Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2022/January 2023 i Zoomer Magazine

GET YOUR (NEW) GAME ON Every Sunday morning, Jan Dekker, 78, plays pickleball for free at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Community Centre, where the court is reserved at 10 a.m. for people aged 60 and over. He’s at a pickleball court somewhere in the city four times a week. He’s even played the popular 1960s paddle game on cruise ships. “It’s addictive,” Dekker admits. He enjoys both the socializing and, along with the other sports he plays, the workout that helps keep his blood sugar levels stable. Now there’s evidence that Dekker’s preferred form of exercise provides major health benefits. Research published in the International Journal of Research in Exercise Physiology found significant improvements in cholesterol, blood pressure, oxygen intake and metabolic responses after six weeks of participation in pickleball.…

FINANCIAL FORECASTS AS 2022 DREW TO A close, with global economies facing fierce economic headwinds, and high food and energy prices forcing many households to cut back on non-essential spending, economists dusted off their crystal balls to prognosticate how next year would unfold. In her Fall Economic Statement in November, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland predicted that we could be in for a “mild recession in the first quarter of 2023.” She noted, however, that “compassionate” and “responsible” government spending policies will help us weather the worst of the coming storm. Forecasters from Canada’s major banks generally agreed with the finance minister. Scotiabank predicted that a global recession in 2023 was “inevitable,” but felt that the financial blow would be less severe in Canada and the…

THE IMAGE OF KING CHARLES III after the committal service at St George’s Chapel in Windsor for his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, with Queen Consort Camilla by his side in the sovereign’s Bentley State Limousine, was poignant. After a long, emotional day of mourning his mother in public, with cameras catching him solemnly watching as the crown jewels were removed from her coffin, and a tear running down his face as “God Save the King” was played, he must have been exhausted. It had been 11 days of urgent activity for the new King: greeting the public, long processional walks behind the Queen’s coffin with his siblings, addressing Parliament and taping statements for television, receiving foreign dignitaries and holding audiences, and travelling some 3,000 kilometres around the United Kingdom to…

ON A COLD WINTER evening not long ago, I found myself searching for a piece of a naked demon, but no one had seen it. “I’m putting together the trumpet monster,” my daughter said. My son was working on the Garden of Eden. Our heads were bent together over the dining room table as we worked on a jigsaw puzzle, shutting out the misery of the pandemic outside. Once assembled, our 1,000-piece puzzle would depict 15th-century Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, famous for its graphic and bizarre representations of the Christian afterlife, with sinners writhing in hell and the saved bound for heaven. I suppose we could have chosen something more cheerful, but this one suited the mood of the times. I mean, there’s…

IN 2022, A FAMILY-RUN RESTAURANT is a rare thing, and a fourth-generation family-run restaurant is practically unheard of. There’s a reason for that. The Commodore opened on Jasper Avenue in Edmonton in 1942. The owners, the late Fong Chun and Ting Gee, were not part of the wave of immigrants who created Canadian Chinese food. Initially, they served all the things you’d expect to find on a diner menu – cheeseburgers, shakes and cherry pie, as well as sardines on toast and devilled eggs. Eventually, their son Wally took over with his wife, Sun Hee (Sunny). When Wally and Sunny’s sons were born, they grew up in the restaurant. David, the eldest, worked there off and on until he bought the place from his parents in 1997, and his daughter,…

Given that it’s a non-negotiable, milestone event in everyone’s life, it’s not surprising that death is frequently explored in movies. What is perhaps surprising is the thematic breadth the subject can take. For every flat-out weepie like Terms of Endearment and The Fault in Our Stars, there are ribald comedies like Beetlejuice, An American Werewolf in London and Death Becomes Her. And there are titles like Ghost and The Sixth Sense – heck, Ingmar Bergman’s towering The Seventh Seal from 1957 – plumbing death’s unfathomable mysteries via elements of fantasy. If there’s one thing linking all movies about death, though, it’s the concept that life is precious, every moment an incalculable gift. Two new, forthcoming films join the canon making that point, albeit in suitably different ways. The gentle…

SINGER-PIANIST CHANTAL Kreviazuk and alt-rocker husband, Raine Maida of Our Lady Peace, are back at it this December, playing shows on their Forgive Me tour that includes songs from their duo album, I’m Going to Break Your Heart. “We’re really focused on putting out new material. We’re in the studio now. We’re writing a book together and really just focused on the continuation of the journey,” says Kreviazuk, a two-time Juno award winner, in an interview with Zoomer. “Obviously, we’re always evolving as individuals and as a couple. That’s how the material is reflecting.” While Kreviazuk and Maida, who have been married for 23 years and have three sons, have co-written songs for her albums and for other acts, their first true collaboration came in 2014 in a creative…

