Smells Like Yukon Flog

A few weeks ago, some anonymous vandal destroyed a series of wooden structures on one of Whitehorse’s most popular mountain bike trails–an event now immortalized as the Boogaloo Chainsaw Massacre. News of and speculation about the vandalism spread quickly through the local mountain biking community, but it wasn’t until early last week that a pair of stories by CBC’s Nancy Thomson, one of which included an interview with Smells Like Yukon’s own Mark Koepke, brought this issue to the attention of the wider public. This initial coverage then begat a print story by Tom Patrick of the Yukon News.

By now, enough has been said and written about the Boogaloo Chainsaw Massacre, so Smells Like Yukon has no intention of jumping on the story bandwagon. But all the publicity does provide a perfect opportunity to revisit a subject that once loomed large on the Flog.

You guessed it: The City of Whitehorse’s Gameswear Where? Gallery.

You may recall that an offhand comment in a radio segment from Smells Like Yukon’s first season inspired Whitehorse Mayor Bev Buckway to call Mark with the news that the city was setting up an online Gameswear Gallery to prove that all those orange Canada Winter Games volunteer jackets were doing more than collecting dust in Whitehorse basements. Less than a year later, we can’t find any trace of the gallery on the city website, which is really too bad.

Below is a photo of a pile of household and construction waste recently dumped at the side of the Boogaloo trail near the Grey Mountain Cemetery, in an area where, thanks to the planned expansion, many Yukoners can look forward to one day having their remains disposed of in a “neo-traditional” fashion, whatever that means. Now, if you look closely, you’ll note that the centrepiece of this pile of garbage has a pretty familiar appearance….

And now, for the close-up…

Once again, Smells Like Yukon’s powers of prediction have proven all too accurate. Last season’s segment, “The Barstools of Yutopia,” recorded on location in the then-brand new Yutopia Bar and Grill in downtown Whitehorse, ended with the warning that “utopias are a lot like bars at 4th and Main: they don’t last forever….”

Well, Yutopia lasted little over a year. Now it has been replaced by Kathy’s Restaurant & Asian Food. We’re still trying to figure out the name–Is the Asian food served in the alley, as opposed to the restaurant? Do you have to mail-order the moo goo gai pan? Why not tack on “& Beverages” to the name, just for good measure? As Smells Like Yukon grapples with these timeless questions, we understandably mourn the loss of the previous establishment and especially its name, which did, after all, inspire six minutes and 43 seconds of speculation about how to make the Yukon a better place to live. Only time will tell what Kathy’s Restaurant & Asian Food is going to inspire.

Fortuitously, when Jesse and Mark ate lunch at Lizard’s yesterday, the waitress explained that the martini bar that is scheduled to open in the space between Lizard’s and Kathy’s would not just be high-end, but “super high-end.” Somehow, this assertion seems ripe with satirical possibility.