| THE BEST
· 98 per cent of the response to Calgary’s flooding. The city did a great job of communicating, letting Calgarians know what the city was doing, how we could help and generally what was going on. Residents felt safe, informed, up to date and dry.
· Royal Visit 2005. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh arrived in Calgary to a spectacular showing by our city and its people. The final stop on their 2005 Royal Visit to Canada was described as the best. Passing thousands of well-wishers waving Canadian flags, they went to a party with 15,000 guests and dignitaries, which was a success for all involved, even those of us who weren’t invited (and were paid with beer tickets to stand and flag-wave because we couldn’t get into medical school and have decided to be writers and have no place to be in the middle of the afternoon). The British press would later comment that it was a show rivalling a West End production in London.
· Calgary finally acting like a big dog. Initiatives seem to abound this year that see Calgary beginning to take its place at the international table. Council has launched and supported imagineCALGARY, a city-led, community-owned initiative to create a long-term sustainability vision for Calgary. Combining vast community input, Calgary's entrepreneurial spirit and bold thinking, imagineCALGARY will result in a 100-year vision for Calgary and 30-year targets and strategies toward the vision.
THE WORST
· The other one per cent of the response to Calgary’s flooding. The mayor affectionately referring to some of his constituent flock as "dopes." A) Never call the people who control your destiny names. B) Never call the people who legitimize your existence names. C) Never call the rest of the people who didn’t actually vote for you anything but sir and ma’am.
· The other, other one per cent of the response to Calgary’s flooding. Can we please get a more user-friendly water restriction system in place? With Level 1 starting at "Please continue to waste ridiculous amounts of this quickly disappearing resource," to Level 3 exhorting us to "Only water those blades of grass up to but not including those with a length up to but not exceeding 2.5 inches," up to Level 5, which seems to imply, "Don’t even think about watering anything, let alone brushing or washing or drinking, in fact — what you should be doing right now is running around in circles screaming because you are about to be washed into Lake Southern Alberta."
· The optics around the Ward 10 voting scandal. I’m not saying it wasn’t a naturally sticky and messy situation, and I’m not saying we didn’t need to spend some money to make it go away, but I am saying that me and the other old men who sit at the McDonald’s coffee shop each morning and complain about everything felt like we were watching the bad part of the Jerry Springer show – not the naked part, but the rest. |
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