Crave TV orders up first original series: Letterkenny

It’s one thing to climb aboard rail-relocation train, quite another to pay for the ride

Anyone who wants a brighter, safer, healthier future for the city of Winnipeg should really want the renewed hopes of rail relocation to finally become reality. And the sooner, the better.

Premier Wab Kinew announced Wednesday the province was going to forge a plan to relocate the Canadian Pacific Kansas City central yards and many of other the lines that run through Winnipeg to a bypass that runs around the city.

This “plan to design a plan” strategy was devised by a task force headed up by former federal MP and cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy, who in 2024 was given a two-year mandate to find the best way to rid the city of some or all of its rail infrastructure.

For the record, Kinew and Axworthy said a relocation would likely take 20 years to complete, which makes this week’s announcement an important statement of intent, but little more. The sobering reality is that this promising idea has been proposed by political leaders, and then abandoned, for decades.

Crave TV orders up first original series: Letterkenny

Bell Media’s recently launched streaming-content service, Crave TV, has ordered its first original Canadian series, and it’s a beauty: a half-hour comedy called Letterkenny, inspired by a wildly popular series of online mini-sodes about a couple of fast-talking tough guys in a rural Ontario town.

Letterkenny Problems, which has garnered more than eight million online views and received a 2014 Canadian Screen Award for best web series, is a collection of five short videos — none longer than two minutes in length — in which two Letterkenny country boys, played by Jared Keeso (19-2) and Nathan Dales (King & Maxwell), rattle off a rapid-fire series of insults and profane observations about the hicks, “skids” and hockey players that irritate them on a daily basis.

Crave TV’s version of Letterkenny will follow good ol’ boy Wayne (Keeso) as he tries to protect his farm-based lifestyle and attitude against the threats that the ever-evolving outside world keeps delivering to his doorstep.

In a Bell Media release, CTV/Crave TV’s senior vice-president of programming, Mike Cosentino, called Letterkenny “raw, authentic and unlike anything we’ve seen before,” and predicted the six half-hour episodes commissioned for Crave TV will be standouts in the service’s comedy collection.

Letters, Aug. 13

Fears and jeers are not an appropriate response. The supervised consumption site debate too often assumes a false dichotomy: either supervised consumption or treatment spots, not both.

Winnipeg couple feels flush after highway porta-potty scare

Talk about a crappy situation.

Two Winnipeg seniors were driving on the Trans-Canada Highway Monday afternoon when they collided with an unlikely projectile: a porta-potty.

Ed and Helen Toews were driving to their cottage in Sioux Narrows from Kenora, Ont., when a portable toilet came loose from the bed of a passing truck and launched into their car.

Ed Toews, 87, was sitting in the passenger seat when a flash of green came into his line of sight.

Dealing with what’s left behind … in the cloud

Sooner or later, we will all face it; if we’re wise, we plan for its arrival.

Death.

Notwithstanding the pithy observation of 18th-century American statesman Benjamin Franklin regarding the inescapable nature of taxes, the only real inevitability in each of our lives is that it will end. And when it does, those left behind to (one hopes) mourn our passing are always left with the unenviable chore of tying up multitudinous loose ends.

What comes to mind first are familiar material considerations such as wills, finances, property divestiture and the burdensome responsibility of sorting through and disposing of a lifetime’s worth of accumulated clothing, furniture, vehicles and all manner of personal belongings. These jobs are made immeasurably easier if the departed has left specific and detailed instructions and documentation for those tasked with sorting it all out.