Expos Have "Seemingly Disappeared?"

Every so often, I run into someone who'll adamantly proclaim that they don't hold world's fairs anymore.

It always saddens me to hear that, but it's really disturbing when a national newspaper basically says the same thing.

In writing about Calgary and Edmonton's potential bids for an Expo 2017, Canada's National Post on Friday, they proclaimed that expos "seemingly disappeared after Vancouver's Expo lands went condo."

That's just sloppy reporting. True, the word "seemingly" is in there, but for a newspaper of record to say that, it says that events that happen in other continents don't really "seem" to happen.

Since Expo 86, there have been eight world's fairs on three continents:

- 1988 Brisbane,
- 1992 Seville,
- 1992 Genoa,
- 1993 Taejon (Korea),
- 1998 Lisbon,
- 2000 Hanover,
- 2005 Aichi Prefecture, and
- 2008 Zaragoza (Spain).

In the next few years, we'll see:

- 2010 Shanghai (70 to 100 million visitors on 1300 acres),
- 2012 Yeosu (Korea), and
- 2015 Milan.

By this measure, Winter Olympics have also seemingly disappeared since Calgary hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics. After all, there have only been five since then and only one is planned in the next four years!