Set up guardrails before dipping toes in sports betting ahead of FIFA games

As you don your favourite soccer player's jersey and head to the nearest pub with your friends to watch a World Cup match later this month, you might also be tempted to bet money on the prospects of your team.

What feathered creatures signify for the health of the herd

Usually, Winnipeg snowbirds are known for going no further south than Florida.

But one migratory bird, the lesser yellowlegs, can go all the way to the southern tip of South America from Alaska and back, with midway stops in the prairies.

Most yellowlegs, like “Cholao 2,” don’t go quite that far.

That’s the name given to a specimen tracked as travelling from Cali, Colombia, to near North Battleford, Sask., and which will likely summer in the subarctic or Arctic.

After years of living in encampments, Lawrence is slowly adjusting to life with a roof, instead of a tarp, over his head

Just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic upended daily life in early 2020, Lawrence had a steady job, reliable income and a roof over his head. Within months, it was all gone.

After burning through his savings to keep paying rent, the 58-year-old from Sagkeeng First Nation spent the next 4 1/2 years homeless, living in an encampment along Waterfront Drive.

“At first, I couldn’t believe it,” he said while sitting in an office chair inside a low-barrier apartment complex in the city’s West End. “I was sitting at a drop-in centre trying to figure out ‘how did I end up here?’ It was too quick for me to absorb at the time.”

Lawrence, who didn’t want his last name used, has now been housed for three months through the province’s Your Way Home strategy, which aims to move roughly 700 Manitobans from encampments into stable housing.

A cache to crow about: Collector feathers nest with just about anything related to Robin’s Donuts

Ronald Moore’s personal association with Robin’s Donuts began when he was a grade schooler.

Volleyball bench boss named to coaching staff for men’s national squad tourney

Chris Voth is getting bumped into the starting lineup.

The Winnipeg Wesmen men’s volleyball head coach was named to the Canadian senior men’s national team’s coaching staff for the upcoming Volleyball Nations League tournament this summer.

Voth spent five years on the staff of the senior men’s extended roster that trains in Gatineau, Que. That time was spent with Team Canada’s reserve crop, who were young professionals or up-and-coming university athletes.

Now, he’ll help the main roster as it begins its push for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Music fest committed to exploration, experimentation

In the fifth-floor headquarters of the Cluster Festival, Ash Au is nerding out a little bit over a piece of West German machinery that’s still humming after all these years — a 1967 Nordmende 3004-C.

“The (original) warranty card on it says to get it serviced at Columbus Radio,” Au says, referring to the one-stop repair shop opened in 1968 by Bill Yaworsky, Winnipeg’s doctor of audio.

Au, the artistic director of the festival — officially titled Cluster: New Music and Integrated Arts — visited the shop at 1151 Sanford St. to get the Nordmende up and running.

With the fest settling into its Exchange District studio apartment, Au — a prolific sound designer, bassist, music educator and queer creative — figured it was about time to invest in a sick soundsystem.

Linebacker Clinton making strong case to be kept on Bombers roster

Ja’Kobe Clinton’s path to the pros hasn’t been anywhere near as glamorous as his brother’s.

The aspiring Winnipeg Blue Bombers linebacker had to scratch and claw just to continue playing after high school. Then there’s his well-known sibling, former Pro Bowl safety Ha Ha Clinton-Dix — a two-time national champion at Alabama who was chosen in the first round of the 2014 NFL Draft by the Green Bay Packers.

He went on to play eight NFL seasons and made approximately US$20 million in career earnings.

“That set the bar way tremendously high for me. But like I tell everybody, we got two different roads and I kind of took the harder route,” Clinton told the Free Press after Bombers practice on Tuesday.

Local fatboy challenge gives customers 30 minutes to devour behemoth burger

It’s just noon on what’s turning out to be the hottest day of the year and Curtis Kalmakoff, 40, takes a swig from the bottle of water next to him before taking his 11th bite of the world’s largest — and likely most expensive — fatboy burger.

Weighing as much as a three-month-old child, the burger comprises a seven-pound meat patty topped with: 10 slices of Bothwell cheddar cheese, half a pound of chopped white onions, one pound of tomatoes and half a pound of Elman’s sliced dill pickles, all smothered in 1½ pounds of chili and sandwiched between two made-to-order buns from Food Fare measuring 38 centimetres wide and approximately five centimetres tall.

As Kalmakoff wraps his lips around the 12½-pound beast in the outdoor seating area of St. James Burger & Chip Co., owner Kevin Ramberran and restaurant manager Les Bartle cheer him on.

