A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 
Ezra's Christmas Blog

Salvation Army bell ringers report having their worst year on record for donations from their kettle and chime operations on the Commons. As of Dec 24th, the Army reported a gross take of 72 cents after three weeks of ringing the bell and harrassing the uncharitable. Captain Merriwether, head of the Ithaca branch of the Starvation Army, attributes the low rate of giving to the extra parking fees downtown.

The Association of Toothless Americans today announced that they will be holding their summer convention in Ithaca.

The same family of Ithacans has been selling apples on streetcorners since 1929. The McGlincheys are proud of their long tradition of street vending in Ithaca but wish the economy would improve so family members could branch out.

Dan Hoffman has succeeded Marty Luster as City of Ithaca attorney, confirming Ezra's suspicion that Ithaca is run by an old boy/girl network of former Cornellians who smoked pot, ate vegetarian food together and possibly exchanged bodily fluids back in the 70's. Dan's background is in coop law so, after being president and moving force behind GreenStar for many years, Ezra is wondering if the city will now be run on a coop basis with residents getting a discount on their taxes if they fix their own potholes. Welcome to the American political establishment, Dan. It's time you got your slice of the pie. Oh, by the way, Dan has been spotted from time to time up at the East Hill P&C, wearing bermuda shorts and pushing a shopping cart loaded with six paks of microbrew and imported salami. What a change from sweeping the sawdust and filling up the lentil bins at GreenStar.

Well, Ezra wishes this blog could be longer but ..........
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 4:51 PM

 

in-sourcing

If you've been driving past the main entrance to the Cornell Plantations lately, you may have noticed a strange cluster of bamboo huts that appears to have gone up overnight. Depending on the time of day, you might have spotted the odd cooking fire,
attended by a group of sem-nude women busily peeling vegetables and stirring large black cauldrons balanced on a bed of glowing hot coals. You may even have spotted goats and chickens grazing nearby; children busily gathering firewood or re-arranging the stream beds as they search for the flattest rocks which they then haul back to the campfire.

What the fuck, you'd be tempted to say - as Ez was recently. Is this some kind of primitive pursuit day camp for jaded Ithaca housewives? Rule that out! Putting it as politically correct as possible, these happy campers do not appear to be indigenous to the area based on their complexions and linquistic orientation not would they be likely to show up at a school board meeting. The few words that Ez overheard on his second or third driveby of the encampment sounded distinctly alien to Ithaca ears. Ez is not a polygot himself, having learned only enough Spanish, French and German to pass finals and receive the requisite C minus needed to obtain credit for having shown up for the semester. The last traces of those agonizingly acquired languages disappeared from Ez's cerebral cortex within 17 days of the final exam.

Other people besides Ez were stopping their cars that day and checking out this odd tableau. Folks carrying digital cameras with Pennsylvania plates on their haul ass SUV's - quilts of travel stickers and honorary policemen decals plastered to the rear door panels. They probably figured that they had stumbled into some kind of ethno-themepark cooked up by Cornell anthropolgists. Wait til the pictures are developed and the folks back home in Hershey see this!

Hey, Ez wasn't even going to stop, being the anti-tourist that he is. He's never owned a camera in his life, never taken a picture of a local attraction anywhere he's been, hates tourists, loathes the idea of tourism itself, apologizes to people for visiting their town or country and, in that vein, refuses to ask for directions
so that folks won't mistake him for a tourist. Well, to be honest, Ez did buy a postcard once in Germany - a view of the exterior of Karl Marx's birthplace in Trier. But that's only because Ez spent two weeks of his three week vacation trying to find Marx's birthplace. And, let's face it, the guy rocks.

The reason Ez stopped at this bizarre (for Ithaca) encampment was to check out if Lauren Signer, Ithaca's police chief, happened to be around. Signer is a staunch defender of toplessness as a form of public expression. Last time women went topless in Dewitt Park, Signer was all over the local papers supporting the cause. Toplessness has still not caught on in Ithaca for some reason or other. But that's another story. Anyway these women gathered around the cooking fires were topless and Ez was hoping that Signer would be around, demonstrating solidarity. Ez might even be tempted to take a snapshot of a topless police chief. He desperately needs to change his opinion of law enforcement.

