Kendrick’s essays not quite pitch-perfect

Memories of East Selkirk evoked on Zoon Monkman’s new album

At the dawn of the MP3 era, an adolescent Zoon Monkman didn’t have the money for an iPod or a Microsoft Zune, the short-lived competitor to Apple’s revolutionary personal-listening device.

What the recording artist from Brokenhead Ojibway Nation did have in his backpack was the catalogue for the Scholastic Book Club, where only one product demanded attention: an AM-FM radio pen that scoured the airwaves for connection with every click.

For Monkman — a Polaris Music Prize-nominated musician who records as Zoon and pioneered the “moccasingaze” genre, which blends the dreamy textures of shoegaze with the rhythms and energies of Indigenous song — his mother’s gift of the ballpoint pen was a means of both self-discovery and the development of his musical taste.

During lonely days as an elementary student at East Selkirk’s Happy Thought School, the device was also a recess-hour tether to distant worlds, where artists such as Feist, Avril Lavigne and Broken Social Scene were introduced by the enthusiastic voice of a man who called himself Ace Burpee.

Letters, August 10

Horrors. Is Donald Trump correct? I think so. The bans on U.S. liquor are discriminatory. How could they be anything else? Provinces don’t ban alcohol from any other country.

Football kept Bombers’ Jaworski going while recovering from car crash

Instead of gearing up for his first full season of CFL football, Matt Jaworski was in a hospital bed wondering if he’d ever get to play again.

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers defensive end was in a serious car crash in March and has several scars on his face — which he pointed out to reporters on Sunday — to prove it.

The 23-year-old from Buffalo, N.Y., was placed on the retirement list in May. Over the weekend, the Bombers signed him to the practice roster.

“I appreciate Winnipeg taking me back and I’m ready to go,” he said after practice.

Woman dead in B.C. wildfire as grim video reveals village in ruins

PENTICTON - The wildfire raging near Okanagan Lake in British Columbia's southern Interior claimed the life of an 80-year-old woman as she tried to escape the flames, police said on Sunday, as video footage and grim accounts emerged of nearby devastation.

A statement from Penticton RCMP said the resident of Meadow Valley, northwest of Summerland, B.C., had been trying to flee with a family member "when she died suddenly," believed to be a result of the fire.

Police said the death, reported early Saturday by a witness who was also evacuating, was the only known fatality in the blaze that has forced about 20,000 people out of their homes and left the community of Faulder a smouldering ruin.

The BC Coroners Service was investigating the nature of the woman's death, and police were not aware of any other fatalities in the fire, calling it "a deeply traumatic event," the statement said.

Suspension upheld for teen hockey player involved in hazing

A high school hockey player who was found to have been involved in sexualized hazing of rookie teammates lost his suspension appeal.

The youth player was barred from Hockey Canada-sanctioned activities. He was handed the four-year and nine-month suspension from sanctioned hockey after an interim ban issued in March 2024.

He appealed his suspension late last year to the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada, an independent conflict tribunal, but the centre upheld the youth’s suspension, according to a written decision issued earlier this year.

An independent investigator who probed the hockey player’s actions described the youth as a veteran player who both participated in and co-ordinated the “assigning” of rookie team members to veteran players to perform tasks for them. He himself was “assigned” a rookie, the decision said.