Ramberran is the mastermind behind today’s contest.

Watch it: Chillers, thrillers and some workplace drama

Revenge is a dish best served with humour and … coloured contact lenses? Who can say. These are crazy times. Here are some mostly retaliatory new viewing suggestions for passing the time while awaiting a sign that summer will, one day, arrive for certain.

● Spider-Noir Series premières with all eight episodes Wednesday on Prime Video

Back in 2007, Nicolas Cage was thrillingly over the top as Johnny Blaze in the supernatural superhero movie Ghost Rider.

Nearly 20 years later, he and his crazy eyes are once again fighting crime and other injustices in the live-action adaptation of the Marvel comic Spider-Man Noir.

Museum diorama detailing marshland, rye farm decommissioned owing to pest infestation

What was designed as a triumph of taxidermy has instead become a buffet for pests.

Manitoba Museum has been forced to decommission the Delta Marsh and Rye Farm two-part diorama in the Parklands Gallery after discovering the extent of the devastation wrought by mice, clothes moths and beetle larvae. The open-air exhibition, completed in 2003, represents the province’s most important wetlands and the challenges faced by early farmers, including Ukrainian immigrants in the 1920s.

“Pests are a major issue,” says Amelia Fay, the museum’s director of research, collections and exhibitions. “All museums have pests and use discreet pest-management systems, but this specific diorama was particularly vulnerable because of how authentically it was constructed, using real plant materials and organic elements that various types of critters like to consume.”

Pests can enter the museum when the doors open; clothes moths drift in with foot traffic, mice can get in through tiny gaps and dermestid beetles can hitch a ride with visitors or via tiny cracks, laying eggs in areas close to food sources for future larvae.

Klaschka first Winnipegger in decades to compete in cross-country skiing World Cup

Taschi Klaschka has emerged as one of Manitoba’s top Nordic skiers.

Social media, screen time bigger risks to kids than substance use, inactivity: Doctors Manitoba

Social media and excessive screen time pose a bigger health risk to youth than substance use and inactivity, say Manitoba doctors, who are throwing their support behind a ban proposed by the province.

Gallery sees new location as blank canvas, celebrating with auction, exhibition

It’s the end of an era for Mayberry Fine Art, but partner and gallery director Shaun Mayberry prefers to think of it as a new beginning.

After spending 23 years of its more than 50-year existence at 212 McDermot Ave., the family business will be moving to its new — and much larger — location at 661 Wall St. next month.

“It’s bittersweet. We made our home in the Exchange,” he says. “We bought the building 24 years ago and it was a big move for us and our family. We moved out of St. Boniface into the downtown, a conscientious choice to be a part of the downtown Winnipeg arts community. The building has certainly served us well and has become a major part of our identity.”

But Mayberry Fine Art has outgrown the space. The Exchange District building wasn’t designed to be a gallery space; it was an office building that the Mayberry family constantly adapted to meet the needs of an evolving business.

Emerging film fest fosters creativity, community

While Ontario and Quebec film artists have long spoken ambivalently about working in the shadow of a cultural superpower, Prairie film artists tend to express a different kind of marginality.

“Canada doesn’t hold a candle to Hollywood and all that, but Winnipeg really struggles in the shadow of the folks in Toronto who set the agenda and who get most of the funding,” Winnipeg filmmaker Kevin Nikkel recently told the Free Press.

Nikkel’s son Caden, also a filmmaker, is driven by a similar sentiment.

He’s the programmer behind the Manitoba Emerging Filmmakers Festival (also organized by Matthew Shoup, Kieran Peters and Taryn Edgeworth). The festival, now in its third year, will show dozens of films next weekend in the Exchange District.

After quitting hockey twice, Oakbank’s Tabin flying high as Walter Cup champ

Kati Tabin was in the midst of hugging her teammates and soaking in the moment when a stark reminder of the magnitude of the long and winding road that brought her to the pinnacle of this remarkable journey was brought to her attention yet again.

“That was just it — it was like a pinch-me moment, like Holy (crap), we did it,” Tabin said in a telephone interview over the weekend. “It was so crazy, because one of my teammates came up to me after the game and she said ‘hey, remember when you quit hockey?’

“It was just kind of funny to think about that and to think about where we are now. I’m just super grateful that I stuck with it.”

The Oakbank product has been a little busy since Wednesday night, when the Montreal Victoire became the first Canadian team to capture the Walter Cup as champions of the Professional Women’s Hockey League.