Lay down some boundaries with desperate ex

City tries to find the right balance in regulating personal e-vehicles

Patty Wiens was already a cycling enthusiast when she got an electric bicycle in early 2023, but she didn’t realize how much it would transform the way she got around Winnipeg.

She started riding throughout winter and stopped relying on her vehicle. Eventually, she sold her car.

“It’s not a replacement for a bike,” she said. “It’s a replacement for a car.”

Wiens, who has been dubbed the “Bike Mayor of Winnipeg” by a global cycling advocacy organization, said her e-bike is a cheaper and more environmentally friendly way to get around the city, especially as the cost of living mounts.

Hydro’s planned outages turn out the lights for thousands across province

Business owners in the East Beaches area of Lake Winnipeg hauled out generators Wednesday after a planned Manitoba Hydro outage left thousands of residents and cottagers without power.

Lise Bourassa, who runs several stores in Grand Beach, had to rent generators to accommodate the eight-hour blackout, which affected the area from Beaconia to Victoria Beach as well as Sagkeeng First Nation, while Hydro crews fixed a pole that was damaged by fire in May .

Despite the spare power source, she was only able to open one of her stores during the outage and said it came at a bad time.

“I understand the importance of what Manitoba Hydro is doing, the problem all the businesses in this area are having is that our season is very short and to be shut down for a full day has a fairly big impact, plus they added cost of getting generators,” she wrote in a message to the Free Press. “We also had less than one week to make arrangements, find electricians and generators to be able to keep all the food safe.”

First Nations’ concerns overshadowed by talk of major projects

The contrast could not have been more stark in Ottawa — unceded Algonquin territory — this week.

On one side, hundreds of chiefs and their proxies met at the annual summer meeting of the Assembly of First Nations to debate resolutions focused on issues — primarily crises — in their communities.

Of the 53 policy resolutions and two emergency resolutions proposed by the chiefs, pressing topics such as child welfare, housing, drinking water, poverty, Alberta separatism, citizenship, and online attacks from deniers of the atrocities of residential schools were all on the agenda.

On the other side, over seven cabinet ministers from the federal government showed up basically to argue the case for the fast-tracking of “major projects.”

Overlooked Really Ralis now the local favourite for Manitoba Derby

Trainer Cindy Krasner now has the local favourite for the $125,000 Manitoba Derby on Aug. 3, with a horse nobody wanted.

The 69-year-old former Hastings Park trainer saddled Really Ralis to win the $50,000 Derby Trial on Monday, defeating previous Derby favourites Prime Suspect, who had romped through a pair of local allowance races earlier this year for trainer Steve Keplin Jr., and Elston Gunnn, who defeated Prime Suspect to win the Golden Boy Stakes for trainer Tina Birdwell.

Really Ralis went through the BC Yearling Sale with a $5,000 reserve and did not come close to meeting it. Buyers took one look at his size and passed. Krasner’s longtime client, Dennis Spence, stepped in with a number and the colt changed hands for $2,500.

“I thought, God, for $2,500 you could triple your money as a show horse if he couldn’t run,” said Krasner.

Christopher Nolan crafts modern epic, brings wartime saga home

Months before this week’s release of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, the film was already being criticized for being too “woke,” insufficiently manly, overly casual and not faithful enough to the original 2,800-year-old poem.

There was a lot of online griping about the historical inaccuracy of the armour, the helmets and the boats. (These accusations about lack of realism being made, mind you, against a story that also includes a one-eyed, man-eating giant, a six-headed sea monster and a sorceress who can turn men into pigs.)

If you’re willing to approach it on its own terms, Nolan’s cinematic epic is magnificent, moving and visually astonishing. And — putting to one side those quibbles about period-specific Bronze Age breastplates — his take ends up being “realistic” in a much more profound sense: even sequences reaching toward mythic heights remain grounded in fundamental and enduring human questions about love and loyalty, death and war, time and age.

Worrying about fidelity to the original also seems by-the-by. The Odyssey is a foundational text that weaves through centuries of re-imaginings in literature and art. Even the comparatively brief history of cinema offers up several adaptations, from a 1905 silent short by Georges Méliès, to a (sadly) unrealized Ray Harryhausen Claymation version in the 1990s, to the Coen Brothers’ antic musical O Brother, Where Art Thou? from 2000.

‘Historic day’: two-year demolition of Arlington Bridge begins

The first pieces of the Arlington Bridge, a long-deteriorating Winnipeg landmark, were removed Thursday morning, nearly 115 years after it was built.