Your hearts are pulling in opposing directions

Weather aside, Goldeyes warmed by potential of new season at training camp

It may feel more like hockey weather than baseball season around here, but that hasn’t stopped the Winnipeg Goldeyes from getting into the swing of things.

Sure, these Fish might be frozen during spring training, but optimism is already heating up about what these boys of summer could accomplish by early fall.

“I think we’ve got a really good team. I think we’re going to make a run at it,” veteran slugger Max Murphy told the Free Press on Wednesday at Blue Cross Park.

He’s talking about an American Association championship, which the Goldeyes last accomplished in 2017. They came close to winning it all in 2024 — the first year under skipper Logan Watkins — but ultimately lost in the final. Last year represented a step back, with a 48-51 record which led to missing the playoffs entirely.

Prepare to be … blutterbunged?

Are you not blutterbunged?

If Russell Crowe’s second-century gladiator character had uttered a 19th century equivalent of “Are you not entertained?” that fit the mood of today’s 21st century, that would be it.

Definitions first. Blutterbunged is an obscure regional dialect word from England that means everything from astonished to confounded to bemused or shocked into speechlessness. Its composition suggests something both more and less, namely blustering bloviation (that’s the more part) and empty words (that’s the empty part). These days we would more naturally punctuate our reaction to an event or statement with a profanity. But you get the drift.

Unearthed by lexicologist Susie Dent, it speaks volumes about our times that it fits now. That we need to reach back hundreds of years to find the right word to adequately capture a contemporary civic reaction to what the hell is going on in politics and the world today.

COVID running up the score on some U.S. NHL teams

Boy, how about the thrilling, non-stop NHL action Thursday night? Let’s roll the highlights:

Down in Denver, you had the high-flying Colorado Avalanche hosting the Arizona Coyotes. Well, on paper, anyways. The actual on-ice product was postponed. OK, let’s head to the State of Hockey to see how our old Central Division friends fared, as Minnesota entertained St. Louis. What’s that? Scrapped as well. Huh.

Surely things are a bit better on the East Coast. Were the Buffalo Sabres able to contain Alexander Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals? Turns out their inability to contain something else meant this one was also shelved. At least there’s that Flyers-Devils clash in Philly, right? Wrong.

Oh, for Pete’s sake.

Philippines reports world's 1st virus death outside China

BEIJING - The first death outside China from the new coronavirus was recorded Sunday in the Philippines, as countries around the world evacuated hundreds of their citizens from the infection zone and Chinese authorities completed a new, rapidly constructed 1,000-bed hospital for victims of the outbreak.

Chinese authorities also delayed the reopening of schools in the hardest-hit province and tightened the quarantine in one city by allowing only one family member to venture out to buy supplies.

The Philippine Health Department said a 44-year-old Chinese man from Wuhan, the city at the centre of the crisis, was hospitalized Jan. 25 with a fever, cough and sore throat and died after developing severe pneumonia. The man's 38-year-old female companion, also from Wuhan, tested positive for the virus as well and remained hospitalized in isolation in Manila.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte approved a ban on the entry of all non-citizens from China. The U.S., Japan, Singapore and Australia have imposed similar restrictions despite criticism from China and an assessment from the World Health Organization that such measures were unnecessarily hurting trade and travel.

Crop storage headaches loom on horizon

A sense of calm descends over Prairie fields this time of year — at least on the surface.

Activities become more limited in the weeks leading up to harvest. There’s not much farmers can do now to support this year’s crop, other than monitor and protect it from diseases such as sclerotinia in canola and leaf stripe and fusarium head blight in wheat and barley.

July is when you might see farmers wading into a thick stand of canola, conducting a so-called “wet pants test” to get a low-tech read on how much disease-inducing moisture is lurking in the canopy.

Disease pressure is high in a humid, hot summer like this one and it’s kept aerial applicators busy applying fungicides. Sclerotinia spores live on plant residues in the soil and blossom into a mould that destroys the canola stem, starving the maturing pods.

Housing-first initiative aims to offer city’s homeless dignity, understanding

Ken St. George has dedicated the last 20 years to taking care of people in the community-health sector. Now he will enact the Housing First model in Winnipeg for the first time.