Brit BFFs on Titanic moored to each other

Former Winnipeg Jet doing his part for future of funded deaf athletes

Jim Kyte defied the odds to have the hockey career that he did.

The hard-nosed defenceman from Ottawa made history by becoming the first legally deaf NHL player when the Winnipeg Jets drafted him 12th overall in 1982.

“Right now, I’m the only one in history to play in the NHL, but I’d like to be able to say I am the first player — which would imply that there would be a second player, and hopefully a third, fourth, fifth,” Kyte recently told the Free Press.

Between 1982 and 1996, he suited up in 598 career NHL games, including 399 as a member of the 1.0 Jets.

AC/DC fans power up with pre-show pop-up

Those getting ready to rock on Sunday night at Princess Auto Stadium, can prime their engines at AC/DC’s PWR/UP Pop-Up this weekend.

Fans lined up all the way down Fort Street south of the Pyramid Cabaret for a special preview event on Friday night.

“We’re so excited,” said Marcella Ceron shortly after getting into the Pyramid. Ceron and her husband were hoping to win tickets to Sunday’s concert, one of a number of promotions running throughout the pop-up’s tenure at the downtown bar. “We were in line since 5 o’clock.”

According to organizers, the venues across Canada have been handpicked – including the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver and Foufounes Électriques in Montreal, among others — owing to their reputations as “places where fans already gather and music culture lives.”

Manitoba abandoning spring, fall clock changes

Time’s up for the time change in Manitoba.

Manitobans won’t be setting their clocks back an hour in November. The province has decided to permanently stay on daylight time after surveying residents on the twice annual clock adjustment.

“We heard from Manitobans loud and clear — no more changing the clocks in Manitoba,” Premier Wab Kinew said in a news release Thursday.

Most of the 72,000 votes submitted in an online EngageMB survey — 92 per cent — said they would like to see the practice end. The survey asked if they preferred earlier sunrises in winter with standard time or the later sunsets in summer with daylight time. More than half of survey participants (58 per cent) indicated a preference to stay on permanent daylight time; 34 per cent voted to eliminate the time change but stay on standard time.

Jets GM insists club’s not working under any deadline in netminder’s trade request

Connor Hellebuyck and his family were subject to so much post-Olympic vitriol that both the Winnipeg Jets security team and even police had to get involved.

Brit BFFs on Titanic moored to each other

Donna Jones Alward could be a character in one of her novels: Maritimes-born farm girl leaves home, gets an education and then an office job, finds love, marries, has babies, returns to work, starts writing in her spare time and finally — after much angst — sells her first book in 2006. Fast forward to 2025, where our Nova Scotia-based heroine, now with countless romance novels under her pen, has segued into historical fiction writing. Talk about happy endings and homecomings.

Alward has described Ship of Dreams, released in late August, as “a story about the enduring bonds of friendship when they’re tested by adversity.” Set in 1912 aboard the RMS Titanic, dubbed “the ship of dreams,” her novel focuses on Hannah and Louisa, two longtime English chums who book passage to New York aboard the luxury liner. One is married, the other a single suffragette. But both young women have big secrets and need to repair affairs of the heart and head.

Little do the two besties know that the ship’s collision with an iceberg at sea will put their beliefs on love, loss, grit and grief to the ultimate test.

Like any decent historical fiction scribe, Alward doesn’t let her famous setting overshadow her fictional characters. While Ship’s storyline plods along for the first two-thirds of the novel, the narrative picks up steam once ship meets berg. Having the first-person chapters alternate between Hannah and Lou offers insight into how the pair view their locale, their dilemmas and demons; it also fosters reader engagement.

Kinew delivered what most of us wanted; now we’ll have to deal with the consequences

Premier Wab Kinew has decided to adopt permanent daylight savings time, which means a permanent end to the spring forward, fall back tradition of adjusting our clocks. And absolutely no one is surprised.