Actor played Boba Fett in Star Wars

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts: We love our grandchildren, but now we’re sick of them. The two sets of parents — our adult children — have been parking their kids out here on the farm with us while they take back-to-back road trips to see their friends. We’ve had enough.

Grandma and I want them to come back and get the “brats” (just joking, they’re nice kids) so we can relax.

You have to be so careful with city kids around the farm who don’t know when they’re going to make a mistake and get hoofed by an animal or run over by a farm implement.

How do we tell our kids the party is over early, and they really need to come back before grandma and I give out?

Mayor Scott Gillingham, in one of his first re-election campaign pledges, has promised to create a level playing field for local businesses to compete with national and multinational bidders on city contracts for goods and services.

It’s not a bad pledge, per se. There are a lot of Winnipeggers who are keenly interested in seeing government do business with other Winnipeggers and Manitobans.

But Gillingham’s newest campaign policy fails to answer two key questions: what, exactly, is a “local” company? And it is beneficial to give government business to local companies over those headquartered elsewhere?

Two recent controversies illustrate the difficulty in obtaining definitive answers.

U.S. authorities say a Manitoba man falsely claimed he had been kidnapped and taken across the Canada-U.S. border over the weekend.

Roderick Garson, 37, is being held in a county jail near Alexandria, Minn., after he was arrested and charged with falsely reporting a crime.

The arrest stems from a report police received Saturday that a man had been abducted with a weapon in Manitoba and taken across the border into the United States.

The investigation led U.S. authorities to Alexandria, about two hours northwest of Minneapolis, where police located the reported victim and suspect after the latter ran into a local store claiming he had escaped from his 31-year-old unnamed captor.

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