PANIC PANIC PANIC!
By Wanye
13 years ago
It’s no secret that your ol’ pal Wanye has a love on for Edmonton. Heck, we have a 1/38 scale drawing of Phase I of WEM tattooed on our back. But every now and again the City we love goes out and embarasses itself on the international stage.
Recently, Lady Gaga came to town and put on a pair of show stopping concerts. During rehersal the folks over at RX1 were swapping out letters in the Oil Country sign to make room for a spot light to be set up on the catwalk. During this time, the letter O was removed from the sign.
Gaga – sharp as an eagle but with 5x the singing chops – tweeted a picture of the sign sans O and everyone had a hearty laugh us included. We love seeing pics of the hilarious mundane. Before we were banned from twitter, we used to take pics of witty things all of the time.
Take this Nissan Maxima we were behind in traffic this morning. Hilarious right?
Heh heh. Four 20 indeed.
ANYWAYS
Gaga tweets some photo of the gaffe, we all have a laugh and are quickly distracted by weed themed vanity license plates.
Life moves on.
So you can imagine our immense surprise when we read this article over at PerezHilton.com this morning:
"A few nights ago, Lady GaGa made a bit of stir after her performance in Edmonton, Canadialand when she tweeted this photo (above) of an Oil Country sign with a HIGHlariously key letter missing – along with the message "holy mother of laughter."
However, city officials are now displeased with the pop star because they think she has soiled the city’s image!
Mayor Stephen Mandel says:
"Some things are disgusting and you shouldn’t have to say they’re disgusting. I think it demeans them more than anything else."
And reportedly local TV stations won’t air the pic!
Ha! Too bad it’s plastered all over the internet for the world to see!
We personally don’t see what the big deal is! What happened to the HIGHlarity of wordplay, people?!
We’re sure she didn’t mean for anyone to take it personally!"
PANIC ARTICLE 2
Then we wandered over to the link to the CTV website and read this alarmist gem:
"A recent tweet by Lady Gaga, which shows an offensive photo of an Oil Country sign with a key letter missing, is triggering debate over how much damage her online comments can do to Edmonton’s image.
The post was made hours after the recording artist performed her second sold-out show at Rexall Place on Friday. Beyond a link to the image, Lady Gaga wrote to her 5.8 million online followers, "holy mother of laughter."
Northlands said the photograph was taken while crews were setting up for a show, at a time when one letter from a permanent sign had been removed to put a spotlight in place.
Since Lady Gaga appeared fourth on the 2010 Forbes list of 100 most Powerful and Influential celebrities in the world, one local social media consultant argues her twitter comments can have a huge impact on how the rest of the world sees Edmonton."
TOP DRAWER ANALYSIS
We sort of imagine that the meetings among the power brokers to discuss slights to the City of Edmonton look sort of like that kid freaking out in this video. Drawing attention to things like this ~ and a standing ovation of courage goes to CTV for having the balls to not show the offensive photo ~ makes the City look small minded and hickish in the eyes of many.
Do you think that Mayor Bloomberg would have issued a statement on the matter had this occured at a concert in NYC? Heck no, that guy is way too busy doing Mayoral things to comment on these trivial things.
Pictures like this don’t do any damage to the City’s reputation at all. Calling on a man of such importance as the Mayor to make a statement on the thing damages the City’s reputation. Circling the wagons of social media consultants to weigh in on the matter damages the City’s reputation.
Way to go team. We come out of this looking like Grade A winners.
Hopefully Dany Heatley doesn’t read about all of this. He still might come to Edmonton right?
RIGHT?
*recrosses fingers for the 1,257,773rd time*
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