Olympics Overnight: Speedskater Blondin wins silver in the mass start, Bowman narrowly misses podium in halfpipe skiing, Jamaica returns to bobsled track

Here’s what you missed overnight at Day 15 of the 2022 Beijing Olympics.

Province’s first female dentist took skill, insight wherever needed

Some stories take longer to get around to than others.

In the fall of 2011 I hooked up with Fiona Odlum at an Academy Road Starbucks for a lighthearted feature about people who report on traffic for a living. Odlum, currently a contributor at CBC Saskatchewan, was working for 680 CJOB at the time, clueing rush-hour commuters in on stalls, lane closures and fender-benders they’d be wise to avoid.

Odlum turned the tables at one point by asking a few questions of her own including, “So, what’s your main beat?”

I don’t really have one, I told her, but if pressed, I would probably go with human-interest pieces.

The trick to attracting wee, treat-seeking ghosts and goblins on Halloween is to go all-in

When I was a kid in the 1990s, I lived for Halloween.

My mom, a gifted seamstress, made all of my costumes. Deciding what I’d dress up as involved imagination and a trip to the fabric or craft store.

I loved flipping through the McCall’s patterns, and running my hands along the bolts of fabric that my mom would transform into Little Bo Peep, or Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, or, one year, a Christmas tree — complete with the star on top. Old things were repurposed into new things.

Trick-or-treating was my... I don’t know, some sort of sports reference. The goal? Amass as much candy as possible. We’d troll the neighbourhood for hours, dragging snow-sodden pillow cases full of it. We’d target specific streets, lured mostly by the promise of full-sized chocolate bars.

Actor-director Cooper takes new approach to familiar tale

TORONTO — In his self-directed version of A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper plays a rock star named Jackson Maine.

Note the name: it marks the character as a member of a cinematic lineage that descends all the way to 1937.

That year, the first A Star Is Born was made, with Frederick March in the role of alcoholic actor Norman Maine. The name stayed in 1954, when James Mason took over the role of an actor who first nurtures the career of Judy Garland’s up-and-coming star Vicki Lester before his drunken shenanigans threaten to derail it. By 1976, Kris Kristofferson played the role of musician John Norman Howard, a rock singer with a musical stake in the ascent of Barbra Streisand’s Esther Hoffman.

Cooper, 43, remembered the Maine name, but also brought his own vision as a first-time feature filmmaker to the new version, which opens Thursday, Oct. 4, opposite Lady Gaga after the originally designated director, Clint Eastwood, dropped out. While actors might not want to see different interpretations of a role, Cooper embraced the opportunity to see all the past iterations.

Provincial budget fails to chart new course

If the 2022 Manitoba budget was intended to provide a lifeline for the Progressive Conservative government, it must surely be considered a failure.

Prior to the budget’s release, Premier Heather Stefanson and her government were teetering on the edge of the political abyss. Manitobans are profoundly unhappy with the government’s performance on most issues, including pandemic management. National polls show Ms. Stefanson is Canada’s least popular premier.

That political context made this budget a high-priority project for the Tories. It was, simply put, their best chance to shed the lingering burden left by former premier Brian Pallister, and rebuild the party brand under a new leader.

Unfortunately, Ms. Stefanson’s first budget remains shackled to the deeply flawed fiscal and political logic that defined the Pallister years. And no single budgetary measure embodies that failure more than the premier’s decision to continue cutting education property taxes.