Smells Like Yukon Flog

Note the exclamation point, as opposed to yesterday’s question mark.

As anticipated, the second segment of Smells Like Yukon’s Blockbuster Third Season was bumped from its scheduled time slot this morning. Something to do with Dawson City, fish, and a high speed catamaran. Now, we’ve just received word from CBC that the piece will air tomorrow morning (Thursday, October 2) at about 7:15 a.m.

Details about Smells Like Yukon’s third season, scheduled to begin on Wednesday, September 17, have finally been released. These details were released last night in a media release that never was and never will be released to the media. We just call it that because it sounds all professional and stuff.

The media release has a link to the schedule for the first six segments of the season. Or you can just click right here to see the schedule–but then you’ll miss out on all the other juicy details contained in the media release that really isn’t.

What the media release won’t tell you, however, is that the start of the new Smells Like Yukon season was delayed because the senior producer of CBC’s morning show has been in China pursuing his dream to create a handcrafted line of bouncy rubber balls.

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…

Like many CBC Yukon listeners, we learned this morning that Sandi Coleman, the long-time host of the morning show, will be vacating her chair for television reporter Al Foster, effective September 2. Sandi will take over Al’s duties in television.

Sandi has always given Smells Like Yukon good intro, and pretty good extro as well, so she’s certainly going to be missed by us. On the other hand, we look forward to the added testosterone that Al will lend to Smells Like Yukon over the coming season.

The SLY series has always been masuline fare–kind of like a collection of Hemingway stories. Some of last season’s pieces, you may recall, featured explosions, foul language, animal abuse and other stuff that men seem to value in popular entertainment. We can only see these aspects being enhanced in the future, as each segment is bookended by banter from a more manly host.

In other news, the production of segments for Season 3 is now well underway and, before long, we should be posting a broadcast schedule to the website.