Well, to make a long story short, Ez waded out among the toursts who were oogling and snapping pictures, and made contact with several of these non-indigenous people.
Besides being topless, non white and not able to speak much English, they were all wearing Cornell University picture id's , somehow affixed to their minimalist wardrobes. Ezra is not making this up! Go out to the Plantations and check it for yourselves! These beautiful, very natural and friendly people - all so seemingly out of place in this cold, increasingly unnatural, ever-unfriendly Yankee peddlars' village of Ithaca, New York - were all employees of Cornell University.

It took a few more days to piece together the whole story. Believe Ez when he says that it's not a pretty story.

We're all afraid these days of losing our jobs to Folks in India or Vietnam. Every time a telemarketer calls to sell you a subscription to the Ithaca Journal, you listen carefully for traces of a Calcutta accent. Ez's boss, Satan, is at this very moment negotiating with a company in Singapore to ship Ez's job off to Asia. Elsewhere in the world scientists are connecting monkeys to robotic arms. No kidding. A monkey may take over your job one day. Rolling up to the McDonald's drive-in window one day, you might find a chimpanzee in uniform taking your order. Talk about working for peanuts - try bananas.

Hey, let's get with it. Globalization isn't something that started yesterday. The early Phonecians were going global thousands of years ago. Outsourcing high tech jobs to developing countries might be a fairly new development but, before outsourcing, there was - you guessed it! slavery. Millions of Africans were stolen from their homes to help to fuel the world economy within years of white Europeans having made first contact with the coast of Africa. America was built on the backs of foreign workers. When the slaves were freed, immigrants from Europe and Asia were suckered into building America's industrial infrastructure -we're talking now about the railroads, the tunnels, our manufacturing base.

That's right - in-sourcing. And that's exactly what Cornell has done! What Ez found out is that Cornell transplanted the entire Iyo tribe of Southern Brazil to Ithaca, New York - head chief, village gods, culture and all to staff the University's livestock management operation. The Iyo, legendary herdsmen of the Amazon basin,occasional cannibals, are now working in barns and stables all around Cornell's sprawling campus. You can see them over at McConnell barn wrangling mares,or milking cows to produce yummy lates for the campus Dairy Bar. That's right,at Cornell, otherwise known as Moo University (Jane Smiley), there's a Dairy Bar - lest we forget our humble orgins as a land grant college built to crank out
brainy farmers.

Imagine if you were a displaced barn worker. Most likely, you had worked on a farm as a kid, seen your family lose the business and had, after working at Ithaca Gun for 15 years until that plant closed, drifted into work that was at least familiar if not well paying - pitching hay for Cornell. Now, you'd be a little sore if you saw some 4'5" dude wearing practically nothing at all, a small piece of wood stuck through his nose, cooing gently to a 400 lb heifer named Junie Moon to coax her out of the stable when that used to be your job.

Not a bad deal for Cornell, do you think? During the day, the Iyo work in the barns and stables of Cornell's vast ag science operation. They get bused around in Big Red vans every morning and back to their camp at day's end. You might spot the van stopped at a traffic light and, invariably find the Iyo peering excitedly out the windows and pointing at the neon rooster over the Chanticleer. At night hordes of grad students and wannabe social anthropologists, clad in Birkenstocks and Levi jeans, descend on the Iyo camp to peek in their cooking pots and try to catch them mating.

Holy shit! Just when you thought you'd seen everything.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:57 AM

 
EZ tax

Having trouble figuring out your taxes? Not sure if you qualify for an Alaska Permanent Fund dividend? (Tip: If you live in Texas, own an oil refinery or have been out to THE RANCH for barbecued ribs, you qualify!) Having trouble with the 1040EZ form? Only hours to file?

Well, here’s help! EZ stands for Ezra Kidder’s easy tax filing service. Forget going down to the local post office to pick up your forms. There’s likely to be a sign on the door telling you that the Post Office doesn’t provide tax forms anymore. Truth of the matter is that the Post Office has been bought out by Staples. That explains all the glitzy kiosks filled with mailing accessories. You can even use your credit card to buy a 37cent stamp. By way of preparing you for the not so distant future when a first class stamp will cost $13. 70.

