Wild blast from past not getting the message

Prairie sculptor Joe Fafard pays tribute to revered Dutch master

Vincent van Gogh has been inspiring artists for close to 150 years. For sculptor Joe Fafard, the Dutch master’s life and art have been objects of fascination for many of his 75 years.

So much so that Fafard’s latest Winnipeg exhibition, The Essential Joe Fafard — Van Gogh and Other Inspirations, which opened Friday at Mayberry Fine Art, includes several sculptures of van Gogh, who began painting in 1881 but lived a short, turbulent life, fraught with mental illness, before committing suicide in 1890 at the age of 37.

“Starting about 1983, I started doing portraits of van Gogh,” Fafard says in a phone conversation from his home near Regina.

“Essentially, people used his life, his career and his anguish as sort of a stereotype of an artist’s blueprint for artistic endeavour. I became quite fascinated to see that he was the Christ and other artists were the apostles.”

Winnipeg’s challenge: preparing for weather extremes

A new United Nations report warns the world will exceed the 1.5 C Paris limit by 2030.

Winnipeg’s string of extreme weather events in recent years — this summer’s intense rainstorms that caused flash flooding, basement damage, power outages, prolonged heat waves, last summer’s wildfires, and the freakish October 2019 wet snowstorm — underscores the urgent need for stronger emergency plans and climate resilience in the face of the UN’s new report.

As the city enters an unknown era from increwasing extreme weather events, it must also confront this haunting truth or face future unprepared consequences.

Winnipeg faces persistent challenges, including limited library hours during the summer (they could act as cooling places for the most vulnerable), and gaps in public and active transportation which make it harder for many residents to reach essential services.

Time for AI guardrails is right now

The genie is most definitely out of the bottle.

And while there’s little chance of putting it back in, we should be very concerned that the people who released it from the bottle are now frantically warning us that it has become disinclined to do their — or our — bidding and seems instead to be increasingly intent on following its own whims and granting wishes to itself.

The figurative genie, in this case, is artificial intelligence, or AI, and in recent weeks many of the tech geniuses responsible for its development and introduction into the digital-information realm have begun asking the U.S. government and even the United Nations to impose limits on the pace and breadth of its growth.

Their fear is that, as AI very quickly continues to advance and develops the ability to make independent decisions and essentially think for itself, it will cease to be a tool controlled by its creators and instead will become a species unto itself that might eventually decide it’s better off without humans continually messing things up.

Transit, roads and city council’s priorities

Did any of you happen to notice that the week of Sept. 14 marked an interesting confluence of events in Winnipeg? First up was the mayoral debate on public transit. Second was an announcement that the city would be undertaking a survey to determine whether their citizens’ “transportation needs” are being met.

The debate on our public bus system, from which our current Mayor Scott Gillingham was tellingly absent, focused primarily on safety rather than the efficiency of the system.

Which, on one level, is no great surprise.

After all unlawful incidents on buses and at transit stops have increased by 280 per cent compared to levels recorded around 2016. Moreover, the candidates were primarily speaking to the bus drivers’ union that organized the event, and bus drivers are often the victims of violent episodes.

Demski taking it to another level

Brady Oliveira still remembers the first time he saw Nic Demski on the football field.