Everytime I head off to Calgary, I'm blown away at how fast that city is growing. It's crazy.
Other than the suburbs, it seems that Calgary may be growing "up" as well. EnCana has announced that they will be building the Bow Tower, which is not only massive, but will block out most of the Calgary Tower... (here are the before and after shots...). Following this announcement, it seems like we have a "my johnson is bigger than your johnson" competition going on between EnCana and Imperial Oil, who also want to build a big town in Calgary...
And to end the post on a relative theme, I leave you with this...
Nihilist: We believe in nothing, Lebowski. Nothing. And tomorrow we come back and we cut off your chonson.Though it's really not fair to compare The Dude to EnCana or Imperial Oil, I can't help but remember the pictures of all those tarped-up half-built office towers in downtown Calgary following the last oil bust and economic recession in Alberta the 1980's.
The Dude: Excuse me?
Nihilist: I said
[shouting]
Nihilist: "We'll cut off your johnson"!
Nihilist: Just you think about that, Lebowski.
Nihilist: Yeah, your wiggly penis, Lebowski.
Nihilist: Yeah and maybe we stomp on it and squoosh it, Lebowski.
I guess the economy is a nihilist.
Too bad EnCana won't spend the money necessary to build an upgrader that serves to meet the value add goals of the government instead of wanting to ship our raw bitumen to the US for refining. Shipping out investment and skilled high quality jobs out of the province and the country in exchange for fulfiling a corporate ediface complex is not good optics and not good business as I see it.
ReplyDeleteIt is still a great looking building in a Toronto City Hall-ish kind of way...no doubt intentional as Calgary aims to empty out even more Toronto head offices in the next while. Imperial Oil was just the start.
encana leases a lot of over-priced office space all over downtown. its kind of crazy. i suspect they want to put all their people in one place. you wonder what will happen if there's a downturn.
ReplyDeletei visited an o&g office last week that had a HUGE art collection and way too much space for what they were doing. it reminded me of the 80's when everyone was overextended. and we know what happened next.
for a non-interventionist ralph klein sure pushed hard to get all those pipelines built into the american midwest so their refineries could process crude instead of ours. you wonder what the payback will be. maybe he should just change his name to mulroney.
i also wonder how many time steve buscemi got told: "shut the fuck up donny". must be in the hundreds.
The Dude is just about my favorite character of all time. What we need is a good "Lebowski for PC Leader" campaign. :D
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