Say goodbye to the humbugs

French tandem cements place among greatest ice dance duos with Olympic gold medal

Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron stayed for another four years after being edged out by Canada’s Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir at 2018 Games.

Billboard evangelism may look outdated but group says it’s effective

Maybe you’ve seen them in Winnipeg — billboards that say things like: “Jesus is alive!” “Are you prepared to meet Jesus?” “After you die, you will meet God.” They include a phone number to call: 844-FIND-TRUTH.

There are two billboards in Winnipeg. One is on Henderson Highway in Elmwood. The other is on Balmoral Street, by Cumberland.

Have you ever wondered who is behind them, and why they do it?

You might be surprised to learn they are created and sponsored by an Amish/Mennonite organization called Christian Aid Ministries (CAM). Based in rural Ontario, the group is funded by Amish and some conservative Mennonite denominations and individuals.

Remembering when, where we were when Putin invaded Ukraine

As a child, I learned history through books and movies but lived it vicariously through the eyes of my father, gathering up all his where-were-you-whens with an insatiable hunger. Every time I learned about an event that had shaped the course of the world, my young mind did a hasty calculation and, having verified he’d been alive at the time, I’d ask him the question.

Where was he on May 8, 1945, when news broke that Germany had made an unconditional surrender? He was young, almost too young to remember, except in fragmented pictures: the kitchen of his little house in small-town Michigan, the hem of his mother’s dress, newscasters declaring victory on the radio, people running down the street in jubilation.

Where was he on Nov. 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated? In a classroom at the American university where he was teaching, finishing up a lecture. He went home through stunned streets and yelled at the dog; my mother, seeing this, snapped back that the dog didn’t do it, so he sat and wept and felt the world he knew fall apart.

By the time I was eight years old, I had committed most of these stories to memory. None were dramatic. None of them had my father at the heart of what was the most violent or important or transforming. He was, like many folks in North America and all of those who are lucky, only a second-hand witness to the greatest machinations of geopolitical trauma.

Pandemic has seen a record number of adults taking music lessons

For some people, it’s called six-string therapy. For others, it has become 88 keys to coping with 2020.

It seems learning to play a musical instrument has struck a chord for adults during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Since the whole COVID outbreak, a lot of people are starting to turn toward in-home lessons or online lessons,” says Mike Fondse, operations manager at Quest Musique’s Portage Avenue location. “As far as music lessons, home recording, anything regarding playing music at home has skyrocketed recently.”

It’s no surprise, really. In the spring, when lockdown protocols to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus kept people at home, they took up baking, tried learning a new language, or planted their first gardens, among other activities.

Racist ingredients baked into Manitoba's 150th birthday cake

The steeple’s cross-tipped spire stabbed the sky, rising high above the domed architecture of old St. Boniface College like the outstretched fingers of the faithful grasping for heaven.

The flames worked quickly, their appetite for destruction insatiable as they licked their way up walls and down halls, shattered stained-glass windows and sucked up oxygen like kindling until the small blaze transmogrified into an inferno.

It was 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 25, 1922.

A Jesuit brother awoke in a flash, startled by what he thought was the sound of an explosion. Instead, he found a fire ripping through the oldest post-secondary institution in Western Canada, which had stood on the grounds of Winnipeg’s Provencher Park since 1880.