Way back in the early 鈥�90s, a popular car magazine made a joke about how to easily sell magazines. They invented one called 鈥淚s this the new Corvette?鈥� magazine, which would just recycle the same rumors about Corvettes every month, with the idea that people would eat it up.
There was a reason it was foolproof. Corvettes, the finest sports cars you could buy from Chevrolet, had this weird habit of almost changing dramatically. For decades, they would be surrounded by rumors of radical new drivetrain layouts, engines, and other massive changes that never actually came to pass. For all the rumors, the Corvette remained a car with a giant V8 in the front, no matter how dramatic the rumors might have been.
Until, suddenly, it鈥檚 not.
The engine remains a giant V8, and it even has a little window where you can look at it. But now that engine is mounted behind the driver. That鈥檚 a pretty dramatic change for the new model, and one that has been teased and hinted at since at least the 1970s.
We are now truly in the future, for Corvettes have a mid-engine layout.
I bring it up only because it鈥檚 one of those things you assume will never happen. There are lots of things like that. New work by artists who don鈥檛 often release new material. Changes to who is voted into public office that you assume wouldn鈥檛 happen for various reasons. Stuff that is constantly on the verge of happening that never does, and at a certain point you just assume it never will. The rumors swirl for decades and they just never actually happen, and you assume it鈥檚 a bit of background noise that is not going to actually come to pass.
Locally, I can think of a couple rumors that have been going around for at least a decade, many of them involving stores, restaurants or movie theatres that are constantly on the verge of breaking ground around Yorkton and never actually show up.
Every village, town or city has these rumors, and while some of them eventually come true, others just sit as an unfulfilled wish from the population for years, speculation driven by what people would enjoy rather than on any concrete evidence.
Others are rumors based on reality, but then the reality changes somewhere behind the scenes and the planned change never takes place. The mid-engined Corvettes of these towns are planned businesses and growth that are torpedoed by outside factors before they could ever happen, never quite announced, sometimes with the plans drawn up already before they were tossed in the cupboard.
But then again, we have a mid-engined Corvette, suddenly any of these rumors could come true. We just might have to wait over 40 years for them to actually happen.
