Take smoke signals for what they are and move on

Beware invasive, ‘frightening’ waterhemp

There’s a threat lurking on the edge of Manitoba farmers’ fields this fall that’s even scarier than the escalating trade war with their biggest customer.

Provincial extension advisers are warning farmers to watch for a weed known as “tall waterhemp,” which, true to its name, may already be towering above ready-to-harvest crops.

Those wispy tentacles waving in the breeze look pretty innocuous from a distance. But this highly invasive member of the pigweed family produces hundreds of thousands of seeds that are just itching for dispersal through farmers’ combines and across their fields.

Each of those tiny seeds — one small pill container filled halfway holds 44,000 — can produce plants with stems the width of saplings and heights of two to five metres. One or two plants can quickly turn into a patch. If waterhemp takes over a field, it can choke out the growing crop and cut yields by more than 90 per cent.

Of frogs, roses, kings and a Great Lake

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, as the saying goes. Basically, if you change something’s name, you don’t actually change the nature of the thing.

That being said, if even 15 years ago an American president had called an entire news conference to announce he was renaming one of the Great Lakes by writing on a map with a red pen and issuing an executive order purporting to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” all and sundry would question his mental health.

Maybe, after witnessing so much from Donald Trump, we’ve all just been hardened off and the foolish is now expected daily. Perhaps it’s the political equivalent of the fable of the boiling frog.

As the fable goes, drop a frog into a pot of boiling water and it will jump right out. But put the frog in room temperature water and bring the pot to a boil, the frog will stay until its death. (It’s unlikely the frog would actually wait.)

Main Street Project to expand to former Mitchell Fabrics building

The Main Street Project is moving on up.

The shelter’s administration finalized the purchase of the former Mitchell Fabrics building at Main Street and Logan Avenue on Sept. 21, a move that will revolutionize the services the facility offers to the city’s chronically homeless and addicted.

“It’s still very fresh for us, and we’re very excited. This is probably the first significant shelter, mental health and addictions support expansion of this size in the last 30 years for Winnipeg,” Main Street Project executive director Rick Lees said.

The purchase is the culmination of efforts that began two years ago, when the agency did long-term planning to identify the biggest hurdles it faced moving forward. One key challenge identified was lack of space.

White eyes curtain call as Kim preps for another Olympic run

Snider was a brief, shining light during his time with the Jays. It’s a shame that he never became all that we hoped he would be on the field, Mike Wilner writes.

Judy Blume’s life and writerly output for readers of all ages explored in hefty biography

Readers who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s will remember Judy Blume as the acclaimed American children’s author whose fiction offered a frank approach to taboo subjects such as menstruation, divorce, wet dreams and teenage sex. Blume’s books not only changed the face of middle-grade and teen literature, they also sold more than 90 million copies in 32 languages in the past five decades. Now 88, Blume is the subject of Mark Oppenheimer’s thought-provoking, well-researched biography.

A longtime Blume aficionado, Oppenheimer previously wrote five non-fiction books. He has a PhD from Yale in religious studies and lives in Connecticut.

Oppenheimer’s succinct, lucid narrative consists of 31 chapters. The opening pages deal with Blume’s early life. Born Judith Maria Sussman in 1938, she grew up in a Jewish middle-class family in Elizabeth, N.J., moving with her family to Miami for two years because of her older brother’s illness before returning to New Jersey.

The next several chapters follow Blume’s first marriage in 1959, at age 21, through motherhood in 1961 and her early stabs at finding her creative footing. After a few false starts in drawing, felt art and songwriting, she finally took a night course in children’s writing in 1967 — and then, for two years, collected rejection slips.

Winnipeg woman among those mourned after shooting rampage

One of the presumed victims of Nova Scotia’s deadly weekend rampage is being remembered as a kind and gentle soul by those who knew her during her childhood in Winnipeg.

(Elizabeth) Joanne Thomas, 58, and her husband John Zahl, 69, are presumed dead following the events of the weekend in Portapique, N.S. Their home was burned to the ground, but their bodies have not yet been located and identified by authorities.

The nation was left reeling by the deadly events of the weekend, during which a man impersonating an RCMP officer shot multiple people and burned homes in a rampage across the Maritime province. By Tuesday afternoon the death toll had risen to 23 people. The alleged shooter, identified by police as Gabriel Wortman, 51, was killed after being intercepted by police in Enfield, N.S.

“It’s unbelievable that with all the crappy people in this world, that their family is one to get hit like this. It doesn’t even make sense, and we’ll probably never know what happened,” said Jeanine Remillard, from her Winnipeg home.