alternative dystopia

Imagine if you will that Paul Glover, Ithaca's own anarcho-syndicated Stalinist had been elected mayor. This may not be as easy to do as it seems, considering that Paul won only 488 votes in the actual election, but look, this is Ithaca and we're all bored loco, high as a kite on turf builder, seeking some kind of imaginative dispensation from Gywneth Paltrow films amd the anticipation of spending the next 4 weeks in shopping malls and big box emporiums. Give it a try, Ez says.

It's January 25, 2005 and Paul has been in office for just over a year, In more ways than one , he's completely taken over City Hall, having moved in with his bicycle, sleeping bag and yoga mat to occupy the top floor. The last Common Council meeting lasted 120 hours straight. Most of the Democrats and token Republicans on the Council have finally drifted out of office, either moving out of Ithaca entirely or having taken a leave of absence from their careers to spend more time in therapy. Discussing the minutae of bike path routes for endless hours takes a fearsome toll on the human psyche. Paul has packed the empty council chamber with a band of loyalists, many of whom who have never driven a car or stepped foot in any other store outside of Greenstar for the last 25 years. The salvation army look is now in for committee meetings. Actually, the Salvation Army is now the only big box store left standing in Ithaca. outside of Greenstar. Target, Home Depot, the Big K, Barnes & Noble, and a whole list of other retail chains including Arby's have moved out of the area, leaving the hulks of empty 100,000 sq. ft. stores standing like deserted megaliths along the Elmira Road plain.

The event that signalled their departure was Paul's automobile ban, signed into law after a 196 hour marathon session of Common Council back in August, 2004. No gas combustion vehicles are now allowed within city limits. No single event in Ithaca's 300 yr history set off more of a ripple effect than the car ban.

You can only describe the scene in Ithaca following this momentous piece of legislation as ugly. City residents at first didn't want to give up their cars. Many businessmen were reluctant to pick up their UPS packages and deliveries at the edge of town and drag them downtown, using teams of stock clerks with bright orange colored two wheeled dollies, eventually horse-drawn wagons
and dog sleds.

At first, there were massive demonstrations that resembled the Volvo Ballet in the Ithaca Festival parade. Except these drivers were pissed and didn't mind if they took out more than a few road barriers in their path. Once the permanent concrete stagalites were installed along city streets, the resistance to the car ban took on more of a determined Middle Eastern flavor with kamkaze motorcyclists and suicidal riding mowers. More than a few Molotov cocktails were thrown at City Hall, giving the red brick facade a scorched, burnt out look.

To be continued.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:11 AM

 
ithaca sucks undy media center

welkom to the ithaka undy media center, an open to my cronies publishing forum powered by boa constrictor, tonka toys and the enlightened hackeysackers of Ithaca. Anybody can publish to this sitcom but me, arkangel, may hide your post, chuck it in the ole waste baskit or you know what with it if you disagree with my pseuo-progressive point of view.

Newswire

bush gets xmas card from saddam hussein by arse32@cornell.edu

You liberals think that we invaded iraq to grab all the oil and line the pockets of the president's fatcat contractor buddies. What a crock of shit! Oops, inappropriate language. Arkangel may hide my post. We sent 250,000 troops over to Iraq to steal the solid 14 carat gold bathroom fixtures from Saddam's presidential palaces. The truth is finally out! Saddam Hussein is living in Texas along with Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, the Shah of Iran and Josef Stalin. Because evil never dies and one day it will take over the whole world.

Reply to article:

Arse32 is really Joe Sabia in drag by Anonymous

Don't listen to a word he tells you. Arse32 is really a patsy for the neocons up at Cornell.

This website sucks by JoeSabia@cornell.edu

It's not true. Arse32@cornell.edu doesn't even go to Cornell. He sneaks into the library to use the internet connection there. And Arkangel still can't spell. IthacaSucks Undy Media is a fraud perpetrated by commie hackeysackers who want to trample on everything that is sacred, get free food at the soup kitchen and never wash under their armpits. Take that, you liberal swine.

Cop Watch

Police Chief Loo Doesn't Wash His Hands After He Uses the Loo by Anonymous

It's true. I watched him.


Editorial

Why you should shop at 10,000 Villages this Christmas by chriskringle@10000villages.com

You hear a lot of negative stuff about globalization these days. How workers in the developing world are exploited, how corporations are wasting the environment in cashpoor countries like Vietnam. (As if all B52's and all that napalm didn't already do the trick.) Well, it's not true that all globalization is bad. The staff at 10,000 Villages right on the Ithaca Commons is prepared to prove to you this holiday season that you can consume poorly crafted products from the 3rd and even the 4th world and still have a social conscience. For instance, we have rhinoceros skin toilet seats made by the happy villagers in East Africa on sale for only $179.50 that will make any progressive bathroom look more contemporary. And bedroom slippers made from kalula bear fur all the way from China produced by contented internees in a government relocation center. Many of the happy workers at this center are political activists too and took part in the demonstrations in Tinanmen Square. Find out what 10,000 Villages is doing to help these global workers become more self-sustaining. Take part in our annual can drive and send a nonperishable gift that can enjoyed around the campfire. Those Chinese internees love Beefaroni! Have a conscience and shop at 10.000 Villages this holiday!

Reply

???????? by anonymous

Hey, what the f---k? This isn't an editorial!

So what by arkangel@undymediacenter.org

Who cares? They give us a discount.

Community Calendar

Hacysackers Annual Thanksgiving dinner at Loaves& Fishes Soup Kitchen Friday, Nov 20.

Anarcho-Feminist Marxist-Leninist Zapatista Senior Potluck Dinner at Moosewood Restaurant, Thursday Nov 19. We'll be serving veggie bacon burgers!
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:25 AM

 
Dewey Wins in Landslide

Oops. Wrong headline. We're experiencing technical difficulties. No, we're not. We're just stupid. Once again, however, the Ithaca Sucks newsroom is ahead of the curve, scooping all the others news channels with instant election results. It's 6 am on a cold, overcast, gloomy,depressing, typical, potentially rainy, average, lousy Election day and no one has voted yet, no one has actually gotten out of bed yet except the people who make the grease at the State Street Diner but Ithaca Sucks is predicting a winner in the City of ithaca mayoral race. Hold on to your greying pony tails, progressives, it's not a revolution, it's not a surprise, it's not even a race. It's politics as usual.

Ithaca Sucks is predicting that Carolyn or is that Caroline Peterson will be the winner with 13 votes. That's 13 votes total, if you're in doubt, readers. Yes, in a stunning political reversal, she's managed to garner all the Green Party votes in Ithaca as well as 5 crossover Republican votes. Beau Saul will come in second with 5 votes due to a strong showing from inmates at the City Jail who, it is reliably reported, were treated to an early Thanksgiving Day 5 course dinner and an escorted tour of the adult bookstore on State St late Monday evening. It will come as no surprise to most ithacans that our own radical benchwarmer and Green Party founder, Paul Glover, was only able to muster 2 votes. Sources indicate that both third party votes resulted from an encounter at the Greyhound Bus Station during which Mr. Glover handed over thousands of Ithaca Hours to two rather unkempt strangers with phony voter registration cards. One report indicates that the two unlikely third party voters may have been on their way to Buffalo at the time.

