Sweet treat journey wraps up at cookie café

Walkout creates chaos at St. James Smitty’s

Gordon Sharpe wanted to eat a meal at the St. James Smitty’s Wednesday, but he got a helping of bad news instead.

He saw several workers walk out of the restaurant, at 1017 St. James St.

“(The waiter) came back about 10 minutes later and stood over the table, looking a little distraught and said, ‘I’m quitting right now and so is everybody else,’” Sharpe said. “He said, ‘This is my last time serving you,’ and he was quite choked up.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said, adding that the managers scrambled to serve patrons.

Behind the scenes at circus spectacle Odysseo, it's the horses who hold the reins

It’s almost 4 p.m. on a particularly steamy May afternoon and Cavalia Odysseo rider Chelsea Jordan is putting on her makeup in the back corner of the very humid artistic tent.

She’s already spent some time layering on foundation, and is now into the decorative portion of the 30-minute process, placing a pair of small gems on her forehead and enhancing her naturally sharp cheekbones with some extra contouring.

“This is the messy part of the business,” she jokes as she sticks on fake lashes over an eyelid covered in earth-toned shadow.

It’s odd that makeup is considered the messy part of the day when Jordan spends the majority of her time surrounded by horses, but as with most people involved in Odysseo, the glitzy and glamorous aspects of being a member of the largest touring production in the world aren’t nearly as fun as the time she gets to spend with her four-legged cast-mates.

Industry minister to meet Rogers CEO after outage

TORONTO - Canada's industry minister will convene a meeting with the leader of Rogers Communications in the wake of a massive outage that paralyzed the company's network and hampered several crucial services, his office announced on Sunday, even as some customers continued to report service disruptions.

A statement released from the office of François-Philippe Champagne said he plans to meet with Tony Staffieri and other telecom leaders to discuss the importance of improving "the reliability of networks across Canada."

The statement said Champagne found last week's widespread service disruption — which lasted at least 15 hours and knocked out access to numerous law enforcement, health care and banking services — "unacceptable," adding he has expressed that view directly to Staffieri.

"These services are vitally important for Canadians in their day to day life and we expect our telecom industry to meet the highest standards that Canadians rightly deserve," the statement read.

A profile of one of Winnipeg’s worst-kept secret singer/songwriters

Roman Clarke lives in the last house on his street, with the silently shimmering Seine River as his next-door neighbour. Seated at the picnic table in his backyard are knee-high piles of snow. In the window sill by the front door rests a can of Labatt Blue, the leftover sips frozen by the mid-November chill.

Haunted houses aren’t the only places to find jump scares

C’est l’Halloween, to quote the 1981 elementary school French class banger by Matt Maxwell, but you know what’s already plenty scary? Life.

We all have our personal haunted houses, so to speak, hence the popularity of the “a haunted house but it’s just…” meme that pops up every October. Sample: “a haunted house but it’s just a bunch of men telling you you’d be prettier if you smiled.”

In the spirit of the season, I thought I’d offer up a few jump scares of my own.

A haunted house but it’s just Gate E25

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison dead at 88

NEW YORK - Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, a pioneer and reigning giant of modern literature whose imaginative power in "Beloved," ''Song of Solomon" and other works transformed American letters by dramatizing the pursuit of freedom within the boundaries of race, has died at age 88.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced that Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Morrison's family issued a statement through Knopf saying she died after a brief illness.

"Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends," the family announced. "The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing."

Few authors rose in such rapid, spectacular style. She was nearly 40 when her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," was published. By her early 60s, after just six novels, she had become the first black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, praised in 1993 by the Swedish academy for her "visionary force" and for her delving into "language itself, a language she wants to liberate" from categories of black and white. In 2012, Barack Obama awarded her a Presidential Medal of Freedom.