WINNIPEG — The new leader of the Louis Riel School Division is a Métis teacher who has — not unlike the founder of Manitoba — dedicated much of her life to supporting Indigenous families.

Jackie Connell has been named the incoming superintendent and chief executive officer of the St. Vital-based board office in charge of educating 17,000 students.

The board of trustees announced her historic appointment, which begins Aug. 4, late Tuesday.

“I feel Indigenous women are inherently built to lead. I don’t know that education systems always see or honour that leadership,” Connell said in an interview Wednesday.

If you ever get close enough to a hen to whisper sweet nothings into her ear, take note of her earlobes — with just a couple of exceptions, the earlobe colour will tell you the colour of the eggs she will lay. The two traits, earlobe colour and egg colour, are linked genetically, so — green lobes, green eggs.

The same rule does not apply to ham. If your ham is green, you should not eat it … Sam I am.

June 3 is National Egg Day (and as if one day isn’t enough, Oct. 9 is also earmarked as World Egg Day) and with summer at the garden gate, trying some new recipes with nutritious, easy-to-cook eggs can help to turn down the heat in your summer kitchen.

As an affordable, locally produced protein, eggs are a big deal, especially when learning to cook. A reliable, local resource for recipes and nutritional information is Manitoba Egg Farmers (eggs.mb.ca).

WINNIPEG — With its public launch earlier this month, a digital music marketplace called Subvert aims to live up to its name, directing more power — and more dollars — to recording artists navigating the choppy waters of the streaming wars, including some in Manitoba.

Initially pitched as a collectively owned successor to Bandcamp — a popular sales interface for independent artists — and an alternative to big tech-funded streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music, Subvert (subvert.fm) was already hosting music for purchase by 20,000 artists from 120 countries as of Wednesday afternoon.

Nearly 30 of those artists — including Altona-based pop producer Daggerss, a.k.a. Laura Smith — call Manitoba home.

“To me, the co-op model is really exciting,” says Smith, a former touring member of indie rock stalwarts Said the Whale whose past projects include Rococode, a synthy duo that released music through Winnipeg label Head in the Sand Records in the 2010s. “It gives power to the people and keeps it in the hands of the people instead of us being at the beck and call of a tech company.”

It was not a great start for the new management regime for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE) president and CEO Keith Pelley fired general manager Brad Treliving in March and fans were eagerly awaiting the announcement of a new boss for the Leafs, who had one of their poorest seasons in years and have gone 59 years without winning the Stanley Cup.

What Leaf fans got when Pelley’s announcement was made in early May was a disappointment to many: A twosome featuring former Arizona Coyotes GM John Chayka, who does not have a good reputation around the NHL, as general manager, and former Leaf star Mats Sundin, who hasn’t been involved in the NHL since he retired 20 years ago, as senior executive advisor.

Chayka was 26 when he was hired in Arizona in 2016. Strong on analytics, the young GM lasted only four years before being booted after costing his team two draft choices for violating draft rules by holding conditioning camps for prospective draftees, and for seeking employment with another NHL team while he was still under contract to the Coyotes.

WINNIPEG — British director Ben Wheatley has always been adventurous in his penchant for traversing genre boundaries, including hardcore horror (‘The Kill List’), the big-budget monster movie (‘The Meg 2’), the cerebral art film (‘High-Rise’), and his own invention, the acid-trip period piece (‘A Field in England’).

With his Manitoba-shot latest, ‘Normal,’ Wheatley adds neo-western to the list, citing inspirations such as ‘Bad Day at Black Rock,’ John Sturges’s 1955 thriller in which a one-armed stranger (Spencer Tracy) arrives in a small town to investigate the suspicious death of a friend.

The stranger in town here is Ulysses (Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk, completing a trifecta of locally lensed action movies along with ‘Nobody’ and ‘Nobody 2’), who has come to the Minnesota burg of Normal to act as an interim sheriff after the suspicious death of the previous officeholder.

Ulysses has both his arms, but he arrives bearing the after-effects of a trauma from his previous job. And at first blush, Normal is a town where he can heal, given that the worst thing he encounters is a shouting match at the hardware store and a lackadaisical parking job by the saucy local barkeep Moira (Lena Headey).

Students at Niverville High School recently embraced the world of neurodivergence by celebrating unique human quirks.

Student Cooper Lavin is behind the planning of Neurodiversity Spirit Week for the second year in a row. Lavin is a 16-year-old Grade 11 student who identifies as autistic, one classification of neurodivergence. The goal is to create awareness and education through participation.

On Monday, students were encouraged to wear tie-dye or vibrant colour schemes. Wednesday produced crazy hair or hats.

“For a lot of neurodivergent people, their thoughts are all over the place,” Lavin says. “The thoughts are inconsistent, loud, and out there, like vibrant colours.”

Landmarks across Manitoba are being illuminated in red and blue this month to shed light on fibromuscular dysplasia (FMD), a cardiovascular condition that experts say is far more common than its “rare” label suggests.

On May 1, the Island Park causeway and City Hall in Portage la Prairie were lit up to mark Fibromuscular Dysplasia Awareness Month. The initiative is part of a growing movement led by Julie Vogelsang, a Winnipeg-based volunteer for the Fibromuscular Dysplasia Society of America.

Vogelsang, who was diagnosed with the condition in 2022 through MRI testing, has co-ordinated the illumination of 16 landmarks across the province, including the Esplanade Riel Bridge and ‘Winnipeg’ sign in Winnipeg later this month, along with the York Lobby at the Convention Centre. Joe the Steamer train in Austin was also lit up. Other prominent landmarks have been illuminated across the country thanks to Vogelsang’s efforts.

“Researchers used to call it a rare disorder, and now they’re saying they don’t think it’s rare, but rarely diagnosed,” Vogelsang said. “The lack of awareness and education is not just within those who have it, but also in the medical community.”