Don’t stress! You can now download your tax returns from Napster along with the new Screaming Chickens cd.

Let’s get started. You’ll see how EZ it is to file your taxes using Kidder’s Robo-Tax. All that’s required is answering a few simple questions. Ezra will calculate your taxes automatically and, if you belong to that lucky 1% of the population that already owns the whole fucking universe in the first place, make sure that a big fat juicy tax refund is deposited in your Swiss account.

Question 1 Did you earn over $2.8 billion in taxable income last year? (We’re not talking about earnings from overseas investments in the Afghan drug trade, profits from the sale of enriched uranium to North Korea, or the Thai sex trade.) Did you contribute more than $1.2 million to the Republican National Committee?

Congratulations! You’re entitled to an Earned Income Credit of $23 million, a free tank up at any of 32,000 Exxon stations, a McRibs sandwich at the Crawford Ranch and a chance to get your picture taken with Condoleeza Rice in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Question 2 Did you earn less than $30,000 last year, eat more Macaroni n Cheese in the last 12 months than you have eaten in the previous 34 years, consider selling a kidney on the black market to pay down your credit card debt? Do you drive a car that has logged more miles than the Voyager space probe? Have you considered asking your boss for a longer lunch hour so you can break bread at the local suup kitchen?

Oops! Your tax bill has just increased dramatically. The war’s not going so well, the troops may have to stay another 6 years in Iraq, the cost of privatizing social security will cost trillions (forget retirement!) and the economy isn’t doing that well, so toughen up and bite the bullet – why don’t ya? We’ll see you down in line at the post office a minute before the filing deadline
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 9:47 PM

 

heart of darkness

They speak a different kind of language up there on the hill – short, garbled sentences filled with words like ipod, mp3, virtual this, viritual that - and punctuated with names of bars, eateries, exotic latte drinks, Club Med lingo, buzzwords for having sex in physically challenging locations, and the verbal detritus of early 21st Century consumer society. It’s like all the students at Cornell were equipped at the same time with a brain implant – a neuro-Norstar equivalent to what General Motors puts into the dashboard of their new models. This device serves as a multi-purpose translator, dictionary, archive for menu and drink specials all around town, a homing device for potential mates who share the same class knowledge, zodiac sign and ipod downloads.

Ez had to spend some time up at Cornell recently. He won’t tell you why but keep in mind that he’s been working on a thermonuclear device for some time. This may be too much of a hint but maybe he needed to spend some time with the ghost of Hans Bethe, one of the godfathers of implosion theory. There, Ez gave away his secret.

After spending a couple of hours on campus, Ezra got this strong sense of dread – much the same as characters do in 19th Century novels. People who inhabit contemporary fiction don’t get the same sense of angst or foreboding – probably because they consume too many pharmaceuticals. Drugs like Prozac, and all the other uppers and downers in the modern mood changing arsenal, take the edge off things. So you can’t really compare the kind of Victorian sensibility manifested in Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach with the whacked out mental world of a Hunter S Thompson. Arnold dreamt it, Thompson lived through it.

But Ezra started getting this strong vibe up at Cornell – like he was floating down some kind of virtual Congo, the powerful, dark brown waters carrying him past cyber communities of Born Again headhunters, pizza-and-Diet Coke ingesting pygmies videoconferencing on their cell phones, dancing around their ceremonial laptops, juiced up on hiphop streaming in through their Walkmans. Every mile that Ezra traveled down this violent flood, filled with Pac-Man like crocodiles and 100 ft constrictors took him closer to the vortex of the world seemingly shared by all those Cornell students up on the hill – the ever evolving future.

Holy Shit! What’s that on the horizon? It looks like some kind of weird episode of Buck Rogers meets Harvey Potter meets Blade Runner. All these people are running around with weapons that resemble a cross between light wands and Waring Blenders, zapping each other all over the place as they try to get closer to this scary thing at the edge of the jungle. You can barely make it out in the mist. What is that? It’s some mishmash of corporate logo – golden arches merging with a red bullseye combined with a gigantic W, standing next to an equally huge A. Wait – is that an L? Could that be a 200 ft high Smiley Face lurching over the whole bizarre gig?

