The Social Page: World AIDS Day

Nine Circles Community Health Centre held its Crimson & Cocktails: A World AIDS Day Mixer, a fundraiser for the Manitoba HIV Program, on Nov. 29 at Bailey’s Restaurant & Lounge in the Exchange District.

Every year, Dec. 1 marks World AIDS Day, a time to reflect on what has been achieved in regard to the national and global response to HIV, and what must still be achieved.

Nine Circles is a community-based, non-profit organization that specializes in HIV prevention and care. Nine Circles supports HIV and STI prevention through testing, education and treatment, provides co-ordinated medical and social supports for those living with HIV, and promotes sexual and personal health, including harm reduction to those at risk.

For more information, visit ninecircles.ca.

Boy, 8, 'can't wait' to go to camp with older cousin

‘Thank you! Thank you, Mom! Thank you!”

Eight-year-old Ondreiz Osborne shouted to his mom when he found out he would be going to camp for the first time this summer.

“He’s very enthusiastic and kind of dramatic, but in a good way,” mom Susie Saville laughed.

Ondreiz has wanted to go to camp for awhile — he almost got to do until his mom welcomed a baby into the family and couldn’t take him.

Wolseley School students ditch classrooms for the great outdoors

On June 5, Wolseley School students gathered up their books and school supplies and walked out... with their teachers’ blessings.

It was the start of a two-week project that involved turning the great outdoors into a classroom setting for the nursery to Grade 6 school. Principal Suzanne Mole explains how the idea came together.

Why would an entire school leave the creature comforts of the indoors and move all 171 students out onto the steamy schoolyard?

Because it’s amazing!

Winnipegger takes incredible voyage from childhood curiousity to sunken treasure

Brent Piniuta readily admits he’ll never be mistaken for a salty dog, a tag given to those who spend an inordinate amount of time sailing the seven seas.Sure, he was fascinated by tales about pirates and naval battles when he was a kid growing up in St. Norbert.

And yes, he enjoyed gluing model boats together in his bedroom, then setting them afloat in the retention ponds that dot the south Winnipeg neighbourhood where his family lived.

But when it came to rollicking in the waves at one of Manitoba’s or northwestern Ontario’s myriad lakes and beaches, Piniuta could never bear the thought of, as he puts it, “stepping into water in which living things might lurk.”

“Even as recently as five years ago, when my wife and I would go camping with our two girls at Rushing River, everybody would be telling me to join them (in the water), and I’d be like, ‘I’m OK, right here on the sidelines,’” Piniuta says, seated in the dining room of his Fort Richmond bi-level.

Cirque show reimagines the industrial revolution

Last week, the empty lot sitting on the corner of Kenaston Boulevard and Sterling Lyon Parkway got a temporary facelift when Cirque du Soleil delivered their famous Big Top for their upcoming show Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities.

The blue-and-yellow striped tent is impossible to miss. At 19 metres high and 51 metres in diameter with a seating capacity of around 2,600, the venue alone may be enough to lure those who have previously foregone seeing the Montreal-based theatre troupe at MTS Centre, and promises to be an entirely different experience for Cirque regulars. 

“Because this is the first Big Top production coming to Winnipeg, the whole experience will be very different for anyone who may have gone to an arena show,” says Jeff Lovari, publicist for the show. 

“We manage all of our sites, so from the moment the guests park and enter, see the sights and the concessions and the front of house, it’s a much more theatrical environment that we can control in a way we can’t in an arena,” adds artistic director Rachel Lancaster, who has been with Kurios for almost a year, but has worked for Cirque since 2011. 

My century-old caboose is in rough shape

Yes, we have a caboose in our family. It’s in our backyard, actually.

It’s a 1905 CN Railway caboose that has been a ton of fun since I bought it at an auction in Gordon many years ago. My winning bid was $850. Then I paid Brunger Brothers of Teulon $1,000 to move it. At $1,850, the cost was very nice — it would have been cheap at twice the price.

I have kept it all original except for the seating and oil stove — the latter of which I donated to the railway museum in the VIA Rail Station and replaced with a cook stove.

Even this stove has a notable history as it was the cook stove used in the John Taylor home summer kitchen. I traded a case of beer for it.

Urban breweries serving up investment and pride

Winnipeg’s positive redevelopment efforts and sense of community innovation are major draws for creative people outside the province. Kevin Selch, Braden Smith, Mark Bauche and Shannon Baxter are all non-natives to Manitoba, but each has found a home here, both for themselves and their creative endeavours.

Selch is the owner of Little Brown Jug, a 10,000-sq.-ft. brewery on the fringe of downtown’s Exchange District. He was born in Tisdale, Sask., and raised in Winnipeg. At 18, he left the city for university in Wisconsin and later migrated to Vancouver to further his studies. He worked in Ottawa as an economist for 10 years, then got to work on a business plan and moved back to Winnipeg in 2015. It took nine months to build out the space; now Little Brown Jug has been open for several months.

Smith has been Winnipeg’s chief planner for four years. He grew up in the Kootenay Rockies and then found himself in Tofino on Vancouver Island where he served as the town’s chief administrative officer. Smith marvels at the fact he has an incredible opportunity to work in land-use planning in one of Canada’s fastest growing cities: “Our growth rate has actually exceeded Toronto’s, Vancouver’s, Montreal’s, and Ottawa’s over the past two or three years and so it’s a really exciting time to be in Manitoba.”

Bauche and Baxter both moved to Winnipeg to study landscape architecture at the University of Manitoba.

Rights, camera… moved to action

Last September, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights issued an open call for crowd-sourced images to reflect four themes — freedom of expression, inclusion and diversity, reconciliation, and human rights and the environment.

