Sticks like glue

They say a man's home is his castle; grand old Queen Anne house takes the adage literally

To call the house at 494 College Ave. anything other than a castle would seem wrong, so we’ll call it the Castle. It’s three storeys tall but seems taller, 115 years old but seems older, and it is right smack in the middle of a neighbourhood, right in the middle of a city, where its turreted existence inspires confusion, bewilderment and a touch of awe. It’s a place both out of time and out of place, but somehow, it feels like it’s exactly where it belongs.

“It definitely stands out around here,” says Ryan Lavallee, a 33-year-old man who lives two doors down, on the second floor of a house without turrets of its own. “Kids are always stopping to look at it. Even adults do. I have.”

In 2015, Vanh Thiep Hoang looked at it, and couldn’t stop. Hoang had come to Winnipeg with his family from Vietnam, where he worked as a surgeon. He marvelled at the Queen Anne-style castle — its gabled roof, its orange bricks, its ten-foot ceilings, and its playful disregard of convention and defiance of expectation. It cast a bit of a spell.

“It reminded me of palaces I’d seen where I was from,” and of buildings in Ukraine, where he studied, says the 63-year-old Hoang, who emerges from the castle’s front door wearing board shorts and metal-rimmed glasses, his thick head of hair as attention-grabbing as the castle he calls home.

Winnipeg police warn of cannabis candy amid Halloween treats

Cannabis candies — pre-packaged along with regular chocolate bars in zipped plastic baggies — were found in at least a half-dozen stashes of Halloween treats collected by children in Winnipeg’s South Tuxedo neighbourhood.

Esteban Jaramillo

Ready to launch: Inside the massive undertaking to revitalize the beloved Nonsuch replica

For 44 years, the Nonsuch has been enchanting visitors to the Manitoba Museum, bringing a whiff of adventure and the romance of the sea to our landlocked city.The jewel in the crown of the Hudson’s Bay Company Museum Collection, the replica of the 17th-century fur-trading ship takes those who board her back in time.

Decades’ worth of schoolchildren have clutched the rails at the side of the rickety gangway that leads you onboard and descended the narrow stairs — backwards, please, for safety! — into the fo’c’sle, where they could marvel at the tiny bunks — how short men were back then — and peer out the round portholes, imagining them being lashed by salt spray as you crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a grand adventure to find a new trade route for England.

Few of us on long-ago field trips ever stopped to think about why this Prairie city was honouring a British ship that never actually visited Manitoba — let alone why we had built an entire museum wing around a replica that, while it sailed more than 14,000 kilometres in European, Canadian and American waters, was hauled into Winnipeg in pieces.

As the first phase of its $17.5-million Bringing Our Stories Forward capital campaign, the museum has spent about three years planning its refurbishment of the Nonsuch exhibit, which has remained largely untouched since it was installed in 1974, in part to better tell that story.

Digital media an illusion of democracy

I recently finished reading The Obsolescence of the Human (Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen) by Günther Anders, a German philosopher and critical theorist known for his critique of technology and modern society.

First published in German in 1956, the book appeared in English for the first time only in 2025. It is an unsettling work. Writing in the age of television, industrial automation and the atomic bomb, Anders worried that humanity was becoming more technologically capable without becoming better able to understand, much less control, what it had created.

Seven decades later, his observations seem remarkably prescient. Quoting a tale set in his fictional land of Molussia, Anders writes: “The less people have a voice, the more they are given to look at and see.”

Anders was describing a world in which images brought distant events into people’s living rooms while decisions shaping those events remained beyond their influence. The world appeared increasingly accessible, but accessibility was not agency. He warned that images could become “stultification-devices”: representations that reveal fragments of reality while obscuring the relationships needed to understand and judge them. One could watch history unfold without having much say in its direction.