The Shakedown
What's the Deal with the Rose Festival?
Sizing up our annual civic celebration, 110 years old this month

↑ Upside
- Parade-viewing turf wars give onlookers chance to feel better about own life choices
- What else would we do with all these damn flowers?
- Fleet Week seamen jokes still not stale
- Every real city needs that thing locals pretend to ignore
- C’mon, not like Royal Canadian Navy was doing much else
- Commemorates that one time Pettygrove seduced Lovejoy on a bed of roses
- Has improved every year since legalization
↓ Downside
- Technically, all those roses are withering and dying
- Budweiser Clydesdales still count as celebrity appearance
- Thorns definitely metaphor for lack of affordable housing
- Ground zero for pre-summer teen breakups
- Jacobite factions refuse to recognize Rose Queen
- No human sacrifices
- Royal Rosarians: totally failing to be a truly sinister secret society
- Roses really smell like poo-poo-oo