According to our crack team of IS reporters posted throughout the city. the rest of Ithaca's eligible voters decided not to vote this year in order to take advantage of a two day sale at Home Depot.


Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 5:53 AM

 
Being tired of all illusions and everything about illusions - the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them , in order to lose them , the sadness of having had them, he intellectual shame of having had them kowing that they would have to end this way." Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:16 AM

 

freshmen class

They're rolling into town. In SUV's, Camry's, Jeeps, Lexi, mutant VW's, Greyhounds, minivans, maxivans, Piper Cubs, you name it, they drive or fly it, anything that sucks us gas from the desert.

They're the Class of 2007. The Freshmen Class.

Some interesting statistics emerge as this new generation of American princes and princesses begin the annual spawn to the shores of old Cayuga.

5% of freshmen have actually had dreams featuring ATM machines.

82% have had pan fried pizza in the last 6 months.

98.8% own cell phones.

98.8% own credit cards.

22% of the women are named Alice.

43.5% of the men are named Todd.

99.5% have read the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

99.9% were born during the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan, the greatest contraction of public generosity since Herbert Hoover described people selling apples out on the street during the Great Depression as "self-employed entrepreneurs." Presidents with same letter initials have historically tended to be misers.

100% have bought products produced in overseas sweatshops.

0% have worked in sweatshops.

23% of freshmen have had some form of sex in a Chrysler product.

97.5% currently use a product made by Microsoft.

In a survey, 37% of freshmen name Bill Gates as the greatest living American. 5% nominated Bart Simpson. 2% nominated Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

99.9% regularly eat products that have been genetically modified, producing moodswings, unusual growth spurts, abrupt hormonal changes, possible long term genetic damage.

.1% believe that they were abducted by aliens.

.4% will open a restaurant in Ithaca within the next 10 years.

.2% state as their life objective that they want to change the world.

38% state as their life objective that they want to be richer than Bill Gates.

38% express the desire to have fun and be happy as their life's goal.

10% left that question blank.

9% of freshmen will settle down as veterinarians someplace in New Jersey, name their son Todd and their daughter Alice, eventually sending them to Cornell, decked out with credit card, cell phone, a Jeep with a roll over bar, where one day they will walk down the Commons and wonder why so many storefronts are empty.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:54 AM

 

meter maid

"lovely rita, meter maid,
nothing can come between us."

You guessed wrong if you thought education was I-town's biggest industry.
It's parking.

Parking revenue contributes more to the City's coffers than Cornell does.
You can't park within a 10 block radius of the Commons without encountering one of those spiffy lolipop sentinels, sitting bolt upright, demanding coins of the realm. Why don't they come up with Ithaca Hours that work in parking meters?

Sometimes you're cruising downtown looking for a spot to park and it seems that you have to head out to Lansing to find all day, free parking. It's a shame. Like you'd want to spend more time in lovely downtown Ithaca, soaking up the ambience, the culture, the radiance of the boutiques, developing your weltanschauung but you only get 2 free hours parking on weekdays and they're tearing up half the parking spots and, at any given moment, your vehicle is being stalked by someone who looks like Smokey the Bear's human companion.

The meter maids in Ithaca look like park rangers. Cheap pun.

Yeah, they wear these cute little outfits with earthy colors and Canadian Mountie caps. Unfortunately some of the lovely madchen that flesh out the vast army of highly trained meter maids don't shave their legs. What a comedown when you're looking for romance. How Ithaca.

It's disconcerting on a hot Summer weekday when you have to trek 10 blocks to
pick up stamps or visit your parole officer or spend 50 minutes with your shrink combating the depression that appeared the last time you visited downtown. Why are there parking meters on North Geneva St? The only thing you find on North Genva St. are funeral homes and chiropractors. Isn't that a little like making people pay to suffer? You've just lost a parent, a relative, your best friend or suffer from excruciating back pain and you have to fumble in your pocket for a quarter? What's that all about?

When you finally step foot on the Commons after walking all the way from Newfield, your first thought is - wby did I bother? Half the stores are empty. You can't find anywhere in town to buy a postcard to send back to the folks who are babysitting your car in Newfield. You can't get a prescription filled or buy a pack of cigarettes or a newspaper unless you walk another three blocks. Sure you can pop into a used bookstore and find a copy of Sartre's No Exit or that other cheery novel, Nausea, but you can't buy a hamburger for less than $7.50. Not that you'd want to be seen eating a hamburger in downtown Ithaca for fear of being picketed by animal rights activists.

The one thing they should have downtown to make the trip worthwhile is a Parking Museum.

What a great idea! Ez can't believe that no one has thought of it yet.

The Tompkins County Museum of Parking History.

Home of the first parking meter. Neo-Gothic parking meters. Art deco parking meters. Parking meters that take wooden nickles. War-time parking meters with bellicose images of Uncle Sam hawking war bonds, kicking the crap out of Huns, Japs and Nazi's, International parking meters that accept yen, rubles and pesos. Futuristic parking meters for cars that land and take off vertically, no more parallel parking, hooray.

A rogues gallery of famous parking ticket scofflaws just like Madame T's wax museum. Medieval devices used to torture and punish scofflaws, a word, incidentally coined in the good ole' USA back in the 1920's. Parking meters used by Ted Bundy, Son of Sam and Jeffrey Dahmer while they were rounding up victims.

Now that would be worthwhile and interesting. You could lose yourself for a couple of hours in a place like that. Come out, find a parking ticket on your car and a pair of hairy legs sauntering off in the distance.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 10:42 AM

 

tourist season

July 4th kicked off the beginning of Ithaca's official tourist season.

Most of the cute bright red and orange construction cones have finally disappeared from the Commons along with the miles of planking, crime scene tape, swirling clouds of brick dust, leathery looking, Red Man chawing workmen shuffling around with their yellow hard hats and Home Depot tool belts, gigantic cement mixers and soul penetrating sounds of drills and sanders that provided a shrill, omnipresent chorus from hell all spring. But, you know, they still haven't gotten those damn yellow bricks right yet. Occasionally you see a commando unit of brick masons swoop down to rip out the same row you saw them laying last month. It's a work in progress. Like Ithaca. We may never get to Oz at this rate.

But the new street lamps that Mayor Cohen ordered from a Sears catalog sure look purty. They provide that nice gaslight village look, you know, and a hell of lot more light for drug deals too. Watch the crime rate go down. Hey, if you're stupid to go down on the Commons past 8 pm on a summer evening , you deserve to be the victim of a violent crime. All the stores have been closed for two hours. There's nothing down there except criminals and wastrels. No music, no clubs. Pretty soon the downtown bars will be closed too once the smoking ban goes into effect. Did they think that health nuts are going to come down to the Chanticleer to do calisthenics, munch wheat germ and drink Bud?

You have to admit that the Commons looks great this time of year. The trees are in bloom; the cops are decked out in their summertime shorts. Outside Juna's folks lounge around, drinking iced coffee at the sturdy forest-green K-mart grade tables thoughtfully provided by the Downtown Partnership. You are constantly reminded of that because of the large decals pasted to every single chair and table. It has a nice ring - the word 'Partnership' - not quite the same as 'dealership'. It conjures up pleasant image of merchants holding hands around a cash register, trading stories about markdowns past, exchanging rumors about the next business ready to fold, remembering all the 'partners' who moved on, leaving empty storefronts as reminders. Like tombstones.

