A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

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