You've seen me do this before, and you know how often it happens: I think of some idle curiosity offhand, it rattles around my brain for a week or two until it finally just clamps on, and then I have no choice but to pursue it.
Here's what I'd written on Twitter about a week and a half ago:
Y'know what we, as a city, have just never been very good at? Postcards. They just... they're not a strength of ours. flickr.com/photos/rondowl…
— James Hope Howard (@jameshopehoward) April 2, 2013
And they're not, man. I mean, look at that thing, click that and get a load of it. I kept poking around the related Flickr galleries that day in hopes of finding more dignified recent examples, but, well.
Why?I just, I don't... why.flickr.com/photos/adam79/… #why
— James Hope Howard (@jameshopehoward) April 2, 2013
Now, this ended up getting a bit of a discussion going, and some folks did insist that they'd seen better ones in the wild -- maybe not archived online, like these trainwrecks, but certainly better ones out there somewhere.
Well, it was possible, of course, that I might be wrong; I have been wrong before. Perhaps the local postcards have improved dramatically since I had last checked a physical store; indeed, perhaps each of our postcards are now world-class works of modern art! The days of embarrassing, sometimes cringeworthy photos and colours and fonts could very well be a thing of the distant past, the industry having advanced to a new and higher standard of grace and refinement.
Oh boy!
So curiosity, as it always does, eventually got the better of me, and off I set to discover what our fair city and fair province have for postcard offerings these days. The Forks is an indisputable tourist destination in Winnipeg -- very likely the indisputable tourist destination in Winnipeg, at least for now in our pre-CMHR era -- and thusly that seemed the best place to begin.
So here we are on the first floor of The Forks, and here is where my earlier bout of postcard-related optimism goes THBPPTH.