And there's all the art. Raptor-like chrome birds of paradise, welded 1957 Chevy bumper gargoyles, metal roosters, wraith-like flames of stone , blue jungle gym abstract sculptures greeting you wherever you wander. Art everywhere. The offical Ithaca art crawl. The kindly Downtown Partnership even provides tourists with a map listing the sculpture installation around town. No. 18 is missing, however. Nobody can find old #18. It's called 'Closing the Language Door.' Try as hard as you can, you can't even find the Language Door, let alone close it.

Even the banks have sculpture. No, not the marble credit card megaliths you might expect but a statue of a chubby nude child hugging her confident, smiling dad, smiling because he knows that, by putting a little away each week, he'll one day be able to afford the $3.5 million it will cost to send the kid away to college. Wouldn't you know, the day Ez walked in to check his negative ATM balance, some local John Ashcroft has pinned a square post-it note right on the kid's fanny.

On July 4th , however, there was something missing in the picture. Besides the absolute absence of American flags, patriotic bunting, or anything indicating that you had just driven into to small town America on the 4th of July. Most of the stores on the Commons weren't even open. The Great American Holiday. Dozens of tourists strapped down with bandoliers filled with credit cards, 35 mm cameras, pepped up on raging consumer hormones, teeming all over the newly refurbished Commons with its gaslight village lamps - and only a quarter of the shops bothered to open their doors. And even the parking was free. Suddenly the vaseline-smeared images of the Downtown Partnership as pioneer businessmen of the future fade away and you're left with a foreboding sense that this might be a commie town after all. How American can you be if you don't even have a 4th of July sale? Isn't that what America's all about? It makes you wonder if you're not living in the USSR. Maybe it was reconstituted in upstate NY? You know, commissars, 5 year plans, collectives, the KGB, the evil empire, the whole nine. Maybe Ann Coulter's cronies got it right. Ithaca is the City of Evil.










Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:23 AM

 

past forward

Have you ever thought how Ithaca can benefit from the coming Dark Ages?

Remember Alvin Toffler? Back in the 1970's, folks like Alvin (named after one of the Chipmunks) ruled the globe. They were called futurologists. It was like Madame What was Her Name(?) from the 50's song Love Potion No. 9 had suddenly moved into the boardroom of American corporations; everybody back then spent a lot of time, peering into crystal balls to predict the future, discover the next big wave before it was even a wet wrinkle in the ocean. Even dry cleaning businesses had futurologists in those days. The future was big business. How prescient.

Alvin wrote a book called Future Shock which rocketed up to No. 1 on the bestseller charts. You hardly see a copy anymore - not even at the Friends of the Library Book Sale which is sort of a palentological research institute for former bestsellers. There are certain books that make great insulation if you have a trailer out in Newfield. Like Barbara Tuchman's Distant Mirror. They're stacked like cordwood at the Book Sale. The stuff everyone was reading 10 or 20 years ago. In a couple of years Oprah will be warming the neighborhood.

Funny, Alvin didn't predict that there was no future for futurologists. You never hear about them anymore. Maybe the future is too gloomy to predict. Or maybe we're moving towards the past. Plato's cave. Hoola Hoops. The classics are making a comeback. Everything is a rehash of something else when you go to the movies these days. Terminator 43. Captain Nemo. Mrs. Dalloway.

Even our President looks like Alfred E. Newman from Mad Magazine. He certainly doesn't look like Eisenhower. Ike was a progressive compared to this fool. Ike warned us about the military-industrial complex. Bush it it's poster boy. The Secretary of Defense gets more airtime than the Secretary of State. At any given time we're rattling the saber, threatening to go to war with someone else. This week it's Africa. Bush is lining up the black vote. We might soon be sending troops to Liberia or Zimbabwe to dislodge a couple of more dictators. That helps unemployment back home because we'll be able to send a lot of otherwise unemployed African American youths to Africa to fight and die for a country that won't even provide them jobs back home.

Anyway, it all seems like a bad dream. Like reading Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, having too many Blue Ribbons, falling asleep and dreaming that it's 432 AD all over again. Do you think we're heading towards the next Dark Ages?

Well, Ithaca is the perfect place to be when the fog of history rolls starts to roll in.

First of all, we haven't recovered from the last Dark Ages.

People are still living out in the woods around Ithaca , left-overs from the last time that we thought that the end of the world was just around the corner. There's lots of little encampments, cozy little nooks where you can bunker down and start your own quasi-messianic cults. And new cults are moving in all the time who find that Ithaca has the right mix of backwater chic, rural comfort and a large pool of potential recruits. It's no coincidence that the 12 Tribes picked Ithaca to set up shop.

Folks around Ithaca are used to living off the land. We have organic farms, community gardens, farmer's markets, Greenstar. And lots of craftsmen who know how to make things from popsicle sticks . Check out the Ithaca Festival and visit the forest of knick knack tents. We're the capital of the cottage industry industry.

People around here are tough, resilient and independent. We have our own currency, our own credit unions, our own candidate for president. It took 20 years for Wal-mart to make a beach head. McDonald's went out of business when it was downtown. Ithacans are used to bad weather, a bad economy, bad newspapers, bad radio stations, bad politics, bad roads, bad service, bad jobs, bad everything. We're like the Ozarks of upstate New York. Folks in Ithaca thrive on adversity. Wilderness spirit. Grit.

That makes Ithaca an up and coming place. A road stop on the slouch towards Bethlehem. Come see us!
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:19 AM

 

rewards

The US Occupation Forces in Iraq just raised the bounty on Saddam Hussein to $25 Million.

You can make more in a single day by picking up a Lotto ticket at A-Plus. Why go to Iraq to dodge bullets, duck Shi-ites and, possibly end up floating face down in the Tigris and Euphrates? Moeover, after 9/11, who cares about earning frequent flyer miles just to get to Iraq.

Better to stay home and look for runaway Boxers in the Danby woods. A girl named Susan Benz just paid someone $1,000 for information leading up to the retrieval of her pet Boxer. She must have been related to Mercedes Benz.

Sorry. Bad joke. That's a lot of money to spend tracking down a pooch. Maybe Saddam Hussein is hiding in the Danby woods. Ezra wonders if there'll ever be a bounty on his head. Would the Chamber of Commerce, Common Council or Civilian Conservation Corps fork out a $1,000 for the arrest and capture of the Curl-less Curmudgeon? Now you know. Ez is experiencing significant hair loss. Look for the balding guy wearing a Blogger parka who resembles a cross between Ted Kzyzinscki andWayne Dyer, That's it, no more clues.

If they found the Unabomber, they'll probably find Saddam Hussein. Money talks.
You can live in a cabin in Montana, never sign up for an e mail account or for AOL, never own a credit card or register an SUV at Motor Vehichles, hide away and spend your days writing manifestos on an old Remington typewriter, but eventually you'll have to go to the Post Office to buy postage to send your letter bombs. That's when they'll nail you. Or else a member of your family will turn you in. Which, in Saddam's case, won't be likely since the whole family seems to have been posing for the Wanted poster. Hey, it'll be a disgruntled Republican Guard or someone who turns him in. With $25 mil, you can buy a second hand presidential palace in Iraq complete with gold plated faucets and an underground bunker. You can enter politics. That's just about what it costs to buy a congressional seat in California these days.