Have a nice day.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:50 PM

 
tabloid

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Ezra will once again attempt to fill the void in his readers’ consciousness known as Sunday. He knows you’re hurting, Ithacans. Ezra feels your pain. During the week, you punch out for lunch and race over to Center Ithaca to get a free copy of The Ithaca Urinal, hoping to find one lying on a table, pristine and virginal as the moment it rolled off the press. Occasionally your hopes are crushed as the only copy unattended resembles a 3-D menu with gobs of lo mein book marking the editorial page and curry smudges effacing the sports scores.

On Saturday you wrestle with the 30lbs version of the Urinal loaded with all those advertising inserts from the big boxes out on Rt 13. Ok, for 15 years you were part of the choir, waving your fist at the big retail chains that threatened your little ecotopia. But, now there’re here so you might as well load the kids into the Ford Explorer, head over to Target or Wal-mart or wherever. You rationalize that it’s raining, how many times can you visit the Sciencenter or the Museum of the Earth and you need some ice melt anyway because another 45 inches of snow is predicted for April. Oh, and by the way, you get to be a good citizen of the earth by recycling the Ithaca Urinal at the dump along the way.

But Sundays, crazy Sundays. There’s nothing to do in Ithaca that you haven’t already done on Saturdays. Back in the days when there was very little grey in your ponytail, you’d head out to Plum’s where the Mahogany Grill is now on Sundays to hear Peggy Haines and the Low Down Alligator Jazz Band reprise the New Orleans sound right there on Aurora Street. After a few bloody mary’s and cantaloupe rounds, you’d swear you had stepped out on Bourbon Street except that streetcar named Desire was really a pick up truck with a VFW decal on the bumper, honking his horn at you.

Peggy Haines left to work for Cornell and buy up all the Victorian cookie cutter mansions on East Hill. The Mahogany Grill is just another rich college kid bar with no class, no music on weekends, and the same basic menu as Ponderosa. But the real truth is that the Ithaca Urinal doesn’t publish on Sunday. Not that much ever happens in Ithaca, New York to fill up a whole Sunday issue. What would you put in a Sunday edition ? List all the Labrador Retrievers in Tompkins county side by side with their photographs and you still wouldn’t fill up one section of a Sunday paper. Somebody would make a fortune if they came up with a Sunday Ithaca Urinal cover sheet that wrapped around the NY Times or Syracuse Post Standard! Imagine coming in from Omaha and seeing that sucker on a newsstand? Until you opened the paper, you’d think you actually were somewhere! Surprise!!!!

A couple of years ago, if you recall, Ezra tried to launch his own Sunday rag right here at Ithaca Sucks. It wasn’t quite journalism – call it gestalt shock therapy – and it didn’t catch on – like no one eve wrote in to complain that a virus had eaten their copy of the Sunday Ithaca Sucks. Nobody cared! Ezra never quite got over that disappointment but --getting over doesn’t matter – what counts is getting even! So –

Extra! Extra! Get your first issue of the Ithaca Sucks Outhouse! Ithaca’s own lurid tabloid style journal of hyperreality, mytho-conscious bullshit, lies and UFO sightings.

Read all about it! Nostradamus predicted that Ithaca would get a Wal-mart, that Cayuga Lake would be sucked up in a big straw and that a race of small men, read robots, would appear in the early 21st century somewhere in upstate New York. That damn Nanotechnology center!

Read all about it! Martin Bormann actually lived in Ithaca, New York for 5 years starting in 1951. He taught German up at Cornell and ate sauerkraut and hotdogs everyday at the Rosebud. The Outhouse has exclusive photographs.

Read all about it! A 50ft high violet and green dragon-like creature has been sighted repeatedly swimming around Cayuga Lake by fishermen and boat owners. Nessie, move over. The Outhouse has the only reliable snapshot taken by a Trumansburg couple who were illegally dumping their garbage at the time.

Read all about it! Scientists at Cornell University have cloned a chicken with a tofu pup. Watch out, vegetarians!