After receiving 984 submissions, a jury has selected 70 photographs for a new Canada 150 exhibit called Points of View.

Twelve of the images were submitted by nine photographers based in Manitoba.

The exhibit opens a week before Canada Day, on June 23, and runs until Feb 4. However, the images can be viewed online.

Tales of canine heroism will have you busting out the kibble

It's the kind of heart-tugging tale of devotion that leaves readers around the world feeling warm and fuzzy.

Unless you spent last week in a coma, chances are you saw the viral photos of a loyal dog in Argentina that refused to leave his injured master’s side, hugging him and nuzzling his face until help arrived.

The doggie drama began when Jesus Hueche, 28, was pruning branches outside his home in Bahia Blanca, Argentina, and fell about two metres out of a tree, cracking his head on the concrete pavement.

When paramedics arrived, they discovered the unconscious Hueche was not alone — his faithful dog Tony was “hugging him,” perching astride his master’s chest and never leaving his side. 

The pricey Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg has even its critics applauding

The Elbphilharmonie, a concert hall in Hamburg encased in glass and set upon a giant brick warehouse, is surrounded on three sides by the waters of the city’s bustling harbour. 

Designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog and de Meuron, the building cost about US$850 million, took more than a decade to design and build, and was for a long time cited as a joke — a dark joke — among Germans who fretted the project had become an albatross: unbuildable, over budget and wildly out of proportion to what the sensible people of this mercantile city needed.

But the building, one of several projects around the world which aim self-consciously for “iconic” status and have price tags in the billion-dollar range, opened to international acclaim on Jan. 11.

The acoustics, designed by the renowned Japanese acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, are a marvel of clarity, precision and cool objectivity. Visitors enjoy stunning views of the industrial grit of Hamburg, renewing the city’s relation to the source of its wealth and its cultural window on the larger world. Tourists flock to ascend the Elphie’s long escalator, rising through the old warehouse in a tunnel of white glass and plaster to visit the rooftop terrace, which bustles with activity before and long after evening concerts. 

Churches get a chance to show off at Doors Open Winnipeg

EVERY Sunday morning, members of a church in the heart of the Glenelm neighbourhood climb to the top of their roof to sing and pray.

It’s not quite as dramatic as it sounds, since the red brick building housing Gordon-King Memorial United Church was built on top of a high basement used as the worship space for two decades, building manager Dan McCulloch says.

“The floor is actually a tar roof with all the drains in place,” he says of what’s underneath the sloping hardwood floors of the building completed in 1927.

That’s just one of the hidden details on display at the 700-seat modern Gothic building during next weekend’s annual Doors Open Winnipeg.

This year, encourage Mom to be a basket case

Mother’s Day doesn’t always have to start with pancakes and eggs. It doesn’t even have to mean getting Mom out of a comfy bed on a Sunday morning to battle a crowd at brunch.

It could mean letting her sleep in and then waking up to a basket stocked with enough yummy things to nibble on all day and a couple of magazines to read while sipping from a wine glass.

Filling a gift basket for Mom is easy-peasy. You can get started with that right now. Depending on your household, letting her sleep in might be more difficult. You should work on that.

Here is a list of basket stuffers made up almost entirely of local items with just a couple from outside of Manitoba’s boundaries. The gift-giving guidelines come from a simple rhyme I found years ago in a 1999 book called The Benevolence of Manners: Recapturing the Lost Art of Gracious Victorian Living by Linda S. Lichter. I’ve used it ever since whenever gift-giving is in order:

End of the world is on the minds of Harpoonist & the Axe Murderer

What would do you if an apocalypse were on the horizon? Hunker down and hope to survive or live it up like there’s no tomorrow?

Vancouver-based blues-rock duo the Harpoonist & the Axe Murderer lean toward the latter option on their new record, Apocalipstick, which explores some intense lyrical ground while still living up to their raucous, soulful and dance-inducing reputation.

“We live in pretty uncertain times, and not that the end of the world is necessarily inevitable, but there’s a lot of crap going on that certainly isn’t pleasant. There’s a few references to that in the lyrics of songs, like Get Ready is — even though it doesn’t seem like it from the beat and major key of it — it’s actually a song about the end of the world. The idea of it started as it being a warning song to our kids, actually… like, just get ready because the world is not always awesome,” says Matthew (the Axe Murderer) Rogers of the record.

“Musically we kind of translated that as well into more end-of-the-world-style sonic landscapes, so sort of more gritty, psychedelic stuff that reminds me of the end of the world…

To everything there is a season…

Brian Bowman discusses new austerity measures at City Hall

How Manitoba will handle legalized pot: A primer

Participants in the annual 4/20 event at the Manitoba Legislative Building are likely to be in an even more celebratory mood this year as the federal Liberal government is poised to introduce legislation to make good on its promise to legalize pot.

The April 20 bash, which extols the consumption of cannabis -- especially the smoking of it -- may also have a more political undertone as local medical marijuana advocates protest a lack of consultation by the Pallister government before introducing a bill last week setting out new rules to deal with cannabis when legalization occurs.

Over the weekend, the CBC reported that Ottawa is to introduce legislation the week of April 10 that would see cannabis legalized in Canada by July 1, 2018. The feds would license producers and ensure the country's marijuana supply is safe, while the provinces would decide how products are distributed and sold.

Medical marijuana users are upset that Bill 25 (The Cannabis Harm Prevention Act), the proposed provincial law, doesn't appear to discern between recreational users and those who consume cannabis as medicine to treat various ailments.