Ez grew up watching Wanted Dead or Alive. You remember, Steve McQueen played the bounty hunter who walked around with the sawed off Winchester fitted in a special quick draw hip holster. The television writers had to come up with something different, something gimmicky. Matt Dillon (who never existed even though they named an actor after him) carried a hand gun with a 30 inch barrel, took him 3 minutes to clear his holster which never seemed to matter because it was the bad guys who always ended up dead in the dust. Paladin, the dandified cavalier cowboy of the Old West handed out calling cards engraved with a chess piece. Bat Masterson sported a cane, wore a derby. You had to create something totally new and different if you wanted your product to stand out from the crowd. Madison Avenue meets the Pecos Kid. It's a cartoon graveyard up there on Boot Hill.

Now we have Most Wanted playing cards for the Iraqi leadership. Shoot outs in the streets of Baghdad. The prez talking like Wyatt Earp. You have 24 hours to get out of town. $25 million rewards for guys who look like B-actors with big black sinister moustaches.

Iraq is an extension of the American West. New worlds to conquer. It's all being done for our benefit back home. To boost ratings, sell more American flags, allow us to tank up our gas guzzling SUV's, to feel good about ourselves again. Just in time for July 4th.

July 4th. 1776. All the white Virginia slaveholding planters got together to sign the Declaration of Independence. The day after, they started killing Indians.

That's how Ithaca got started. Congress started handing out free land in upstate New York to Revolutionary War veterans. If they could wipe out those pesty natives who happened to have got here first. Rewards.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:56 AM

 

harry blogger and the potholes of doom

J.K. Rowling, the author of all those bland Harvey Potter novels , has raked in over $400 million so far, peddling a rehash of C.S. Lewis.

Maybe she'd consider buying Ithaca. A town badly in need of a remake. Some twinkle dust. Slip us all a mickey and let us sleep it off.

Somebody bought a town on E-Bay this year. From all reports, it was one of the few places in the USA that ranked below Ithaca as one of the worst places to live. Even Michael Serino in the Ithaca Journal agrees. Ithaca is a wrong turn in a bad dream.
Did you all read that? Hey, the guy writes a column. He must know what he's talking about. Do you see him picking cans and bottles on the Commons? What's wrong with the guy, anyway? Spouting off like that.

J.K would know how to bring back the ole' magic glimmer to I-town's city streets. Anybody who sold 10 million 2 lb tomes to kids who don't even own a credit card yet would know how to fix up this boomless town. Probably be a better mayor than a guy who ran a restaurant. Didya know that Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York? Twice?

Now, a lot of people question the literary merit of the Harvey Potter novels. Not the people standing behind the cash register. Not the parents who have bought the lie that Harvey Porter will lead to Victor Hugo; that a frightfully bad novel that weighs 2 lbs and costs $27.95 will open little minds to the joys of reading. Hey, Mein Kampf may have turned a lot of little German minds on to the joys of reading too, but beyond that?

Robert Graves once wrote, "There's not mucb money in poetry nor is their much poetry in money." Actually, that quote is from a speech Graves delivered in 1963. He certainly didn't deliver the commencement speech at Cornell. If you follow Graves' logic, you'd probably guess that J.K won't be trying her hand at poetry any time soon. Another 7 or 8 more Harry Porter novels to tide the little creeps over until they make it to college. One a year. Certainly not poetry.

Why doesn't she just buy a college? Then she can change over the curriculum and write textbooks. Harvey Porter and the Principles of Advanced Calculus. Harvey Porter and the Lessons of History. Harvey Porter and Plant Science. Harvey Porter and Cat Neuroanatomy.

J.K.'s got $400 million. She's filthy rich. Rich people buy colleges, start colleges, whatever. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Stanford, Ezra Cornell.

Why doesn't she just buy Cornell and throw the city of Ithaca in for good luck.Change the name to Warthog University. Hey, would enrollments go up or what? We're talking pure gold now. Instead of yellow bricks on the Commons, we'd have real gold bricks. A Harvey Porter theme park. Everybody would paint their faces and dress up every day. Wear wizard caps. Nobody would have to pick cans or bottles anymore. We could just sell used Harvey Potter books.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 9:58 PM

 

new cult on the block

Move over, Twelve Tribes. The new cult on the block, the Thirteen Cabals, have arived in Ithaca to assume the mantle of most bizarre socio-religious amalgam to grace the sublunar landscape. Hey, it's the lake waters, glowing out there in the moonlight like a big gatorade slick that attract these whackos.

We've all read now about how the 12 Tribes, that zany bunch of communards who follow some Arkansas bible thumping con-man named Earl Spriggs (sounds like a character Humphrey Bogart would play) recently plopped down $1.5 million for the Home Dairy building and the Ithaca Fitness Center. What readers probably don't know is that many group members eat at the local soup kitchen. Jesus saves on meals so he can afford to speculate on real estate. Adherents embrace a heady stew of Mormon-like Judeo-Christian mytho-gibberish with some communism thrown in for flavoring. The matriarch of the Ithaca contingent looks like Colleen Dewhurst dressed in KungFu pajamas. This Saturday a bunch of 12 Tribesmen were parked in front of the Home Dairy building on the Commons, dispensing free Mate (their own blend of java) to passerbys, endearing themselves to the public and the hardworking competition at Juna's.

Well, if Jesus saves, Pythagoras hoards. The Thirteen Cabals descended on Ithaca this week like a StarTrek convention, dropping a cool $25 million to buy Center Ithaca, the Short Stop Deli, the old CVS, Simeon's, 3D Light, Autumn Leaves and Talmadge Tire. And, yes, they all dress like Mr. Spock, accept Pythagoras and Lester Maddox as their personal messiahs, advocate having safe sex with robots, go around picking Macintosh computer components from dumpsters, assemble the parts into a time machine that transports them back to 302 BC to participate in Graeco-Roman bowling tournaments. They walk around Ithaca, lugging copies of the Kaballah and Monopoly board games under their arms, dressed in pink jumpsuits. In other words, the Cabalists pretty much blend right in to the I- Zone's human parade.

It's nice to see that people believe in something these days besides shopping.

Ez knows a thing or two about cults. He was once inducted into the Rotary. Yeah, he was living in a place called Pleasant Valley, New York. As you may well imagine, there wasn't much else to do besides join a covert coterie of businessmen and golfers whose mission was to make sure that everyone in the world wore pocket protectors. It took a couple of weeks of deep deprogramming in a Motel 8 before Ez finally went cold turkey on those plastic do-hickeys that almost ruined his life.

Cults come and go. The hills around Ithaca are dotted with hidden encampments, abandoned, dilipidated compounds that had formerly housed Babas and gurus, brainwashed hippies, mantra-mouthing flower children, born again Hindi-Lutherans, free-loving lotus lizards.

