Stampede 2012

[Northendzone]

I am generally indifferent to stampede, until I see some of the ladies in cutoff shorts and cowboy boots

[Top Shelf]

Deep fried Oreos and deep fried Snickers

[c.t.ner]

Side note if people are interested and want to get in on the spirit at work and mix it up. I've created a handful of "humorous" Stampede specific wallpapers for download. (They work with the iPhone/iPod Touch and most regular laptops, desktops, etc.).

http://www.armadillostudios.ca/stamp...nnial-edition/

Anyways, just something a little more tounge-in-cheek to lighten up the Stampede.

[king_amonte]

Anyone know who the Bud Light Blank Ticket was tonight?

[c.t.ner]

Originally Posted by king_amonte

Anyone know who the Bud Light Blank Ticket was tonight?

Sounds like The Arkells played (or at least was the opener)

https://twitter.com/real_jp/status/221099786823139329

[GreatWhiteEbola]

Originally Posted by Bigtime

The myth is great, it is just laughable when people actually buy into the myth and think of the Stampede as an actual reflection on the past of Calgary. One of the most notable people to do this was Ric McIver, and he got chewed up pretty good for his quotes related to it.

Originally Posted by MrMastodonFarm

Go on.... Never read any of this... but would very much like to.

Me too, I would like to know what myths are being perpetuated.

[The Goon]

Happy Stampede everyone! Get out there and enjoy it.

I love this city.

[Senator Clay Davis]

For prominent animal rights activist and TV game show legend Bob Barker, no rodeo is a good rodeo.

Despite efforts by the Calgary Stampede to make its animal events safer for both critters and cowboys, the man who signed off each episode of "The Price is Right" with a plea for people to neuter their pets would like to see an end to the display of western skills.

"I would like very much to see them celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Calgary Stampede by saying that is enough animal cruelty," Barker said recently in an interview with The Canadian Press. "Let's wind it up and close it down."

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/tv-legend-b...2084--rah.html

I'd still rather watch the senile old man than Drew Carey, but maybe thats me.

[Bigtime]

Originally Posted by MrMastodonFarm

Go on.... Never read any of this... but would very much like to.

Originally Posted by GreatWhiteEbola

Me too, I would like to know what myths are being perpetuated.

My google skills are weak but I am pretty sure it all started with a McIver opinion piece in the herald, which was then rebutted by either Jeremy Klaszus or Chris Turner afterwards. I believe Chris Turner later expanded on the myth in his excellent article on Calgary in The Walrus magazine about a month or so ago.

[GreatWhiteEbola]

Originally Posted by Bigtime

My google skills are weak but I am pretty sure it all started with a McIver opinion piece in the herald, which was then rebutted by either Jeremy Klaszus or Chris Turner afterwards. I believe Chris Turner later expanded on the myth in his excellent article on Calgary in The Walrus magazine about a month or so ago.

http://walrusmagazine.com/articles/2...econsidered/2/

CALGARY WAS NEVER actually the Wild West, at least not in the gunslinging sense. For all the romantic nostalgia surrounding that first handful of pioneering ranchers, it was settled primarily by the North West Mounted Police and the Canadian Pacific Railway. Until the Mounties and the trains came, there was no town to speak of. And because the settlement was young even then — younger than Edmonton, which had been a bustling fur trading post for decades, younger than the NWMP’s primary southern Alberta post at Fort Macleod — it never did become the administrative centre of anyone’s map. It was neither the provincial capital nor the main outpost of the federal government back east. It had no established religious power structures, no Loyalist cliques. In Calgary, as its current mayor likes to say, “no one cares who your daddy was,” and no one ever really did. If you can talk your way into the room, you’ll get a hearing, and you might even walk out in charge of something new.

Back in 1912, a smooth talker named Guy Weadick, an eastern city boy who’d learned trick roping and made a living pretending to be a frontier cowboy, came riding into town and convinced four local bigwigs to throw some cash at his travelling circus, and 100 years later Calgary still organizes its summers around the Stampede he sold the city on. Weadick launched an institution and gave the city its founding myth, forever wedding young Calgary to its Cowtown reputation. It is a myth so concise and enduring that even today it continues to obscure the reality of a sophisticated, business-obsessed, hyper-modern city. Even the true nature of this Weadick fellow and his vaudevillian rodeo show have been subsumed by it.

Weadick was by all reports a sincere and charming man, a gifted trick roper and horseback rider, and a passionate, persuasive salesman. A 1952 glossy history of the Stampede describes him as “a long, lean cowpuncher with a quick nervous walk and a Wyoming drawl.” If this sounds like a character in a 1950s Western, that’s because it mostly is: Guy Weadick was born in Rochester, New York, and later spent time in Wyoming and Winnipeg. By the time he arrived in Calgary, the American frontier had been closed for decades, and even nostalgic Wild West travelling shows were on the wane. The inaugural Stampede was conceived as a one-time spectacle, a grand finale.Weadick moved the Stampede to Winnipeg the next year, but the show didn’t catch on there, and so he brought it back to Calgary, where it became an annual event in 1923. Even then, it included many of its current trappings: a parade, a midway, horse racing, free cowboy breakfasts, and several novel rodeo events. But those early Stampedes were varied affairs. There were Model T races and city tours, North West Mounted Police on horseback and Hudson’s Bay Company factors on foot; photos from the first Stampede parade reveal bowler hats and Sunday finery outnumbering cowboy hats and spurs.

