developing into a shopping centre.

Kiritsis kidnapped his mortgage broker, Richard Hall, wiring a shotgun to the back of his head, and demanded a public airing of his grievances, with the reluctant help of popular radio broadcaster Fred Heckman.

Klein has burned bridges with PM, Gillingham says

One mayoral candidate accused another of writing a column so critical it could compromise his ability to work with the federal government.

Gillingham in lead with decided voters

A cloud of uncertainty is hanging over Winnipeg as October’s municipal election nears.

Three months after a poll showed more than 40 per cent of Winnipeggers wanted to see someone other than current mayor Scott Gillingham elected, a new Abacus Data poll indicates more than half of Winnipeg voters are undecided heading into next month’s civic election.

Of decided voters, 55 per cent favour Gillingham compared to 23 per cent for former councillor and provincial cabinet minister Kevin Klein and 11 per cent for funeral director Mike Vogiatzakis.

Of all respondents, just over 50 per cent said they were unsure while 13 per cent said they will not vote.

Near-future U.S. the setting for surreal dual-world storyline

It’s not every day you encounter a seriously intended literary novel that attempts to dramatize a mind-bending physics theory like quantum entanglement.

But then the B.C.-born-and-raised Emily St. John Mandel is not your everyday Canadian literary writer.

In her late 40s, she has lived in the U.S. for her entire writing career. She is best known for her 2014 dystopian novel Station Eleven, about a Shakespearean acting troupe navigating a pandemic-ravaged America.

Her new outing, her seventh, Exit Party, shares DNA with detective and sci-fi genres more than with conventional literary fiction.

Cabernet Sauvignon star of wine festival

The Winnipeg Wine Festival will celebrate the king of red wine grapes next weekend — the theme of this year’s festival, which takes place Sept. 25 and 26 at the RBC Convention Centre, is Cabernet Sauvignon.

Cab Sauv, as it’s also known, is the world’s most widely planted wine grape of any colour, first coming to prominence in the 1800s in France’s Bordeaux region, where the grape is still popular. Rather than single-variety wines, Bordeaux reds tend to be blends, with those coming from the left bank of the Gironde estuary being Cabernet-dominant, while right-bank wines are Merlot-dominant, with Cabernet Sauvignon playing a supporting role. Cabernet and Merlot work well together and many other countries have followed suit in blending the two.

A team at University of California Davis put Cabernet Sauvignon through a DNA test in 1996 and discovered its parent grapes are Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc — it’s likely that at some point the two varieties, planted next to each other in some vineyard, crossed and mutated and became the grape we know today. (Someone growing grapes in the 19th century must have had an inkling of what was up, as the grape has been called Cabernet Sauvignon since long before the DNA test.)

Flavour-wise, most Cabernet Sauvignon wines are big and bold, with a core of deep dark berry flavours, some graphite and spice notes and relatively bright acidity. It’s a grape that is well-suited to barrel aging, with most examples seeing at least some time in wood.

Day 1 of Jets training camp in the books with pairings essentially cemented

Nearly six minutes into his question-and-answer session, Scott Arniel took a welcome detour from the news of the day.

After exhausting the discussion around the goalie who wasn’t in training camp, the head coach of the Winnipeg Jets finally got a query about the line combinations and defensive pairings that were unveiled in training camp.

And unlike past years, when exhibition games were more frequent and the training camp wasn’t this condensed, Arniel conceded these groupings were intentional and were likely staying together for some time.

The expansion to an 84-game regular season brings with it a reduction to four pre-season games and a much shorter training camp, which could limit the amount of experimentation that Arniel can do during the next two weeks.