It's when they move into town that you start to have a problem.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:39 AM

 

the curmudgeon's creed

I'd like to believe in God, but am not sure He believes in me,
hasn't called me up in years, is alleged by a lot of otherwise unreliable people to be the creator of heaven and earth but a lot of
scientists think that matter is just a miasmic soup of
random atoms colliding in the dark night before time.
That actually makes a lot of sense if you look at the results; then again, most scientists are unreliable too,
are all waiting around for big grants from corporations
and are known to doctor the facts for a little extra cash.
But I do believe that Carl Sagan
may come back in a space capsule,
that you might see him one day shopping
on the Commons with his dog along with
Marx, John Lennon and Bobbie Kennedy.
It won't be the third day but this is surely hell on earth,
even though it has a lot of gorges.
Whether or not he's come back to judge
the living or the dead depends totally on
whether he can find a parking spot.

I believe that the Almighty Dollar is the
spirit that hovers above everything,
that the corporations rule the earth,
that George Bush will get a second term
and turn the clock back to the 50's
and that they will probably pick places
like Ithaca to build concentration camps
because it resembles Poland, that in a few years
there won't be any clean air or water, a
cup of coffee will cost $10, that the rich will get much richer
and the poor will all be sent to Africa to contract Aids
and watch endless tv reruns with Sally Struthers.

I believe that Martha Stewart is
really the BVM, that she probably had a son
with Richard Nixon, that he's slouching towards
Bethelehem in a humvee to announce the formation of a new, totally streamlined, just for profit,
holy, catholic church,
and we'll have to go into Wal-mart to receive the sacraments.

Furthermore, I believe that the grass is always greener on the other side,
that nothing good can come out of nothing good,
that it does a lot of good to complain, even though no one listens,
or as Ezra Kidder says, I complain, therefore I exist.

Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:55 AM

 

crunching the numbers

Ezra is stepping to the plate to solve Ithaca's 2004 budget shortfall. No, he's not running for Mayor. Well, at least, he hasn't decided yet to throw his beanie into the ring. Who knows, however. Anything is possible in the crazy valley.

For starters:

Mayor for a Day - Plop down $100 and you, too, can be Hiz/Her Honor for a Day: 24 fun packed hours, presiding over empty store fronts, potholes, watering holes, lawsuits, granola heads, potheads. Take bribes, go to lunch with a developer, attend a ribbon cutting at the next big box store to come to Ithaca, supervise construction at a parking garage, let the raw power go to your head. Do the math. 365 times $100. Not bad, eh?

Adopt a Pothole Community organizations can adopt their own favorite seephole, erect a little sign, collect hubcaps. $200 a pothole. The Greater Ithaca Rotary Pothole. The Friends of the Library Pothole. The Knights of Columbus Pothole. There's plenty to go around.

Name a Street Imagine that. You, too, can have a city street named after yourself or, even after your pet, for that matter. Horace T. Griswold Street, Tommy Kowalski Ave. Rover Blvd. The ultimate vanity trip. At $2,500 a pop, it won't be cheap, but it will sure confuse the tourists.

Flea Tax - We spent a year quibbling over the dog ordinance. Now it's time to argue over fleas. Why should those tiny hitchhikers go wherever they want, hopping from pooch to pooch without fiscal restraint? Ok. You want to bring your flea bag downtown? Get ready to have his stowaways taxed.

IQ Tax Hey, we've got 40,000 big brains wobbling around up there on the hills, not paying a single penny in taxes. You can't charge them property tax because they squeeze into all those little apartments, you can't charge them income tax because they live off their parents, you can't levy a school tax because they actually go to one, so....
Charge them an IQ tax.

Meeting Tax - Check out the Community Calendar lately? There must be a hundred meetings a week - the Sharks, the Ithaca Tuna Fish, The Brides of Frankenstein Steering Committee, Rotary, VFW, the Greens, Vegans for Jesus, you name it, they meet every week, most of them over Joe Wetmore's Autumn Leaves big box bookstore. Tax the suckers. More than three people get together for more than 5 minutes, it's not a drug deal, it's a meeting.

Bumper Sticker Tax - Hey, you want to wear your cause on your bumper, ante up. Save the Whales, Stop the War, Go Solar, Free the Curdmudgeons, Pay a Tax. They tax books, they should tax bumpers. Most bumpers in Ithaca read like one of Noam Chomsky's bad dreams.

Recycling Tax - Hey, it's income for 30% of the population around Ithaca. Make them fill out a W2 at the Recycling Center.

Loitering Tax - Hey, the taxpayers paid for the spiffy new street lamps on the Commons. So, if you want to hang out under them, empty your pockets, dudes. If you don't park downtown, you don't shop there, you don't dine, you don't drink, you don't work, then you're considered persona non gratis, an economic terrorist. the deputies will start casing you over, the dawgs will start sniffing your pants legs. So take yourself over to the Assessor's Office in City Hall and pay up. Get a tax stamp. Then buy something, will ya? It'll make us all feel better.

Toll booths on Rt. 13 Hey, tolls paid for the NJ Thruway, didn't they?

License Shopping Carts - You may be able to drive a car but it doesn't mean you should be tearing around Wegman's behind one of those metal lemons without a license. Eye test $25.00, Road test $50, License $75.00.

Ez is just getting warmed up. We'll turn this deficit around in no time. Then we can start issuing tax cuts..
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 11:09 PM

 

un-knowing

Ezra has been testing out one of his pet theories.

Wait a minute. 'Pet theory.' Who came up with that expression? At some point along the winding stretch of evolutionary black top, between the domestication of the first chicken and hatching a sheep in a test tube, humans actually found time to house break theories? That could explain why we invented the newspaper.

Ez has a yellowing stack of Ithaca Journals in a corner too. Unread. Even the cats have little interest in the IJ. They much prefer the granular, bumpy Sahara-like surface of their cat litter to the soggy feel of newsprint. Do they imagine they're little Lawrence of Arabia's when they sit on the john? Who knows?

And that's exactly the point. Who knows. Ezra has decided to cut off the outside world, stop reading newspapers or watching tv news, eradicate talking heads from his diet, go cold turkey on MacNeil Lehrer, end the madness.

The other day Ez was walking down Cascadilla Street. A bunch of anarchist, dumpster -diving, drop outs he knows lives down there. They live on the margins of Ithaca society and are having a ball. Ez lives on the fringe and that's a different story altogether.

Anyway, the closer Ez got to this little nest of ultimate naysayers the more signs of political disenfranchisement he noticed. Chalked messages on the sidewalk. That kind of stuff. Then he spied an Ithaca Journal dispenser with the slogan 'Buy a Lie" grease-pencilled on the front.

Exactly.

Everything that's fit to print is a lie. Ezra would prefer not to know what's happening in Iraq. Who cares if they're remaking Baghdad into another Las Vegas? What ever happened to Tariq Assiz after he gave himself up? Are they working him over with a leather truncheon in some bunker? Where's Saddam, bozo? Tell us where Saddam is or we're make you eat your beret. You wouldn't know what's happening to all those guys even if you did listen to the news. They kept those people in outdoor enclosures for over a year in a prison camp in Cuba and nobody cared.

America is becoming a closed society. You only know what they want you to know. A lot of progressives may spent their time huddled over computers, getting the latest buzz off the newswires, but they're only working on their social tunnel syndrome.
Imagine working as an ace commentator on Counterpunch, having to come im every day to make up a new conspiracy theory. Bush knew about 9/11 in advance? Sure, he did. And Madonna is dating Pat Sajak.