The “Indian Village,” a sparsely attended back corner of the grounds nowadays, was perhaps the most unique Stampede feature and its most authentic frontier experience. At the time, Alberta’s First Nations were forbidden to leave their reserves except on short-term permits, and they couldn’t wear their traditional dress or practise their cultural and religious beliefs, on or off the reserve. The local Indian agent initially refused to allow his wards to attend the first Stampede, because it required too many days off the reserve, and he was only overruled after two of Calgary’s most prominent politicians, Senator James Lougheed and future prime minister R. B. Bennett, petitioned the federal government. The First Nations pitched teepees and camped out on the Stampede grounds by the thousands, embracing the event as a rare chance to express their smothered cultures; the Stampede represented the only opportunity most Calgarians ever had to interact directly with their Indigenous neighbours.

Notwithstanding the mythmaking overstatement, there was an authentic wildness to the city that birthed the Stampede, a frontier gambler’s taste for risk that lives on within its glittering office towers. It’s no coincidence that it spawned WestJet and Bre-X Minerals (the positive and negative poles in Calgary’s freewheeling business culture), and I still can’t figure out how Norman Foster managed to convince the city’s largest gas drilling operation to commission Canada’s greenest skyscraper, but any day now they’ll cut the ribbon on the Bow building, Encana’s employees will move in, and it will replace the Calgary Tower as the city’s postcard icon.

[Resolute 14]

The Globe story I linked above touches on it. But, basically, as a city, Calgary had a history of failed rodeos prior to 1912 - at best, they were a sideshow to the Industrial Exhibition - because the population thought it was above that. The Stampede is a more realistic presentation of "cowboy culture" than the old wild west shows Guy Weadick originally worked, but they are just as rooted in mythology as those shows were. The mythos of the Stampede has very little connection to the area's ranching tradition of the time.

The Stampede is totally an invented tradition, but after 100 years, is very much a legitimate tradition as well. And it is a cultural event we should be proud of.

Max Foran's Icon, Brand, Myth is also a decent read on the Stampede's history. It is available online in PDF format too.

[Ozy_Flame]

Originally Posted by Senator Clay Davis

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/tv-legend-b...2084--rah.html

I'd still rather watch the senile old man than Drew Carey, but maybe thats me.

Where's Adam Sandler when you need him . . .

[Senator Clay Davis]

"The Rodeo is right, bitch"

[Rhettzky]

Originally Posted by Senator Clay Davis

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/tv-legend-b...2084--rah.html

I'd still rather watch the senile old man than Drew Carey, but maybe thats me.

Last week they gave away a trip to the Calgary Stampede on the price is right. Sweet!

[Bigtime]

So this is the 100th anniversary of the Stampede and we only get 2 freaking Snowbirds? Not even the whole team? Come on. I would have hoped for something like the Snowbird team plus a couple of CF-18's for good measure.

Weak.

[Resolute 14]

Kinda strange. They flew a full formation last year.

And as far as the Royal Canadian Mint and coins go, they didn't do circulation sets for the Stampede like they did the Roughriders/Canadiens, but instead high-end collector coins. Including one that runs $12k:

http://www.mint.ca/store/search/sear...sp.formSearch#

[Jimmy Stang]

Originally Posted by Bigtime

So this is the 100th anniversary of the Stampede and we only get 2 freaking Snowbirds? Not even the whole team? Come on. I would have hoped for something like the Snowbird team plus a couple of CF-18's for good measure.

Weak.

I saw the full formation circling around afterwards (from the Glamorgan area). Not sure why they didn't do the full formation earlier.

And as a random aside, who were the medieval Jesus folk right before the start of the parade? They were marching along in costumes and being fairly evangelical. There were a tonne of police on mountain bikes right behind them and seemed to be keeping them moving. Although there were a lot of sanctioned "warm-up" performers doing various things, there seemed to be a different vibe about these people. Could it be possible that they were uninvited guests and were crashing the parade? Perhaps they were supposed to be there, but something about it just seemed odd.

And no, I'm not being anti-religious. But I would much rather have an identifiable church group who is involved in the community instead of some costumed people rambling on about Jesus.

[troutman]

^^^
Salvation Army. At first I thought it was D&D players for Jesus.

There was a hush in the crowd when Rob Anders drove by. I think many people wanted to boo him, but kept quiet out of respect for the day.

[Senator Clay Davis]

Rob Anders, playing the role of rodeo clown no doubt.

[Jimmy Stang]

Originally Posted by troutman

^^^
Salvation Army. At first I thought it was D&D players for Jesus.

Interesting. I recall seeing the Salvation Army Band a little later, but didn't realise they sent their crusaders in ahead of time.

There was a hush in the crowd when Rob Anders drove by. I think many people wanted to boo him, but kept quiet out of respect for the day.

The same awkward hush fell over the crowd when he passed by us. Every other politician received polite applause, but it was probably the quietest moment of the entire day when Anders rolled past. Funny that people will mark an X by his name but can't bring themselves to clap for the guy. Fully deserved response though.