GREEDFLATION IS THE WORD of the moment. How big a thing is it, and how should we deal with it? Inflation has been pinching everyone’s nerves since spring, and nowhere is the pain more acute than at the grocery checkout. The headline number for the Consumer Price Index fell marginally from seven per cent to 6.9 per cent in September, but food prices rocketed by 11.7 per cent, the fastest rise in four decades. Dietary basics are escalating fastest, hurting those on low and fixed incomes the most: Bread costs 17 per cent more than last year; cooking oil, 20 per cent more; and pasta, 30 per cent more. Yet a mid-October announcement from Loblaw Companies Ltd. (which operates No Frills, Zehrs, Real Canadian Superstore and Loblaws) – that it…

LONE STAR Everything is bigger in Texas (the higher the hair, and all that). Yet Marfa, in the western part of the state, is a hidden gem that’s been a draw for the creative set for decades, including the late New York City-based modern artist Donald Judd. La Mansana de Chinati, his residence and studio, with galleries and architectural projects, is open to the public through his Judd Foundation. Others have followed suit: Prada Marfa, the by-the-roadway permanent sculpture, is an installation that popped up in 2005 along Route 90 about 40 kilometres outside town. Although not commissioned by Miuccia Prada, the fashion designer provided luxury goods from her Fall/Winter 2005 collection as props to the artists Elmgreen + Dragset. Marfa was also immortalized on film: It was here, in…

Former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, 86, says the band still exchanges Christmas gifts, and Keith Richards, 78, always gives scented candles They smell like whisky and cigarettes, but it’s the thought that counts. “When I said it’s great to have the whole family together again for the holidays, this isn’t what I had in mind” The HereAfter AI app allows you to converse with voice clones of the dearly departed, created from digital recordings. “Man! I feel like a-tourin’!” Shania Twain, 57, who tearfully announced a series of farewell concerts in 2015, kicks off her Queen of Me world tour in April, which includes 17 Canadian dates. Meanwhile, former Journey frontman Steve Perry, 73, releases his first original Christmas song, “Maybe This Year” The news delighted fans, and goes to…

BEING A BRUCE COCKBURN fan is an uncommonly rewarding designation. And not just because the singer-songwriter, guitarist and Officer of the Order of Canada has been steadily producing reliably excellent albums since the ’70s. Cockburn is also a musician magnet, meaning his stuff is routinely covered by a wide cross-section of others, from Jimmy Buffett to jazz guitarist Michael Occhipinti – a personal favourite of Cockburn’s – imbuing his catalogue with variety and vitality. Now Cockburn, 77, has issued Rarities, a deep dive into the archives featuring 16 “rarely heard and newly mastered recordings,” including, among other gems, “Bird Without Wings,” a Cockburn demo dating to 1966; “Twilight on the Champlain Sea,” featuring folk star Ani DiFranco and previously released only in Japan; plus Cockburn covers of artists like…

IT WAS HER CRAZY LONG LIMBS THAT HOOKED ME. In October 1984, I was on my first proper date with the man I’d eventually marry. I’d just moved to New York to work for GQ magazine, and I’d scored tickets to the show on Broadway, Hurlyburly. Written by David Rabe and directed by Mike Nichols, it was about Hollywood louches, and starred William Hurt, Christopher Walken, Harvey Keitel, Jerry Stiller, Judith Ivey, Cynthia Nixon and – most thrillingly for me – Sigourney Weaver. “That’s a head-spinning first date,” Weaver said, when I mentioned this during a phone interview in September. Yes it was. I’d already seen Weaver on screen, towering over Woody Allen at the end of Annie Hall (she’s 179 cm tall, nearly 5’11”); as an embassy officer in…

AMAY-DECEMBER ROMANCE often describes a relationship between an older man and a younger woman, but when the roles are reversed, the older woman is commonly dismissed as a “cougar” who stalks and preys on younger men. The term was popularized in the early aughts when former Toronto Sun sex and relationships columnist Valerie Gibson published Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men, where she wrote about “the new breed of single, older woman … [who] knows exactly what she wants. What she wants is younger men and lots of great sex.” The flip side of her premise was that many young men were relieved to be free from the pressure to settle down. I wasn’t aware of the book when I met my life partner, who is 14…

MY PARENTS CALLED ME THE KILLARNEY KID; that’s how much I loved our camping trips to the north shore of Georgian Bay. Every August, mom and dad would pack up the tent trailer, cram me, my two sisters and the dog into the green station wagon with the faux-wood side panels, and make the six-hour drive from London, Ont., to the same campsite in Killarney Provincial Park about 100 kilometres southwest of Sudbury, Ont. For weeks on end, the Canadian Shield was my playground. After swimming until my fingers were wrinkled like prunes, I spent hours hunting for quartzite, foraging for wild blueberries, rock-hopping over smooth granite humps and exploring the surrounding forest. There were squabbles over the sleeping arrangements, since two kids had to share the bottom bunk bed…