Anyway, Ezra's theory is that it's better not to know than to know. It's better to be clueless than to think that you know what you really can't know. Better to let your imagination wander willy nilly where it will than to be just another duped consumer of the world wide knowledge industry.

Congress is talking about deregulating the media biz. That means that Time Warner can own the Ithaca Journal, the Ihaca Times, Channel 10, Channel 78 and the Pennysaver. What kind of news do you think you'll get then?

It's time to let go and free float above the ocean of information.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 8:31 AM

 

un-heroes

It's not easy being a Progressive in an unprogressive, retro-50's, cartoon-patriot world. Not a single day goes by that America doesn't seem to be slipping back into the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the Cold War, the hoola hoop and the quicksand of universal blandness. To most of the world, we represent the bully on the block, thugs with laptops, warmongering hoodlums ready to take over someone else's oil wells without a 'please, beg your pardon' or even a nod from the UN.

Here in liberal Ithaca, folks walk around with signs, 'Not in my Name.' We have French Festivals to celebrate Gallic resistance to the imperial Bush agenda. Ithacans visiting Europe this year will probably walk around with buttons that read 'I Apologize' or 'Wasn't Me.' Or, how about pinning the ticket stubs from the last bus trip to DC to protest against the war on your lapel instead of an American flag?

Progressives feel isolated, alone, cut off. The media establishment has sold out to the other side. It's not worth buying the Sunday New york Times except for the exercise of carrying it home or hauling it out to the curb on recycling day. Thomas Friedman waffles between writing editorials on 'Why They Hate the US' and pushing Israeli war bonds. There's hope, however, today. The Times is reporting that Ariel Sharon criticized Israel's occupation of the West Bank. That's like Goebels coming out against the Holocaust.

So what do you do? what do you read,? What do you teach your children?

Che Guevera didn't write any children's books. At least none that have turned up anyway. Subcommandante Marcos isn't making the round of talk shows. He seems content sucking his pipe, itching under his ski mask and wearing the wrong kind of ammunition around his shoulders for the gun he's lugging. You can buy Zapatista gear for your kids down to the ski masks and bandoliers with fake bullets but they'll still be mistaken for right wing Colombian paramilitary.

Kids need heroes. If you don't supply them with examples, the little suckers will start aping Arnold Schwatzennager, or playing with Tom Clancy video games filled with images of techno-mayhem and laser-guided murder. All the left wing heroes are in the past. Today's heroes, whether they be in the jungles of Chiapas or the streets of Seattle wear face masks. Let's face it, kids aren't impressed with the likes of Leon Trotsky, Emma Goldman. Joe Hill, Malcolm X and Huey Newton. They're looking for real life, action heroes with whom they can identify.

That's why Ez has started to write a children's book in his spare time. He's only got the rough draft of the story line down so far. As usual, he's eager to share.

The hero of Ezra's story is named Don QuicksOat. As you may have already guessed, the story is based on Cervantes' Don Quixote. Hey, everything is a rehash today. All the great stuff was already written between 1400 and 1960. If Disney can rip off the classics, why can't Ezra?

Don is an unlikely hero. If he wasn't an unlikely hero, would he really be a hero? The Marine Corps stamps out likely heroes, makes them run around in the hot sun with 80 pounds of gear, spend hours practicing bayonet techniques, combat killer flies in places like Georgia or North Carolina. Those guys are either going to turn out to be true heroes or they get shipped off to the Pentagon to walk around in a maze trying to figure out where the men's room is.

He was an organic farmer who lived in a tiny, home-made cabin on the outskirts of EcoVillage. His neighbors could all afford $150k condos with solar panels and built-in cappuccino bars but Don lived in relatively obscure poverty, scraping out an existence growing organic rhubarb and cucumbers. He dreamed of combating the spreading evil of genetically modified foods, super-pesticides that cause birth defects in bunny rabbits, and big argribusiness. In other words, he wanted to be a Green Knight.

One day, Don woke up from a fitful night's sleep spent on his lumpy futon rescued from the Salvation Army. He had dreamed all night of building windmills to harness natural energy. Suddenly he knew for certain that he was the chosen one; he was being called to a mission. He had to go out and stop WalMart from building a 75,000 sq. ft. megastore next to the Sacred Gorge, a giant monstrosity that would block out the scenic splendor and leach contaminants like motor oil into the water table. Many other eco-knights had tried but failed. Big boxes had slowly crept over the landscape of Ithacaland. There were big box bookstores, big box drugstores, big box grocery stores, big box laundromats, big box liquor stores, big box one hour photomats. Big boxes everywhere. Little hippie boutiques were languishing on the vine from competition with nationally franchised businesses. It made Don sad.

The source of Ithacaland's distress was the evil Mayor, Alan Cohen, also known as the developer's friend. Al Cohen lived where ever some big Syracuse construction mogul or Ithacaland real estate baron paid the rent. The slippery politician hadn't filed a financial disclosure form in years. Unlike Don, he looked like a knight of the round table, possibly Sir Lancelot with his scrubbed, altar boy looks. Don, on the other hand, looked like he had slept in a dumpster or fallen in a pothole. Alan Cohen never met a developer he didn't like. Whether it meant dishing out 25 year tax abatements, surrendering 250 parking spots, or forcing small business owners out using the City's right of eminent domain, Al was ready to do whatever was required to feather his own nest and turn Ithacaland into a facsimile of Los Angeles.

Don raced out of his cabin, collected some redeemable cans and bottles to buy breakfast at Collegetown Bagels. Don always had the same thing for breakfast. Organic tofu spread on an organic sesame seed bagel with a sprout of organic lettuce thrown in for color. He liked to wash it down with a cup of Gimme Coffee Sumatra blend with Swiss-processed water.

Outside the bagelry, Don met Sancho Lopez. Sancho was pulling Red Bull cans out of a recycling bin. He looked like your average upstate NY MesoAmerican wearing a seedy Army jacket, a cross between the Noble Savage and a Bowery bum but, next to Don, Sancho looked pretty well groomed. A knight needed a groom. So, after exchanging pleasantries like 'Got any extra change, man', Don talked Sancho into following him into battle for the Holy Cause. It didn't hurt that Don knew the location of a fraternity dumpster filled with Corona empties.

Don needed a trusty steed to complete his knightly equipage. So the two of them, knight and groom, trekked out to the salvage yard on the Danby Road. They spent the entire day searching among the rusted hulks of VW's, Suburus, and bombed out Hondas. Finally, Don spotted the filly of his dreams. The sun refused to gleam on the rust-encased chassis. It was a '68 Volvo with a murky gray finish, if you could call it that. The poor thing was covered with bumper stickers that went back to the Bay of Pigs and the nuclear disarmament movement of the 60's. A Black Panther strike fist covered the entire trunk. But, even with 375,000 miles on the engine, the thing was still running. Don slapped down his $150 and drove out of the yard with Sancho behind the vehicle supplying some motive power.

