Marketing Canadian cruises is for the birds

I guess you could do worse things than pick a turkey vulture and a great horned owl as your tourism mascots, as the cruise industry in British Columbia has done, and then send them south to the U.S. (though perhaps not to certain parts of Rhode Island) on a meet-and-greet tour. All this can maybe be chalked up to cultural differences. But to call the birds Judge Dredd and Gandalf? In so doing, you run headlong into a greater problem: i.e.,