Read all about it! Research into early settler accounts has revealed several possible UFO sightings in Tompkins County around the 1830’s. One particularly detailed account describes what might have been a crop clearing on East Hill. Ezra Cornell might have been a Martian! Does that explain things? Those astrophysics dudes are sending shit back home!

Read all about it! Carolyn Peterson is really Al Cohen! Or vice versa! This explains why smiling Al has not been seen around town lately. The Outhouse has studied the photographs, obtained fingerprint samples and talked to confidential insiders. We are going public for the first time with the news! His honor is really her honor. Read all about it next week in the Outhouse!

Exclusive to the Outhouse! Michael Jackson owns a house along Cayuga Lake! Do you want to see pics showing what Michael does when he’s visiting? Send $1,500.00 to POB#47124, Ovid, New York.

Outhouse News Extra! The Pope isn’t dead. He was sighted at Friendly’s on Rt 13 this morning! Read all about it!
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 11:28 AM

 

radio ezra

Welcome to Bound and Gagged for Glory broadcast to you live from the boiler room of Anabel Taylor Hall on the Cornell campus. I’m your host Ezra Kidder and I’ll be with you for the rest of life in some form or other - call it Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, call it a bad trip. Call it what ever you want, you’ll going to having flashbacks – I guarantee it. How many hours of hammer dulcimer music can the average human being listen to before they go off the deep end. I’ve had listeners call in and tell me that, after a couple of hours of hammer dulcimer music, they’ve signed up to serve in Iraq. I mean, these guys were long haired hippies, carrying signs right out there on the front lines of the peace movement. Suddenly they turned overnight into cold blooded killers for Uncle Sam, M16, jackboots, the whole works. Something snapped. Did you know that the CIA used to broadcast hammer dulcimer music behind the Iron Curtain? You think Ronald Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall and ended the Cold War single-handedly? Think again, it was some guy playing the hammer dulcimer. It’s a good thing nobody in the Arab world knows how to play the hammer dulcimer. Imagine if Al-Quaeda ever got hold of it?

Students are returning from spring break so that means we’ve had to retreat back to the basement level here at Anabel Taylor. That’s alright, we’re used to it - it’s just like the Ithaca weather, you either get used to nine months of winter or you go insane. That’s when it’s time to tune to 135.6 FM on your radio dial and listen to the comforting sounds of the hammer dulcimer.

Tonight we have a very special guest. Well, we had a very special guest until he tried some of the rat food they put out in little trays around the boilers. You know we tried to break into the dumpster up there behind the End of the Rope Café. When you get the munchies……. well, you understand what that’s all about. So our special guest can’t be with us tonight but we still have 75 hours of taped hammer dulcimer music. While I strip the body, let me put on this little number from Bill Smokehouse and the Down-trodden Country Boys.

--this guy doesn’t have a credit card. I figured as much. Here’s a union card, a lottery ticket – now what’s this. Looks like a photograph of Joni Mitchell – wow – it must have been taken at one of those nude beaches. I’ll keep that. At least I make a few bucks off the stuff he’s wearing. They love those 60’s clothes down at Trader K. Yeah – and there’s this hammer dulcimer…..

We’re back live at Anabel Taylor Hall. Our special guest has gone on to glory. But we have a taped interview that he did in 1962 during the salad days of folk music. Those were the days. Everyone wanted to run away Greenwich Village in those days and be a folk singer – live in some flea-bitten hotel with a hundred other folksinger wannabes, have sex with these wispy looking brunettes from Sarah Lawrence -- you know the kind of girls I mean - heck, they’re your grandmothers now and they probably haven’t changed much. They still wear those long dresses and granny glasses and get that far away dreamy look in their eyes whenever they hear a hammer dulcimer. Boy, if you could play the hammer dulcimer back in those days, you had it made. Now if you play the hammer dulcimer, you’re a candidate for the psych unit.

