Actress more than just a pretty face

Green growth focus of hydroponic gathering

In a town where fresh produce is hard to come by, Rick Barentsen has a line on some lettuce.

Barentsen is part of an initiative at an education centre in Leaf Rapids that grows 60 heads of fresh leafy greens each week, year-round, using indoor hydroponic growing systems.

The veggies are distributed to many of the northwestern Manitoba town’s 300 residents. It’s a boon to a community where Barentsen said the local grocery store has not carried fresh produce for the last six months.

“Being the only food grower in the community, it makes a big difference for the 90 families that we have,” he said. “We harvest it, we wrap it in plastic food bags (and) we hand it out the same day.”

Alberta’s gopher museum closed until further notice as owners find new facility

A quirky Alberta roadside attraction that has delighted travellers for decades with its stuffed rodents in tiny costumes is closed until further notice. 

The World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, located in Torrington, a hamlet about 120 kilometres north of Calgary, made the announcement online earlier this week.

Laural Kurta, museum director, said she was forced to close the doors because the two historical buildings that house the exhibits need to be replaced. 

"We have done every patch repair, staple, spackle, everything we could possibly do, and it is just at its end," Kurta said in an interview Tuesday. 

Dozens of Uber, Lyft drivers switched to cheaper insurance coverage: MPI probe

Ride-service drivers have been defrauding Manitoba Public Insurance by improperly insuring their vehicles as for personal use.

The public insurer and the City of Winnipeg, which regulates ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, discovered the widespread fraud after MPI conducted a review in December last year.

“When a driver changes their coverage from ride-share insurance to a personal vehicle coverage and continues to operate as a ride-share driver, that is fraud, plain and simple,” said MPI chief executive officer Satvir Jatana at a news conference Thursday.

MPI’s review looked at a random sample of 408 ride-hailing vehicles and found 108 were operating without the proper vehicle-for-hire insurance coverage. In order to register with the city as a ride-service driver, a vehicle must have such insurance and proof must be provided to the ride-booking company.

Bombers still control post-season destiny

Jake Ceresna was confident he was putting pen to paper with a Grey Cup contender.

When the star defensive tackle signed with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in free agency back in February, did he foresee any scenario in which they’d be under .500 at this point in the season and in danger of missing the playoffs?

“That’s a good question,” Ceresna admitted after Wednesday’s closed practice.

“Obviously, at the beginning of the year, you think you’re gonna go 18-0. But the reality of life is there’s roller-coasters. There’s going to be hard times, there’s going to be good times. We’re in the valley right now and we just have to come out of it and get back to the peak.”

Actress more than just a pretty face

“Any girl can be glamorous,” Hollywood screen siren Hedy Lamarr once declared. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

With waves of raven hair, immaculately arched eyebrows and perfectly symmetrical features, Lamarr was billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world” in the 1930s. She was naturally glamorous, but she had a very hard time standing still and looking stupid.

Born in Vienna to a cultured, highly assimilated Jewish family and married as a teen to a munitions manufacturer, she fled Austria — and her increasingly unhappy marriage — in 1937. Later, working in Hollywood as the newest discovery of Louis B. Mayer, she watched helplessly as Europe descended into war and German U-boats brought down ships bringing desperate refugees across the Atlantic.

Labouring at the MGM studios during the day, she spent her nights designing a secure communications system for radio-controlled torpedoes, hoping to assist the Allied war effort. With American avant-garde composer George Antheil — who, believe it or not, was inspired by his work with player pianos — she developed a frequency-hopping transmission technique, basically foreseeing the technology that would enable the development of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS systems.

Letters, Oct. 8

Computer scientist Melvin Conway once stated, “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”