Gambit parade reviews

They liked Endymion as the best "overall parade" and Mid-City as the "best day parade."   I didn't see either of those parades this year.  I was riding on Mid-City's day and Endymion tends to be an every-other-year thing for me.

I agree with them about Nyx being this year's "most improved" parade and said as much a few weeks ago. As many people already know, Nyx was basically formed to accommodate the very long list of women on the waiting list to be in Muses.  The list was apparently so long that now there are actually more riders in Nyx than there are in Muses.


Statistics compiled by The Advocate

As far as their other Gambit picks go, I'll have to think about those.  I've got a ton of notes and photos from this year's Carnival and do hope to post a review of sorts this week. If I have time. I never seem to have time for anything anymore.

Gambit seems to have liked D'Etat more than I did this year. I thought they were good. It's a very entertaining parade and one of the wittiest. But their politics is sometimes just so retrograde that it cancels out the fun a bit.  For example, here's their "Hillary is ugly" float.



And, hey, Hillary is pretty terrible. But maybe let's find a way to say that that isn't quite as misogynistic.

This isn't to say they didn't do some fun stuff.  I liked their "Under the Influence" theme.  Most of their floats were pretty funny.  I snapped this picture of their Rob Ford float with my phone and tweeted it out.



The next day it got a bunch of retweets from people in Toronto lamenting that their brand had been kept out there.  Speaking of which, D'Etat, Muses, and Chaos all did OPP floats. Each one featured Ray Nagin in prison somewhere on the float.

Something else about D'Etat that was not their fault in any way but which I still found disappointing was that when the Dancing Rob Ryans passed by us, they happened to not be dancing.



Great idea, though.

Gambit also named Chaos as "best night parade" in a tie with D'Etat. I got to watch Chaos come out of its den and then assemble along with Babylon over by their formation area on the corner of Magazine and Napoleon.  Seeing the parades come together and march away like that is a different experience from seeing them arrive in front of you at full steam so they're difficult to compare.

But I can say that Chaos's John Georges float was one of the best things I saw all year.  Here are some pictures of that.







Anyway, like I said, there's more but it will have to wait... hopefully not too long.