Ok – we’re get to that interview in the second half of our show. Now it’s time for a word from our sponsor, the Fourth Dimension Head Shop right on the corner of Seneca and Tioga. Oh….they moved? That’s where they’re putting up that new hotel? Shit, why doesn’t anyone tell me these things? We have no sponsors? (Pause)

Let’s go to another musical look back at the glory days of Folk when everybody knew who Woody Gutherie was and nobody knew who Bob Dylan was. Here’s a hammer dulcimer standard from Richard Purina and Mimi Buzzsaw….. Sad Eyed Lady of Cleveland.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 12:13 PM

 
state of the blog address

Good morning, lunatics and amnesiacs --- or is that insomniacs? It’s five am in the morning in our fair gulag. Ezra is here this morning to deliver the state of the blog report. That’s right. The prez gets a chance to gloss over all the fucking mistakes he made in the past year. Governors, mayors, salad bar attendants -- right down the line repeat the process. Yes, we lowered taxes this year but spent $40 billion to remodel the White Ranch to make it impervious to terrorist attack. We reformed social security by kicking everyone who made less than $1.7 million a year out of the program.

Mayor Carolyn Peterson informs Ithacans about the great strides she’s made in bringing a Playboy Club to town. Yep, right there in the new Ithaca Hilton that’s going up across from Mugger’s alley. (More muggings take place in the Seneca street parking garage than anywhere else in Ithaca.) Yep, Ithaca needs more porn, soft core or otherwise. In the next five years we will have a 58% increase in adult bookstores, massage parlors, strip joints and pick up bars. Sex is the ultimate revenue enhancer for cities facing severe budget crunches. Oh, by the way, we’re getting a new army base.

So, Ezra wants to talk about the state of ithacasucks. You guessed it-- Ithaca sucks 120% more than it did last year, 280% more than it did in 2003 and 765% more than it sucked in 2002. We’re having a banner year for suckdom and Ez has pie charts and graphs to prove it. The only problem is that Ez has been denied access by dint of sheer stupidity to that part of his computer that spits out those graphics. So, just imagine, fuckers! It sucks!

Ez has cranked out over 120 blogs since Ithaca Sucks was launched two years ago. That comes out to something like 165 wasted hours, hunched over a keyboard with cigarette ashes piling up in the cracks between the keys, to produce a blog that no one reads. Well, actually Ezra did get emails from three people in the course of two years of blogging. One was from a guy who demanded more attacks on the VFW. The other was a guy who felt the blog was too violent. Finally, Ezra received an email from a girl named Amanda who had googled the word Permaculture and came up with Ez’s piece on nouveau- hippie culture in Trumansburg. You remember that blog, don’t you? Ez talked about how latte was the biggest cash crop over in Rongo-land. Remember?

Anyway, Ezra replied diplomatically to Amanda that, by the time she was Ez’s age, she’d be living in a gated community somewhere, growing organic butternut squash that cost $459 a seed, with robodogs and child soldiers from the Congo patrolling the compound to keep out the riffraff. So much for permaculture. Serves Amanda right for surfing sites with the word ‘sucks’ in the address. Lousy elitists.

Two years ago Ezra launched Ithacasucks with the idea of attracting a large, hip, college educated audience. He dreamed of a website with enough bells and bangles, links and pop-ups, cookies and drop downs to rival anything MSN could throw at him. Ez also fantasized about shipping ithacasucks merchandise everywhere in the world. Ithacasucks mugs, ithacasucks microwave magnets, ithacasucks banana peelers, ithacasucks cat sweaters. – you name it. All made by sweatshop labor somewhere in Freeville. Ez imagined driving to his office in the ithacasucks building in a Mercedes, having a 75 ft yacht in the marina christened the Ithaca Sucks, flying out of Ithaca airport in a Lear jet with large red letters on the side, Sucker. Just like that guy Branson who cheekily named his company Virgin. Ez wanted to be a blog billionaire.

Well, all of Ezra’s dreams came to naught. Ithaca Sucks is a dot.com bust, a cyber-flop, a media minnow. Sure, you can google ithacasucks and find Ezra’s blogs. But you can also google ‘cat shit’ and come up with a lot more entries. Nobody came to Ez’s rescue and spruced up his website – the guy who designed it in the first place never even finished it! The thousands of projected orders for ithacasucks litter scoops never materialized. Now Ez has to cough up the dough to renew his site. It hardly seems worth it. Martha Stewart spent time in jail and came out a bigger success than when she went in – Ez has spent two years in Ithaca and look where it’s gotten him. Sucking air, charley.

