Cow on a stick

A few years ago, the gurus in the downtown offices of the City of Chicago's tourism development offices came up with a brilliant plan. Let's manufacture hundreds of life-size cows, they said. We'll have the local artistic set paint them. And then we'll sprinkle them all over downtown, and sit back and watch the tourism dollars roll in. Though it may seem nutso, the project got the green light and tourists from Tokyo to St. Petersburg flocked to our Miracle Mile to take pictures of themselves standing beside weirdly decorated bovines. And like the Swatch watch of the 1980s, the cow concept caught fire, and the whole Cows on Parade thing went global. It's even earned a Wikipedia entry. And there's more: it started a trend. There were Pigs on Parade in Seattle, Whale Mania in Maui, Moose on the Loose in Montana, Gators on the Geaux in Louisiana, A Ewe Review in Michigan, Go Fish in Virginia, and even Corn-on-the-Curb in Bloomington, IL. The list goes on and on.

That was a few years ago. It worked for us then, but we've all moved on, and like our fondness for the band Toto, we thought the cows had faded gracefully away to the archives. So imagine my surprise to discover that the cows have reemerged on the eastern European circuit this summer, a gimmick with new life breathed into it by the Budapest Tourism office. But like all things that die a natural death and then somehow emerge from the tombs, they're kind of icky. Sort of a Cows on Parade: Undead Remix. Take the one painted like a cow-shaped green watermelon, with an unfortuante giant gaping red slice cut out of its neck. Or the cow pieces swirling around in a blender. And my favorite, at the top of the busy pedestrian walking street where I tried to buy some slick gold Nike's at the Budapest Footlocker (they didn't have my size):



Yes, a cow painted with a blue fleck job, melting into the pavement, giant bovine butt in the air with a giant popsicle stick coming out of it. Apparently the cow had been in another location in front of a Catholic church at first, but was moved after protests that the angle of particular parts pointing toward the church was derogatory. I guess the folks at the Footlocker don't mind so much. But I have to say, the next couple of times I tried to order a gelato, I had a hard time shaking the image of that blue cow with a popsicle stick where the sun don't shine.