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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/09/2011 (5435 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
BRAD OSWALD / TV
Blades battles on
Reality TV seldom has to contend with actual, grim reality, but CBC’s competition series Battle of the Blades was forced to do just that after the sudden death/apparent suicide of retired NHLer and third-season contestant Wade Belak. The network and the show’s producers have decided to continue as planned (“We believe he would want us to move ahead,” CBC programming head Kirstine Stewart said in a network release); the series première (Sunday on CBC), titled Game On, will include an extended tribute to Belak.
RANDALL KING / MOVIES
Can you feel the 3D tonight?
The Lion King is the most Shakespearean of Disney musicals. It’s a little bit Hamlet (with the ghost of Simba’s father exhorting him to do the right thing by dealing with his treacherous uncle) and a whole lot Henry IV. (Think of Timon and Pumbaa as Falstaff.) The 3D version opening at Polo Park and St. Vital tomorrow just runs for two weeks in advance of a 3D DVD release in October.
ALISON MAYES / ARTS
This calls for a Cuba Libre
Visions of Cuba by three established painters from that island country are on view until Oct. 8 in the show The Pleasure of Getting Lost at the Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery on the Canadian Mennonite University campus. Tonight from 7:30 to 9 p.m., the public can meet two of the artists, Jairo Alfonso and Francisco Núñez, and hear them give a translated artists’ talk about their lives and work.
Aaron Peters (centre) looks at local music in his new documentary.
ROB WILLIAMS / MUSIC
Winnipeg rock goes big
Veteran Winnipeg musician Aaron Peters has moved into the director’s chair with his first feature-length documentary, Aaron Peters Presents Winnipeg Rock Part One, featuring 12 different local bands, including High Class Low Lifes, Why, Tinnitus, Trouser Mouth and Five Hundred Pound Furnace, performing and talking about their adventures in the business. The film will be screened tonight for the public at the IMAX Theatre in Portage Place for the last time before the footage and masters are donated to the groups in the movie. Tickets are $15. The screening begins at 9:30. Part Two is already in the works.
CHRIS SMITH / JAZZ
Silver lining
Horace Silver, a co-founder of the Jazz Messengers, helped develop the enduring hard bop style of jazz and composed lasting songs such as Song for My Father and Nica’s Dream. You’ve heard his music whether you know it or not. Trumpeter Derrick Gardner and saxophonist Don Braden pay tribute to that music as the Izzy Asper Jazz Performances season opens with three blues-drenched concerts this weekend at the Berney Theatre: Saturday, 8 p.m., and Sunday, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Tickets, $36, are available by calling 477-7534.
BITE club has entered the ball park for a single game, filling the stands with mosquitoes — just not in the way you may think.
The Fish are participating an alternate identity takeover, one that many other teams in the minor baseball leagues have been having some fun with. The Winnipeg Goldeyes re-branded to pay homage to the province’s beloved summer creatures, the Manitoba Mosquitoes.
The Fargo-Moorhead RedHawks had some fun with its alternative identity, doing a five-game name change to the Woodchippers, a fun reference to the 1996 film Fargo.
Other honourable mentions are the Chicago Dogs, who switched over to the Chicago Wieners, the Sioux Fall Canaries transformed into the Minnehaha Martians, Milwaukee Milkmen became the Franklin Benjamins, and the Lake Country Dockhounds swapped to the Wisconsin Dive Bars.
As Manitoba Hydro crews work to restore the last pockets of power following this week’s severe storms, some Winnipeg residents say the prolonged outages left them effectively stranded, unable to safely leave their apartments or charge essential mobility devices.
More than 30,000 Manitoba Hydro customers lost power after powerful storms swept across southern Manitoba Wednesday and Thursday, bringing down trees and power lines. Environment and Climate Change Canada recorded wind gusts of 133 km/h in Brandon, 113 km/h in Souris and 91 km/h in Winnipeg, along with more than 2,900 lightning strikes within 50 kilometres of the city.
In an update posted to social media Saturday morning, Manitoba Hydro said about 500 customers remained without power. The utility said it hoped to restore all remaining storm-related outages later in the day.
“Right now, we’re prioritizing customers that have been out the longest,” the post reads. “The final restoration work will still take time, in part because we’re dealing with small, localized outages and need to travel across a widespread area.”
Laura Rance-Unger5 minute readYesterday at 2:01 AM CDT
A sense of calm descends over Prairie fields this time of year — at least on the surface.
Activities become more limited in the weeks leading up to harvest. There’s not much farmers can do now to support this year’s crop, other than monitor and protect it from diseases such as sclerotinia in canola and leaf stripe and fusarium head blight in wheat and barley.
July is when you might see farmers wading into a thick stand of canola, conducting a so-called “wet pants test” to get a low-tech read on how much disease-inducing moisture is lurking in the canopy.
Disease pressure is high in a humid, hot summer like this one and it’s kept aerial applicators busy applying fungicides. Sclerotinia spores live on plant residues in the soil and blossom into a mould that destroys the canola stem, starving the maturing pods.
Reviewed by GC Cabana-Coldwell4 minute readYesterday at 2:02 AM CDT
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.
