Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

Heavy metal community is the subject and the argument is simple. The music sounds aggressive. The culture is not. Ryan O'Donnell has been to hundreds of shows and never seen a mosh pit that did not stop when someone fell. At all-ages shows, fifteen-year-olds already know to do it. It is not something you learn over time. It is an expectation that comes with the ticket. Good News Tuesday brings a d...

Good News Tuesday lands on one story that earns the name more than most. A six-year-old named Levi has leukemia and could not be surrounded by people for his birthday.   His family posted about it on TikTok. A thousand people showed up for a birthday parade: the National Guard, neighboring police, the local fire department, biker clubs, car clubs, off-road groups, the Boise hockey team, a hel...

Kids recess in Canada has no legal protection. No legislation. Some schools have it. Some do not. A researcher who has been in this field for twenty-five years says that matters more right now than it ever has. The mental health case is direct: anxiety, isolation, lack of movement, and screen time are already pulling in one direction. Taking recess out adds fuel. Chicago removed it for forty years...

Parenting adult kids is the subject and it starts with a phone call. Your daughter says she might come visit. The answer to might is just tell me when. Jerry Agar's daughter is an athletic therapist touring North America with theater productions, fixing circus performers and dancers between show runs and dropping in when the schedule opens up. She is at the point where the work is still good and t...

Kids metal music has a home and it is called Howdytoons. Mike Whitla started writing heavy songs about dinosaurs for his young children in 2010, realised the words brachiosaurus were basically already a song, and kept going until there were seasons of animated content on YouTube and a growing international fanbase of kids who arrived with zero preconceived ideas about the genre. The newest release...

Kids learning music rarely goes the way anyone plans. Bob Addison's son had never touched an instrument until September. It was mandatory. None of that matters now. The bass clarinet was not the cheapest option. He picked it, practiced until it filled the house, chose it as next year's elective, and turned a Kendrick-to-Pink-Floyd musical detour into something his parents stand around listening to...

Canada right track is the question one year out from the election. Matt Gurney's assessment is that we are more or less where he worried we would be. A poll showing almost half of Canadians think things are going well is being presented as an optimism surge. Matt Gurney's read is that the case for Canada right now exists mostly in theory, and the separatism conversation gets harder to win without...

Tech news this week includes a digital Ozzy Osbourne available for commercial licensing, a Ferrari that looks like an Apple product, and a Canadian breakthrough in early skin cancer detection.   HyperReal, the company behind the Tupac hologram, partnered with the Osbourne family to build an AI Ozzy that replicates his voice, mannerisms, and speech patterns. Brands can hire digital Ozzy and di...

Canadian innovation has a cost problem almost nobody talks about. Not the cost of building things, but the cost of giving them away after they work. Jim Balsillie's argument is pointed: Canadian policy is captured by foreign corporate interests and still built on a 1970s production economy model. The result is that Canada funds the research, loses the IP, exports the data, and competes on cheap la...

The Sears catalog is having a moment online and it opened up something bigger. The difference between what shopping used to feel like and what it has become. Physical department stores had escalators and sandwich bars and crowds and something to discover. The catalog let you circle what you wanted, dog-ear the page, and hand it to your parents. Nobody was telling you how to be. The product was the...

DIY and tech tips cover a lot of ground this week, from what to do with grass clippings to what is quietly running inside the AI toy your kid wants. The Spring Yard Tips Worth Knowing Before the Season Gets Away Pressure washing nozzle selection, grass clippings repurposed as mulch and DIY fertilizer tea, and a self-winding garden hose that finally solved a lifelong tangle problem. The yard tips a...

Sears nostalgia hit the internet this week and the hosts are not entirely buying the story being told. A viral post. A real set of numbers. And a question worth asking more carefully. The post says Sears paid enough to live with dignity and then corporations took it all. The problem: Sears went bankrupt. Twelve thousand Canadians lost their jobs. Eighteen thousand lost their pensions. Record profi...

