And some soothing words of encouragement to our gondolist neighbors
Ace Reporter Schwebke delivers a heart-rending front-page story this morning, reporting on the reaction in the gondolist cult camp to Saturday's five-star rated Boss Godfrey flip-flop.
The loyal gondolist lemmings had campaigned tirelessly for Boss Godfrey over the last two years, hoping to wrench seed money from the sale of our cherished Mt. Ogden parklands acreage, to be applied as a down payment toward their cherished amusement park ride to nowhere.
They're feeling more than slightly "let down" by Boss Godfrey, to say the very least, according to Ace reporter Schwebke, although even now they maintain "hope."
Amazingly, the plainly disappointed Curt Geiger even lets slip a telling amusement park metaphor with this curt statement: "The brass ring on the carousel went past us,” Geiger said, “and we didn’t grab hold of it."
Perhaps the amateur psychologists among us can provide some enlightenment on the true meaning of this.
And the usually upbeat Dave Hardman, President of the Weber/Ogden Chamber of Commerce, utters a crack that's positively nasty, in the context of his constantly grinning, Enzyte-guy normal demeanor. "It would be dumb of our community to miss this opportunity,” Mr. Hardman snapped.
Maybe it's just us -- but we are curious as to our readers' impressions of the possibly subtle meaning of this Dave Hardman comment. Did Dave Hardman actually tell Scott Schwebke that he thought Boss Godfrey's latest decision was dumb?
And courtesy of gentle reader Dan S. we refer our readers to this morning's most excellent Kathy McKittrick story on this topic. As Dan S. notes, the hiring of Ms. McKittrick by the Salt Lake Tribune was clearly Emerald City's loss, and Salt Lake City's profound gain.
But before we turn the floor over to our readers this morning, we're going to offer a few words of consolation to our poor Emerald City brethren who feel betrayed by the "visionary" leader who apparently "hears voices" of conflicting "instruction" from time to time:
1) Remember, when Boss Godfrey makes a promise while his lips are moving, you can expect his actual behavior to be the dead opposite of what he says. Based on careful observation of the Boss of Us All for almost eight years, we're going to go out on a limb and predict he'll in all likelihood sell the park to Chris Peterson anyway -- win or lose or lose the election -- shortly after the November polling date. If the little guy can unabashedly do an 180 degree flip-flop once, he can most certainly do it again. That's one thing you can definitely take to the bank.
2) And even assuming the low-probability alternative, i.e., that Boss Godfrey is breaking new ground -- and actually telling the truth at long last -- our despondent gondolist friends and neighbors should be reminded that the paltry $2-7 million that Godfrey expected to generate from the Mt. Ogden Parklands sale was just a drop in the bucket when compared with the $45 million projected urban gondola price-tag. Loyalist gondolists would have been compelled to beat the bush for another $38 million in investment capital anyway, even if Godfrey hadn't pulled the old last-minute political "switcheroo." Accordingly, the additional $7 mil is just "chump change" with regard to a wonderful project like this. We're sure eager investors will be beating down gondolist fundraiser doors with bags of investor cash, in order to get in on the ground floor of a sure-fire investment like this.
We do hope that our gondolist friends feel better now. As always, we're trying to "stay positive."
Take it away o gentle ones.