"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0742671/quotes
I almost forgot, fellow babies..."Booger!"
The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of 1986 [video]
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of 1986 [video]
#12The thing that strikes me is how deep the pathos about Cleveland runs as the newscasters hype the event ("Cleveland is no longer the mistake by the lake!" as the balloons fly). And that everyone seemed so entirely sure that dumping a million balloons into the sky would somehow make everyone stop laughing at the city. And then of course they all landed in the lake anyway.
Re: The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of 1986 [video]
#13The thing that strikes me is how deep the pathos about Cleveland runs as the newscasters hype the event ("Cleveland is no longer the mistake by the lake!" as the balloons fly). And that everyone seemed so entirely sure that dumping a million balloons into the sky would somehow make everyone stop laughing at the city. And then of course they all landed in the lake anyway.
I think the Onion did a good job of capturing that here
https://www.theonion.com/cleveland-finishes-construction-on-...
Re: The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of 1986 [video]
#14Nowadays, I can't look at any helium balloon release and not think it's littering. “Pretty” and out of sight, but still littering. You're throwing plastic into the nature and environment.
Re: The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of 1986 [video]
#15This was grossly negligent on so many levels, I find it hard to believe that was televised live with enthusiasm just 32 years ago.
Re: The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of 1986 [video]
#16The thing that strikes me is how deep the pathos about Cleveland runs as the newscasters hype the event ("Cleveland is no longer the mistake by the lake!" as the balloons fly). And that everyone seemed so entirely sure that dumping a million balloons into the sky would somehow make everyone stop laughing at the city. And then of course they all landed in the lake anyway.
The "newscasters" are Big Chuck and Little John which were a local TV comedy duo (similar to Almost Live! in Seattle). Its probably one of the more Cleveland things to happen in Cleveland though.
Random aside - local shows like that are pretty sorely missing now.
Re: The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of 1986 [video]
#17Unrelated: I recently found out The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/emerson...
Re: The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of 1986 [video]
#18After this video, I finally got the joke involving Great Ohio Desert (artificial desert that was intended to be landmark of Ohio) from Wallace's 1987 "Broom of The System". Maybe it even inspired his idea with catapulting trash to Canada in his "Inifinte Jest".
Re: The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of 1986 [video]
#19> most of the balloons ended up in Canada in these tense times, Prime Minister Trudeau should look back with an open heart to the days when a great American city gave the Canadian people thousands of free children's toys.
More like "hundreds of thousands of free choking hazards".
Re: The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of 1986 [video]
#20Semi-related - the YouTube clip in the article was linked to on a little subreddit called "Obscure Media", https://www.reddit.com/r/ObscureMedia/
A wide variety of stuff shows up there, some of which might be interesting to the HN crowd.