It's time now to say a little about Don's girl friend. In Don's eyes, she was the fairest of the land. A maiden of the purest order. Her name was Kali after some fierce ancient Indo-European blood-sacrifice demanding goddess and she was a Lieutenant-Colonel and Defense Minister in the Wymen's Underground Army. Kali generally wore a sexy camouflage outfit with hobnailed boots, a bandolier, a tee-shirt with the ferocious image of Lorena Bobbitt carrying a butcher knife on the front. The criss-crossed tribal scars on her face accentuated the luster of her skin and highlighted her close to the scalp crew cut.

There wasn't anything that Don wouldn't do for Kali. He dreamt of winning great battles against Monsato and DuPont to prove his worthiness for her love. In more mundane moments, he fantasized that one day they would live together in an eco-palace in the woods and raise free ranging chickens.

Anyway, back to our un-heroes. Ezra, in his rough draft, leaves them trying to get their rusted out Volvo up Buffalo St. to do battle with the Big Red Dragon that lives in a cave on top of the hill, and spews out foul plutonium contaminated breath on the hapless citizens below.

Actually, that's as far as Ezra has gotten in the plot. He's sure the whole thing will make a great movie too. And a sequel. People need inspiring, progressive, politically correct, nonsexist, non-eurocentric stories to tell their kids.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 1:48 PM

 

falafel madness

Can you feel it, baby? Does it re-arrange your atoms?

The excitement, the pulsing energy, the sheer exhilaration out there on the street? We're talking Festival now. Mardi Gras up north, way up there in the land of bagels, good times there are seldom had ( but don't say a discouraging word. Ithacans take their Festival seriously. You'll get run over by a rusted Volvo --Christsake, the driver can't see for all the blankityblank bumper stickers - if you badmouth the Ithaca Festival. )

But hoola hoops? How retro. Yeah, they're regressing to the '50s. Breaking out the hoola hoops again. Does this mean that Ithaca is finally getting over its preoccupation with the 60s? That we're be going back to sock hops, drive in's, root beer floats, girl bands, leather jackets, greasers, the prom, 57 chevies? No more Age of Aquarius? It's finally over? Ithaca is going backwards. The patient has finally woken up from his long nightmare of history. The falafel is slouching towards Bethlehem. Yo, Yeats.

Yeah, baby. Ez ain't saying that the Ithaca Festival ain't pretty. That it doesn't bring people together. There must have been thousands of Ithacans on the Commons Friday, all grooving to the beat of bands trying to sound like Neil Young or the Middle Eastern gyrations of belly dancing. (Those dancing beauties, comely honies, gearing up to overcome gravity and middle aged spread.)

If a third of those folks bopped downtown on a regular basis, would ya have so many empty store fronts? Would Logos and the former CVS be vacant reminders that, at heart, Ithaca is a ghost town in the making? They don't have Ithaca Festivals up at the mall. Only car and boat shows. This is a community.

Without a cutting edge.

Ez's compadre, RB, name withheld to protect the guilty, put his finger on it precisely. There are no sharp surfaces, no edges. (The whole town of Ithaca is on a suicide watch.) Nothing coming up from the hot steamy subterranean kitchens of the culture. No new dance craze. Just a rehash.

RB is right. He comes to Ithaca from the City. You go over to Central Park on a Saturday afternoon during the summer and you see at least two things that will be the next big phenom in a couple of months. It's something someone is wearing or something that someone is doing. The rawness of culture in formation. Under the volcano.

Hoola hoops? Maybe we're just too far north.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:25 AM

 

alternative ithaca festivals

With a little imagination, every day could be Fiesta in I-town. Imagination is in short supply, so here's a care package of ideas from the Volk at Ithaca Sucks.

A-Plus Beef Jerky Days - Does your snack food still moo? Break out those long leathery sticks of mad cow- delicious jerky. Make earrings and nose rings out of the suckers, turn them in light wands and pretend you're star troopers on Moo Planet.
Storm the evil empire of Moo-sewood and route the pseudo-vegetarians with their fondue haircuts. Real men eat beef jerkey, not quiche lorraine.

Chanticleer Days on the Commons. Let the excitement of the Chanty spill out in the streets with real cock fights, wet tee-shirt contests, barstool deadaways, broken bottle duels, and RedMan Spitoffs. Do you know what a barstool deadaway even is?
It's when a red neck sits on a barstool, has about 10 Gennies, closes his eyes and pretends he's with the 82nd Airborne over Baghdad. Dead away! No parachute, Ma!

Topless Days Downtown. Get all those well-endowed hippie madchen from Dewitt Park out on the Commons to demonstrate the joys of shirtlessness. It ain't fair that only men are allowed to show their nipples in public. The younger set can play street hockey with surplus silicon implants. They work better than hockey pucks!

GreenStar Giant Moth Days - let those little critters out of the bulk bins, will ya? You thought honey bees were a big attraction in Ithaca? Watch those little Asian honies strip down the Commons in a single weekend. Don't be foolish enough to wear a sweater downtown during this event!

Empty Storefront Days. Convert all those empty stores into kissing booths, shooting galleries, cotton candy stands and pretend we're on the Boardwalk. Instead of garage sales on their front lawns, people can rent an empty store front for an afternoon and peddle their broken toasters and yesteryear's astro turf doormats right on the Commons. Give people a taste of running their own boutiques. They might even consider doing it year round and fill up all those store fronts.

VFW Weekend - America's the great place that it is because everyone has the right ot express their opinion. So let the old geezers take over the entire Commons for a weekend and turn it in a coney island of patriotism. They can make a little cash as well to fix up the old howitzer in front of their bat cave. Legless vets selling Iraqi Freedom playing cards, saber rattling contests, tar and feather Joe Wetmore, get Merle Haggard out of the drunk tank to sing a few bars of 'I'm an okie from Freeville.' They gave their all, why can't we give them a weekend in the sun?

Woodstock 3 - think of the possibilities! There's at least one rock band not in wheel chairs or dead from overdoses left from the original concert. Stoke up the nostalgia mill. Watch the hippies crawl out of the woodpile. Hey, man, they closed Rt 79! This is the 2nd biggest city in New York, dude! Young nubile hippies bathing in the potholes! Wow, this is heaven.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:19 AM

 

the ugly cornellian

Ithaca is a state of mind. It's a banana republic, colonized by 40,000 transients. Our own Cecil Rhodes, codenamed The Founder, was a guy from Westschester who, within a few years of landing in Ithaca, started redesigning the local landscape with the use of blasting powder. Yeah, thank, Ezra Cornell, for making Ithaca more 'gorges.' Ez walked into Ithaca, spotted the rolling woodlands on East Hill and said to himself, I'm going to own all that one day. He was true to his word. A man of destiny.

Manifest destiny. The americanism for grab all you can - in short, imperialism. Decades before Ezra Cornell showed up in town, General Sullivan's army wiped out all the natives. Cayuga Lake doesn't belong to the red man anymore. It belongs to Big Red. The university sucks the placid waters up with a big straw to cool the gym. Ultimate ecological imperialism.

