Hot stuff: New ‘Joy of Cooking’ coming out in November

Impaired driving victim honoured

Ten years after he was killed in a collision involving an impaired driver in 2016, Robbie Anderson’s name has been added to MADD Canada’s Manitoba Memorial honouring those killed in drunk and drug-impaired-related crashes.

His older brother Chris Anderson, was one of two dozen people who gathered at the Glen Eden Funeral Home and Cemetery in West St. Paul Saturday to remember their loved ones, 86 victims whose names are etched into the granite monument near the heart of the graveyard.

“It’s heavy,” said Anderson when asked what it was like to be part of the ceremony and see his brother’s name added. “It’s been something I’ve been thinking about for a while.”

Grateful for MADD’s work and its efforts to honour Robbie, who was 27 when he died, Anderson said his brother, represented the “absolute best of us.”

Big Loser’s latest a winning mix of country, folk

The yellow trucker hat for sale on Facebook Marketplace said “Selkirk Lumber,” so Adam Wayne Brown knew he had to hammer home a deal.

Like the other millennial members of Winnipeg folk-country band Big Loser, the bassist has an affinity for the nostalgic, taking every opportunity — through music, through lyrics and through wardrobe — to recall the unique circumstances of growing up in a changing Interlake.

“I remember the matte yellow trucks driving around — the lumber trucks — and so I’ve had this strange memory of something disappearing from my youth and then persisting,” says Brown, who, like the band’s frontman Alex Paradoski, moved to Winnipeg more than a decade ago.

“I have a photo of the Lockport Bridge in my dining room,” chimes in Paradoski, whose first job as a teenager was bunning wieners and chopping fries at Skinner’s, a drive-in mainstay since 1929 along Highway 44.

Foster mom pleads guilty to assault that left six-year-old-girl paralyzed

A Winnipeg foster mother has admitted to violently assaulting her ill foster daughter and leaving her paralyzed after the girl resisted the woman’s efforts to provide her with medication, a court has heard.

Marilyn Keno, 26, pleaded guilty Friday to one count of aggravated assault.

Keno remains in custody and will be sentenced at a later date following the completion of a court-ordered pre-sentence report.

The maximum sentence for aggravated assault is 14 years in prison. Crown attorney Alanna Littman and defence lawyer Jeremy Kostiuk did not disclose what sentences they will be recommending.

Trailblazing Western Scrap Metals heavy-equipment operator relishes role at massive crane’s control

Less than five per cent of heavy-equipment operators in the country are women but that number is trending upward, according to a study conducted by trade magazine Crane & Hoist Canada.

It was reported that in Ontario roughly eight per cent of jobs in the transport and heavy-equipment field are currently held by women. Furthermore, in 2024 almost 20 per cent of graduates at an Edmonton-based heavy-equipment operator training school were female, the article stated.

That brings us to Harmony Guspodarchuk, the first female crane operator in the 70-year history of Western Scrap Metals, a family-owned business at 18 Sutherland Ave.

Three years ago, Guspodarchuk literally stepped into the driver’s seat of a 27,500-kilogram, Liebherr C 924 Heavy Lift Litronic crane. The 29-year-old hasn’t looked back much since.

Men’s recovery home dedicated to ‘homeless hero’ Faron Hall’s memory

Faron Hall never got the chance to begin recovery. Once heralded as Winnipeg’s “homeless hero” after twice plunging into the Red River to save strangers from drowning, Hall told St. Boniface Street Links executive director Marion Willis shortly before his death in 2014 that he wanted help for his alcoholism.