Some serious talent and hard-hitting action is about to descend on Winnipeg during the 2008 Commonwealth Taekwondo Championships. Taking over MTS Centre the weekend of Nov. 21, weigh-ins begin on Friday with the first fights taking place the next morning.

This is the fourth largest taekwondo championship in the world and to compete at this level has taken some hard work. Juniors have had to be ranked in the top four nationally and seniors have had to be in the top four in point standings nationally.

“They’ve been working three or four years in order to get their points up,” Kate Nosworthy says about senior competitors. Nosworthy, apart from doing communications for the event, also has students competing in the championships.

She says competing at this level is a huge commitment and most of her students have been training at least two hours a day, five days a week for two years to get to this point.

Though it has yet to be decided who’s going to be representing the east or west in the 2008 Grey Cup, its guaranteed hundreds of thousands will tune in nationally, taking part in the annual Grey Cup tradition.

Winnipeggers are probably still feeling the pain of last year’s Grey Cup with its twists and turns. Ryan Dinwiddie stepped in for an injured Kevin Glenn, to make his first professional start in the most important game of the season. Despite the intense season-long push of the Bombers, a glory story was not in store as the Roughriders took home the Cup.

When we last checked, the list of iPhone web applications at apple.com was 2,472 long. We imagine this means whatever you want, you can probably find. Here are a few of the newer applications that caught our eye. 

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According to Peter Henry of Handford Drewitt, this season’s suit is a modern take on retro lines. “Fashion needed a little change in direction, so designers have revived some of the elegance of the ‘60s,” he says. This means go for vested suits, darker colours and dressier, more elegant clean lines.

We wake up to it, we end meals with it, our workday is scheduled around it. It is as much a part of our daily lives as water. With terms like macchiato, peaberry and Swiss water entering the common vernacular it seems a new breed of enthusiast has emerged, whose seriousness about the drink parallels that of an oenophile. In our first Connoisseur Series, we take a look at trends, methods and local resources for the second most traded commodity in the world—coffee.