EC tinkered around wirth ways to make money , first building water powered mills, then laying telegraph wires, moved into creating telegraph companies. He was instrumental in hobbling the behemoth Western Union together from smaller startups and made himself a cool $2 million. Big bucks back in those days. Ezra laid out a half million to bribe the state legislature to locate the land grant college which later bore his name to Ithaca. He bought up all the scrip for 60 cents on the dollar and sold it all off at an enormous profit to seed his own personal educational fiefdom. It was a rather complicated transaction, notwithstanding the Jay Gould robber baron shenanigans of the era. Ez was not adverse to using a lot of creative accounting. Folks complained about smelling a skunk in the woodpile for years. Little good it did . Ezra was, at one point, a member of the state legislature.

The Founder teamed up with his millionaire lumber buddies, Henry Sage and John McGraw to throw up some Gothic style outhouses up on the future campus. Now, when you cut down a tree and you've sold it for plywood, it's gone. When you build a university, you get a fresh crop every four years The boys knew they were on to something big. Today the university functions in that grey area between being a corporation and a public institution. You need an army of lawyers to keep the waters murky enough to withstand scrutiny so that's why they came up with the idea of starting a Law School too. And a Vet school to keep the cash cow healthy. All under one rubric. Big Red.

If you think of Ithaca as a big airport, you're closer to understanding the place better. The students don't give a fuck about the city of Ithaca. Most of them couldn't locate Dryden or Newfield on a map. They've got their sights set on bigger places. They are out to rule the world. There are people graduating now who are ready to move into the Norwegian White House. The European Community is full of Cornell alumni. A graduate of Cornell is the head honcho in Taiwan. Yeah, we're talking Taiwan. The place where they make all those plain brown boxes stamped Made in Taiwan.

But, if you live in Ithaca year round, you start to understand the scope of Ezra Cornell's vision. He saw Ithaca as a self-perpetuating, self-sustaining colony out in the middle of the boonies. He knew that naked self-interest and greed would kick in and motivate the locals to keep the latrines clean, to mow the grass, to make the students comfortable once they got here. Ezra C foresaw correctly that there would always be entrepreneurs who would find ways to grow the colony by bits and pieces. Buying up land for apartment complexes, charging exorbitant rents, opening restaurants, building hotels and parking lots. He saw that, out in the middle of nowhere, 4 hours now by car, at that time weeks by foot, you didn't need to build industry like in factories, workshops etc. - you needed to create a whole new kind of industry. A place for intellectual tourists. A temporary zone feeding constantly on its own sense of transience. A place where no one would want to stay unless they were somehow plugged in to his big cash register on the hill. Ezra had the master plan for everything that would follow in his wake. If scholars culled his papers, they'd probably find rough sketches for a prototype of the ATM machine. Ez was a true visionary.

So, if you happened to notice all the proud families of Cornell graduates milling around the boutiques and restaurants downtown this weekend, behaving like the ultimate tourists with their cameras, cell phones, loaded SUV's, not having left home with their American Express, looking down with disdain at us homeboys and girls, and all the merchants with all their little identical signs in the shop windows, all the extra wait staff and dishwashers at Simeon's and the Mahogany Grill, the big banners outside the wineries, if you've been brutalized by that withering tourist stare looking right through you, that sense of not having an reason for existing on this planet outside to swell the ranks of coolie class, well, take your hat off to Ezra Cornell. He made it all possible.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:43 AM

 

a gorges mind

Interviews with Mental Giants and Emotional Midgets, Vol 1 - Ronnie Qed, 12 yr Cornell Ph.D.

Our Ithaca Sucks reporter caught up with Ronnie outside a stall in the men's room at Olin Library where he had just spent 2 hours disproving the main points of Pythorgoras in a tiny but neat script all over the gun metal grey walls of the cubicle. Several other doctoral candidates were poring over his work as Ronnie's dad reminded him to wash his hands before leaving the bathroom.

It was graduation day. Ronnie was about to receive his fifth doctorate from Cornell in 2 years, this one from the Philosophy Dept for his work in the arcane field of intuitionist logic. Our reporter was immediately struck by how average-looking Ronnie appeared - a cross between Harry Potter and the kid in the Munsters with the very pale complexion. He was virtually drowning in his black academic gown
with the mortar board occasionally slipping down to cover most of his face. It seems that they don't make graduation gear for 4 foot tall 12 year olds with IQ's of 475.

Ronnie make look like your average 12 year old but there's nothing average about his brain. Our reporter found that out when he starting asking Ronnie about how he felt on this big day.

IS: So what does it feel like to get your fifth Ph.D. in 2 years?

R: If we restate the question in this form: ``Is it impossible to construct infinite sets of real numbers between 0 and 1, whose power is less than that of the continuum, but greater than aleph-null?,'' then the answer must be in the affirmative; for the intuitionist can only construct denumerable sets of mathematical objects and if, on the basis of the intuition of the linear continuum, he admits elementary series of free selections as elements of construction, then each non-denumerable set constructed by means of it contains a subset of the power of the continuum.

IS: Ok. How does it feel to stand out there on the podium knowing that you're the youngest PH.D. candidate in Cornell's history?

R: Let us consider the concept: ``real number between 0 and 1.'' For the formalist this concept is equivalent to ``elementary series of digits after the decimal point'', for the intuitionist it means ``law for the construction of an elementary series of digits after the decimal point, built up by means of a finite number of operations.'' And when the formalist creates the ``set of all real numbers between 0 and 1,'' these words are without meaning for the intuitionist, even whether one thinks of the real numbers of the formalist, determined by elementary series of freely selected digits, or of the real numbers of the intuitionist, determined by finite laws of construction.

IS: I see. So tell me what your other hobbies are besides mathematics, physics, Persian sub-dialects, 12th Century Welsh poetry and philosophy. Do you like to play baseball?

R: Z.B. ist die Punktmenge: ``alle reellen Zahlen zwischen 0 und 1 mit Ausnahme der endlichen Dualbrüche'', nur deshalb eine wohlkonstruierte Menge, weil die duale Entwicklung einer willkürlichen Zahl dieser Menge eine Fundamentalreihe von endlichen Gruppen von gleichen Ziffern (abwechselnd 0 und l) liefert, so daß die Menge sich mittels einer Fundamentalreihe von Auswahlen unter den endlichen Zahlen bestimmen läßt. Dieser Schritt geht freilich weiter als mein römischer Vortrag

IS: I'm not sure I understood your answer. But that's ok. What do you and your folks plan to do after the ceremony? Are you plannig
to go to McDonald's?

R: It is possible to define a bounded decimal number by demanding that a thousand persons each write an arbitrary digit. One will have a well-defined number if the persons are put in line each writing in turn a digit at the end of the digits already written by those in front in the line. The disagreement starts when one tries to extend this procedure to an unbounded decimal number. I do not suppose that people dream of actually having an infinite number of persons each writing an arbitrary digit, but I believe that Mr. Zermelo and Mr. Hadamard think that it is possible to regard such a choice realized in a perfectly well-defined way even if the complete definition of the number contains an infinite number of words. For my part I think it is possible to pose problems about probability for decimal numbers which are obtained by choosing the digits either randomly or by imposing certain restrictions on the choice-restrictions leaving some randomness to the choice. But I think it is impossible to talk about one of these numbers for the reason that if one denotes it by A, two mathematicians talking about A would never be sure whether they were talking about the same number.

IS: Well.....ah....Yeah, ok. You be sure to have a nice day. Seeya.

Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:26 AM