Memories of a maverick

Prepare to be … blutterbunged?

Are you not blutterbunged?

If Russell Crowe’s second-century gladiator character had uttered a 19th century equivalent of “Are you not entertained?” that fit the mood of today’s 21st century, that would be it.

Definitions first. Blutterbunged is an obscure regional dialect word from England that means everything from astonished to confounded to bemused or shocked into speechlessness. Its composition suggests something both more and less, namely blustering bloviation (that’s the more part) and empty words (that’s the empty part). These days we would more naturally punctuate our reaction to an event or statement with a profanity. But you get the drift.

Unearthed by lexicologist Susie Dent, it speaks volumes about our times that it fits now. That we need to reach back hundreds of years to find the right word to adequately capture a contemporary civic reaction to what the hell is going on in politics and the world today.

Rollins becomes fifth councillor to bow out of fall election

Sherri Rollins says she’s withdrawing her bid to keep her city hall seat after eight years, citing her concerns about the “gradual erosion of the role played by council” and the struggle to work co-operatively with the mayor’s office.

IG Wealth Management to sell longtime Portage Avenue HQ

The downtown IG Wealth Management building will soon be up for sale.

The Winnipeg-based financial services company is moving its headquarters after nearly 40 years at 447 Portage Ave., across from the former Hudson’s Bay flagship store.

By current timelines, staff will move into a newer downtown tower — 360 Main St. — in 2028.

Roughly 1,100 employees will make the transition, according to Nancy McCuaig, executive vice-president of IGM Financial, IG Wealth Management’s parent company.

Nemat’s novel chronicles grandmother’s harrowing life in Russia and Iran

Mistress of the Persian Boarding House is the most enjoyable book I have read in the more than 15 years since I began reviewing books for the Free Press.

Author Marina Nemat’s prose, inspired by her paternal grandmother’s life, flows smoothly, like a babbling brook down a mountain.

Nemat is an Iranian-born Canadian writer and human rights activist known for her bestselling memoirs Prisoner of Tehran and After Tehran: A Life Reclaimed. Arrested at 16 for opposing Iran’s post-revolution regime, she endured torture and forced marriage in Evin Prison before emigrating to Canada in 1991.

Nemat’s grandmothers were both Russian, and she was brought up in a Russian Orthodox Christian family in Tehran. With their Iranian husbands, whom they had married before the Russian Revolution of 1917, both grandmothers fled from Russia to Iran as part of a massive wave of migration.

As wildfire season rages, new book explores the frontlines of battling Canadian blazes

Mother Nature’s talking but we haven’t been listening, according to Jesse Winter, author of Wild Fire: Dispatches from a Country Ablaze, a book, released earlier this summer detailing Canada’s wildfire woes.

Currently, almost 1,000 wildfires across Northwestern Ontario, British Columbia, the Prairies, Northwest Territories and eastern provinces are burning in Canada. Forest fires also continue to wreak havoc in France, Spain and other European countries, and in the U.S. states of Oregon, California, Florida and Texas. While 2023 still rates as the world’s worst wildfire season, 2026 is hot on its heels.

Winter, a Vancouver-based, award-winning climate disaster photojournalist, spent more than two years on Wild Fire, his first book. In-depth research included working with firefighting crews and environmentalists as well as talking to researchers, politicians and evacuees. He says we need to rethink our views on wildfires or be prepared to watch more land go up in flames.

Canada, Winter writes, is “a country almost perfectly designed to burn.” At least 70 per cent of boreal forests, which cover one-third of the country, are stuffed with highly flammable spruce, fir, pine and tamarack trees as well as aspen, poplar and birch. With a wealth of available fuel, it’s no surprise, he writes, that an area twice the size of Vancouver Island burns every summer in Canada.