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09 October 2006

Tourism SNAFU

A story in Sunday's Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram seems filled with every cliche about Newfoundland you can find.

If this piece fits with any of the current marketing messages we ought to be using, then maybe we need to do more than think of a cute logo. Maybe some marketers need to be shot and their heads mounted on poles, pour encourager les autres. For crying out loud, a chunk in the middle is nothing more than a recitation of jokes using The Other N-Word.

Someone might want to take the guys aside at this golf course and set them straight on how to deal with customers:
I had been warned to "pack an umbrella and maybe some snow boots" by the folks who operate the semi-private, 36-hole Clovelly Golf Course, even though I was going to be visiting in late summer.
If the N-word stuff wasn't bad enough, there's talk of the local minstrel shows, otherwise known as "Screech-ins", in which locals adopt the very best Stepin Fetchit attitudes:
To be screeched in is to be officially welcomed as an honorary Newfoundlander. It's an age-old ritual involving rum, a ridiculously nonsensical incantation ("Is ya a Screecher?"; "Indeed I is me ol'cock!"), a chunk of bologna ("Newfie steak") and the kissing of a fish, but as we had no cod, I had to kiss a puffin. A carved one, but about as hygienic as the Blarney Stone on a busy day.
The only thing harder to imagine than this thing being written today as opposed to 40 years ago?

That a single traveler in Dallas-Fort Worth will bother to head to a place farther away from DFW than Honolulu.

Notice that fact gets mentioned.

The city Buzz Mcclaine wrote about is not a place to visit; it is a place to read about and avoid.