On the Canadian National Exhibition: The View from the Sky Ride
This piece is the second in a series of reports from the
2012 Canadian National Exhibition. The first report covered the
opening ceremony.  A frequent complaint about the CNE is that
it’s always the same, year after year. And it’s hard to deny
that there’s a lot of truth to this complaint. The architecture
of the grounds has largely stagnated, and more structures have
been demolished than built in recent decades. Likewise, the
midway, which was once one of the most innovative in North
America, has become predictable. Every year there’s something
that gets ballyhooed as new and exciting, but it’s usually
pretty modest: a new ride that’s not all that different from the
other rides, a crazy food concoction that’s just a little bit
crazier than last year’s crazy food concoction (about which more
in a later post).  This year, though, there actually is
something worth getting excited about: the Sky Ride. It isn’t
new, exactly; it’s a rebirth of the Al