Column: Joe Morinville

joe-batman2So I see on the news a fellow’s got a petition going to erect a 1,000-foot statue of Wolverine in downtown Edmonton so it can revitalize the downtown. I thought at first it was a statue of the wolverine animal, but apparently it’s some comic book character that’s like Fonzie on Happy Days with a set of big steak knives for claws. It got me thinking about some of the other tourist ideas that could be done here and other places.

1/ We ought to try another giant Christmas tree like the time we beat Edmonton. Back when Ray McDonald was the fire chief here in the 1950s. We had a tree in front of the post office that was 46 feet tall. It was 12 feet taller than Edmonton’s tree that year, even though they said their tree was 50 feet tall. Bunch of local firefighters went there and measured it and found ours was actually bigger.

2/ We ought to make us a giant toque again. Never mind regional partnerships on a hockey rink nobody needs but rich folks trying to fit more overpriced seats in. We ought to partner with Bon Accord and Legal to knit us another 13-metre-wide toque like we had back in 1990. We put in on Main Street and it made the papers right across the country. Those were the kind of good stories Morinville used to be in. We could do that again.

3/ Edson has a giant squirrel and Airdrie’s got a giant cowboy. Morinville popped up a couple giant letter Ms at either end of town a couple years ago, but I think we ought to have our own giant something other than a couple unoriginal letters. If Edmonton can have a giant Wolverine, then maybe Morinville ought to have a giant honey badger. Seen a video and apparently the honey badger don’t much care what folks think.

4/ With all this talk about traffic circles and roundabouts, maybe we ought to have a giant Big Ben in the middle of town so we can really be like the English. Speaking of roundabouts, we already had one at the four corners back when the cenotaph was still in the middle of the road.

5/ We ought to get those folks out at the Jurassic Forest to give us one of their old robot dinosaurs. We could put that in the middle of 100 Avenue and see how many people speed by a snapping T-Rex.

6/ Course, maybe we ought to just not get too fast on erecting big monuments in town in case it leads to erecting a big tax bill later on.

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3 Comments

  1. What about a giant Prairie Dog! Those things have been digging more holes in town than the oil field has in all of Alberta, lol.

  2. Why not a giant STOP sign. We could boast we have the most stop signs of any town.

  3. I like the idea of a weather-predicting rodent. My father was born in Wiarton, Ontario, which is home to world famous shadow-seeking albino groundhog, Wiarton Willie. We could look for an albino Richardson Ground Squirrel (aka groundhog) of our own and pass it off as Morinville Marvin or something. Cage It and They Will Come…

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