A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 
Teradactyl day

It's Groundhog Day, for crying out loud.

Well, we should be crying out loud, or maybe crying in our beer or just softly weeping for that matter, because, fact is, Ithaca doesn't have a groundhog of its own. We also don't have caravans of buses and cars loaded with tourists, all carrying credit cards and ready cash, clogging Rts 96, 79 and 13. flocking to town to see a cute, fuzzy, world famous meteorological mammal.

That means we'll have six or sixty or 600 hundred more years of empty store fronts, a flagging retail economy, a deserted Commons, rising property taxes. You name it. Depending on whether you're an inborn pessimist or just in denial.

No groundhog, no tourist bucks. Simple as that. Gorges don't cut it. Only retired people from Iowa, who are suffering from post-primary depression, would travel 500 miles to see a gorge. And a lot of them simply stay home because they're afraid of slipping and falling off the cliff face of one of 'em cute little gorges.

Let's face it. Punxsutawney hires better consultants than Ithaca. There's a consultant gap. Ithacans paid how much to a consulting firm last year only to be told that we needed a winter festival to stimulate the local economy. So what do we get? The Festival of Light. Do you know anyone who actually attended the Festival of Light? The first mistake that was made was putting Barbara Mink, former country executive, in charge of planning for the event. In an earlier time, Barbara Mink would have worn a pink pillbox Oleg Cassini hat. Just like Jackie Kennedy. We're talking high brow now. We're talking high priestess of culture.
Arbiter of taste. We're not talking about the kind of person likely to schedule wet tee shirt contests, tractor pulls or the kind of stuff likely to draw crowds.

Ez has scoured all the local newspapers for details of the much touted Light in Winter festival to find that the highbrows managed to keep the entire affair so hushed that only a single news feature appeared, describing a chamber music concert at PRI. You know, up at dinosaur land. Imagine that. The general population, meaning us lowbrows, were kept completely in the dark about the Festival of Light. Does that smack of cultural elitism or what?

What Ithaca needs is another Cardiff Giant. Back in 1869, a couple of workmen digging a well in Cardiff, New York, 10 miles north of Syracuse, uncovered a ten foot, 2 ½ inch gypsum statue. The discovery sparked a frenzy of interest, not to mention, controversy. Visitors from all over the country flocked to Cardiff to view this either priceless artifact of prehistoric American civilization, or fossilized remans of a race of a giants, depending on who you listened to. Theologians used the occasion as a pulpit to to rail against the evils of Darwinism. A syndicate of businessmen from Syracuse raised $50,000 to promote the colossus as a tourist attraction. It was uncovered three months later than the statue was a hoax planted by a Binghamton cigar maker to revive his dwindling fortunes. A copy of the Cardiff Giant ended up in P.T. Barnum's museum of oddities. Andrew White, first president of Cornell and known high brow, looking back at the whole episode in his memoirs, decried the hoax as a symptom of American civilization gone awry. He hoped that newly established citadels of institutional and scientific authority, read Cornell, would provide a corrective to the money making Big Top huskterism of the Gilded Age.

What the Cardiff Giant did for that tiny hamlet in upstate New York, what the beguiling marmot does annually for Punxsutawney, a well-placed teradactyl or other Saurian beauty could easily do for Ithaca. Forget the light wands and the chamber music. Plant a tantalizing fossil or two, or better, a full sized, extant, meat eating, specimen, roaming the wilds of Dryden, feeding on squirrels and poodles. Even a turkey in a dinosaur costume would suffice for the more gullible.

Then find out if it sees its shadow.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 2:23 PM