Jetcetera: The ‘deadly’ on-ice beep test challenge

Livestreamed mental-health meltdown underscores medium’s disturbing decline

On Tuesday evening, a well-known celebrity blogger, best known by the nom de plume Perez Hilton, opened up his TikTok account and began a livestream from his Miami home. What unfolded over the next 30 minutes horrified all who witnessed it — and should force the rest of us to take a very sober look at the ways social media can harm.

Main Street restaurant Boujee burns for the second time in one week

A former restaurant on Main Street is set to be demolished after a fire broke out for the second time in less than a week.

Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service crews responded to reports of a fire at Boujee Restaurant and Bar, a vacant, single-storey building on the 100 block of Main Street shortly before 6 a.m. Saturday. The same building was most recently damaged in a fire last Sunday.

At the scene, crews found heavy smoke coming from the building. After attacking the fire using aerial ladders that sprayed water from above, firefighters arranged an emergency demolition of the building. Demolition is expected to be completed today, the WFPS said in a news release.

No injuries were reported and the fire is under investigation.

Gilbert Plains Country Club closes for remainder of season due to flood damage

Scott McCallum has made the trek to the Gilbert Plains Country Club clubhouse countless times.

But this was the first time the golf professional and general manager of the course required hip waders to get to his office.

Walking hand in hand with his wife Lindsay, McCallum didn’t need much time to see the devastation caused by the flash flooding in the Parkland region in late June.

“We’re on a river and it’s a beautiful golf course, but anytime you’re on a body of water you know that you’re taking a chance of events like this happening,” McCallum said in a telephone interview. “To this magnitude, we’ve never seen anything like it before. So, this is new to us.

Leon’s Getting Larger and their tours are getting longer

Emo music was never just a phase for Nikola Boticki.

“It was people just saying the things I was feeling,” says the 26-year-old vocalist and guitarist. “Growing up, it’s kind of like, ‘I feel that way but I’m not going to say that out loud,’ so it was nice to hear someone say it.”

Boticki got into the punk subgenre near the end of his angsty high school years and his appreciation only grew while in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The music inspired him to form his own emo band, Leon’s Getting Larger, with friends Luke Penner (vocals/drums) and Noah St Hilaire (bass).

$60M, six-storey Harbourview Terrace due to open in June 2028

They donned high-vis vests and brandished shovels with gold-coloured blades Friday morning at the ceremonial groundbreaking for a multi-family residential development in northeast Winnipeg.

Concord Projects has started construction of Harbourview Terrace, the inaugural development by two-year-old real estate company Foxhill Properties. Located in North Kildonan at 1820 De Vries Ave., the $60-million, six-storey apartment building will contain 179 units.

Founder and president Frank Koch-Schulte, who runs the company with his wife Alisha, said Foxhill wants to develop and manage properties with integrity.

“This is kind of like my opportunity to try to do things our way, which I feel is a way that keeps tenants in mind,” Koch-Schulte said. “We live in this neighbourhood. We’re very much invested in seeing quality housing go here.”

New lab a win for Winnipeg’s long game

It would be easy to overlook the announcement this week that the federal government was green-lighting a quarter-billion-dollar expansion of the National Microbiology Laboratory’s Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health on Arlington Street.

Easy to overlook, in part, because it will take a decade to build the new 140,000-square-foot laboratory specializing in medical countermeasures.

But make no mistake, this latest investment from Ottawa galvanizes Winnipeg’s reputation as a global leader in the research of the world’s most infectious diseases. It also confirms that a wager made by Manitoba political leaders nearly 40 years ago is paying off in spades.

The existing NML was, to be frank, hastily conceived compensation for one of the most egregious examples of political pork-barrelling ever seen in Canada.