July is clearly not Daily Post Month! But, heck, clearly I deserved a break from all the... all the nothing I do normally right now. (God, I hope somebody hires me.)
So! On to business. We are actually quite unlikely to be the Murder Capital this year, astonishing as that may seem; Edmonton's been having another hell of a year, and you never can count out the two-year reigning champions over in Abbotsford-Mission. But Slurpees? God damn, son, we got Slurpees covered.
Slurpee Champions of the World! Twelfth straight year running! Today being 7/11, and the day that you could go to a 7-11 and get a hilariously tiny free sample cup before they ran out around 6:00 or 7:00 AM, I figured that today was as good a day as any to tout our continuing running gag of an accomplishment.
It is of course inevitable this time of year that you get the usual naysayers, the "oh yeah well DIABETES" crowd, but honestly, if Slurpees didn't exist, I'm sure we'd figure out how to give ourselves Diabetes some other way. Wouldn't we? Knowing us, it's a wonder we haven't all turned to cocaine and Frosties by now.
Besides, we need something to credit ourselves with as a city; the only things that other cities know us for are Slurpee consumption and an NHL hockey team, and we've only had the latter back for a few weeks now. We can't even get our traffic lights to work; c'mon, let us have something. (Second and third place in the Slurpee Derby were Calgary and Detroit, if you're the type to draw parallels between Slurpee consumption and terrible places to live.)
One thing that I hadn't even known before I read it this year is that Slurpees were only introduced in Canada 42 years ago, so our fair city of Winnipeg has straight-up dominated the Canadian Slurpee-guzzling arena for... about twenty-eight and a half percent of its Canadian lifespan? Ish? Ahh, something like that. This would have been an easier breakdown if I'd done the math two years ago, when it was 40 years of Slurpee and 10 years of record respectively, but obviously I'm not that bright. So here's to twenty-eight-and-a-half-percent more!
I could have written a column about this very topic for Uptown Magazine, but I'm obviously not bright enough for that, either. I did, however, write this column on this story, and I would like to bring it to your attention because I dig how this one came out.
The column's concluding suggestion to MPI is one that I feel very strongly about, as I'm sure you will as well if you picture yourself blowing money for vanity plates and somebody then swiping said plates off your car. With the success of the Bombers plates, and with the knowledge that this was a pilot project to gauge the prospective success of similar future ventures, it is difficult to believe that our collective fancy as a province will not eventually turn to Winnipeg Jets plates -- and if Manitoba Public Insurance isn't handing out complementary tamper-proof bolts when they eventually (but inevitably) pursue such a venture, oh man, vandals and crooks are going to gobble those plates up like a game of contraband Hungry Hungry Hippos.
OMM NOMM NOMM NOMM
All right, I'm on the board for July! Tune in next time, true believers; I'm a firm believer in the connection between storytelling and music, so I'll tell you about the backstory behind the most-played track on my iPod and you'll humour me by pretending it's interesting. I'll see you then!
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