Divorce starts this conversation and doesn't let go. A viral post about resting on a Saturday for the first time in eight years opens something much more uncomfortable: the question of when we actually decide to change. Jen Kirsch has been covering relationships for years and is navigating her own split. Her honest take on being the best version of herself after leaving a relationship gets a direc...

Canadian farming costs don't come with press releases or ribbon cuttings. Saskatchewan alone puts eleven billion dollars into the ground each spring on one chance to get it right. The Quiet Billion-Dollar Bet Saskatchewan Farmers Make Every Spring Family farms across Saskatchewan are investing well over a million dollars per operation before a single crop comes in. Lesley Kelly connects that finan...

Canada's automotive industry has been in decline for twenty-five years, and the first argument in this conversation is that the name itself is part of the problem. Canada does not own a car company. It holds about ten percent of North American auto sales, gets told what to build and when, and sits in what researchers describe as the peripheral tier, caught between countries that own the patents an...

Mental health in Canada carries a price tag most people have never heard. $180 billion every year, and the lead author of the report that produced that number says it is an underestimate because the data gaps make the full picture impossible to capture. $110 billion of that cost lands directly on employers through lost productivity, long-term disability, and people leaving the workforce entirely....

Divorce finances start with a separation agreement and end somewhere much more expensive. The legal framework splits assets fairly. Fair and affordable turn out to be two different things. The family home is where this lands hardest. One parent keeps the house for the kids' stability, the other takes the savings. Both walk away with equal value on paper and unequal cash flow in practice, with one...

Canadian expressions are invisible until someone from outside names them. With F1 weekend pulling visitors into Montreal from around the world, the hosts asked the question: what do we say that sounds completely normal to us and completely baffling to everyone else? "Yeah, no" came up first. It sounds like disagreement. It is agreement. One host traced it to a gaming session with an American frien...

Alberta's separation talk is getting louder, and a man who organized Quebec's 1980 referendum is watching closely. Andrew Caddell has seen this before. The phrases are familiar. The math is not. He organized on the ground and found the people running the movement were nothing like the people in the legislature. That gap mattered in 1980. Caddell says it matters now, and the question itself might b...

Three weird news stories make up this episode, and each one gets worse the more you think about it. A Texas man drove a Cybertruck into a lake. His citation was for not having a boat licence. A Michigan couple's interior security camera caught their landlord in their home doing something several prosecutors and defense attorneys still can't agree was a crime. It was definitely something, though. H...

What to watch this weekend covers six picks and a real argument: whether audiences have been permanently conditioned out of blockbuster excitement, with a new Star Wars in theatres as the test case. Horror on the Highway and a Heist That Starts With Demi Moore Passenger follows a van life couple who stop at a gruesome roadside accident and spend the next seven days outrunning what they invited in....

Humans in the loop only works as a safeguard if the humans know they are in one. Right now, across industries, most of them do not. Mohit Rajhans points to a coffee chain that pulled its AI automation entirely after customers got wrong information because no one was checking the inventory. That is not a fringe failure. Businesses are deploying AI faster than they are training the people responsibl...

iCloud phishing scams are targeting Canadians with messages so convincing they fooled a cybersecurity analyst's own mother. The pitch is simple: your storage is full, pay four dollars or lose your photos. One click hands scammers your account, your contacts, your messages, and your credit card. There is no storage. There is no Apple on the other end. A separate scam is hitting small business owner...

Canada has an airport drug smuggling problem, and it starts with the people loading your bags. Avery Haines found that corrupt employees have been switching bag tags, routing narcotics through the luggage of ordinary travelers who have no idea. Sixteen of 17 bag tag switching cases traced back to Pearson. Hells Angels, Mexican cartels, and the mafia have all infiltrated the airport workforce. Empl...

1983 brought Mario, the chicken nugget, and the Swatch Watch. A trivia game on air reveals all of them and gets one answer spectacularly wrong. The clues come one at a time: shoulder pads as the worst fashion trend, Ford Escort as the best-selling car, the chicken nugget as the food debut of the year. The video game clue is the one that stings. Pac-Man was the guess. Mario was the answer. The Swat...