Rich, spicy hot chocolate a decadent treat

Manitoba Book Awards

releases short list

The Manitoba Book Awards has unveiled the short lists for the literary prizes to be presented this year.

For the 2026 awards, jurors evaluated 42 submissions in both English and French, and will present six prizes in total for best first book as well as best fiction, non-fiction and poetry, plus the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and a prize for French literature.

Toothless federal regulations leave airline passengers to fight — and lose — their own battles

My heart and stomach sank when I looked at my phone and saw multiple texts and emails from Air Canada.

I was supposed to travel from Toronto to Winnipeg and the flight we had booked — a hideously early departure from Pearson International Airport — had been cancelled. We had been rebooked on a late-evening flight.

The delay meant missing out on some important family events and really putting a damper on our entire trip. Plus, there was the not-so-simple matter of having to spend 12 torturous hours in the airport.

Long story quite short: I sparred with Air Canada customer service for more than two hours, asking if they would transfer me to another airline. All airlines are allowed to do that but almost never offer it as an option unless you let them know that you know that there are agreements between carriers to absorb passengers on cancelled flights.

AI literacy course mandatory at U of W Collegiate

The University of Winnipeg Collegiate is requiring new students to complete artificial intelligence 101 lessons and offering a first-of-its-kind elective for those who want to perfect their chatbot prompts.

The private high school is piloting two projects this year in a bid to improve digital literacy on the downtown campus.

Every Grade 9 and 10 student will have to pass an approximately two-hour long online course about “AI essentials.”

Dean Osaed Khan likened the mandatory e-learning sessions to requiring students to complete a safety course before they can participate in a science lab.

Time for a stronger all-Canadian grid

The kneebone is connected to … non-contiguously, pretty much every other bone in your body.

Unfortunately.

But more on that later.

The New York Times published a quite terrifying story on the U.S. electrical grid this week, one that points out that, with a few simple directed attacks on nine of 10 major U.S. substations, the entire U.S. power grid could be disabled.

A spectral spin on the culinary reality show

The elevator pitch: local ghost-kitchen purveyors convene in a haunted house to have their cooking judged by a hungry spectre.

Oh, and there are also paranormal experts, familiar monsters and just a hint of bike theft.

It’s a deeply weird, multidimensional concept that a Winnipeg film production company has turned into a very real television series available now on Bell FibeTV.

Ghost Kitchens is a four-part reality cooking competition/supernatural history show created by Folks Films, a studio founded by siblings Laina and Taylor Brown. Pushing the bounds of possibility was a driving force behind the pair’s first foray into entertainment TV.