It sucks. It sucks. It sucks.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:05 AM

 
raging bull

The raging bull elephant of Ithaca television is on another rampage. It’s Thursday night again and the Pegasys studios echo with the soulless trumpeting of a shock jock with nothing to say but an hour to say it in. Mike Angley, the self-avowed Pirate of Channel 13, ex-CIA operative, Ladies’ Man and White Negro dons his dark glasses, adjusts some dials and launches into a rambling, hour long diatribe against an area businessman who stiffed him in a deal.

Angley takes no prisoners but mentions no names. His attack, while nasty, personal and relentless, falls just below the event horizon for the legal department. This hit man of the microwaves knows his broadcast law –he’s been through it all before with a previous arrest on obscenity charges back in the 90’s. Time Warner, host for Channel 13’s Cable Access studio, came to his rescue then by way of defending their own right to air soft core on the Playboy Network. Angley became a local cult hero and attracted a small viewing audience which he quickly proceeded to shed by boring the hell of anyone who expected lively, titillating monologues every Thursday night.

The five viewers who, by all reports, watch Angley regularly must be the guys on the graveyard shift up at Cornell’s Safety Department. Those poor dudes have to stay up past ten – someone might break in and steal some nanotechnology and shrink Ithaca – who knows? Back in his college days, Ez used to head over to the neighborhood White Castle and lug back to the dorm a bag of those tiny, individually wrapped rat burgers. Stack up your books and notes in the john, eat a dozen of those things and you’d be up most of the night, glued to the ceramic. That’s the trick to get in a good night of cramming for exams. Only folks who have nothing better to do with their time will last through the first five minutes of Angley’s rant. The ensuing mix of personal fantasy, status reports on his diet, attacks on anyone and everybody from the Pope right on down to people with Save the Whale bumper stickers just fails to engage viewers who are jaded on Jerry Springer. This is just a local yokel with a beef, not Dick Cavett qua axe murderer.

On this particular Thursday Angley is getting really worked up. He grabs his bullhorn and yells BULLSHIT a couple of times. How appropriate for a guy who’s having a bad attack of verbal diarrhea right there on the telly . We’re wading in it –like a brown tide swooshing against the inside of cathode tube –it’s going to short circuit our set for christsake!! Angley is really stomping on this dude’s head –accusing of him of cheating on his partners, cheating on his taxes, cheating on his wife and, last but not least, cheating on his 8th grade homework. Have some mercy!

Interspersed between repeated blows to his victim’s dignity and personal reputation are Angley’s reminisces of working undercover for the CIA in China when the tanks rolled into the Square, fantasies about being the Babe Magnet of all times, exhortations about Virtue and Integrity. Angley is off the hook, he’s on a roll but the ship might very well capsize from the dead weight of this guy's empty patter. Suddenly, if you’ve lasted through all this, you sit up bolt upright and wonder if this might not be a guy who’d blow his own brains out in front of a camera. Could this be the night he picked -- the finale of Angley Live, prequel to Angley Dead? Will the janitors be mopping up Angley’s own blood off the studio floor for a change?

Think again. Angley comes back the following week, a lime green t-shirt shrouding his beefy shoulders, to celebrate St Patrick’s Day and kick off another night of bloodletting, maudlin self-promotion and psychopathic babbling. This time the novelty factor has worn off. Anybody, absolutely anybody with half a brain could do this talk show thing better, you say – and make it more lively and interesting. You could show footage of Chihuahuas fornicating and make television more appealing. Why doesn’t someone do just that – take the orientation, learn how to push the buttons and adjust a few dials and produce a show with a little more, ah – we’re reaching now – ah --intelligence? Ezra still believes in a classless society so he couldn’t very well say ‘class’ to describe the opposite of what Angley is doing on the air.

Why was Angley voted Ithaca’s best talking head? Why have intelligent Ithacans abandoned Cable Access to lunatics like Angley, bible thumpers, holy rollers of every ilk, right wing Republican savants, Catholic Workers with Ego? Public access television is a wonderful way to build community, encourage dialogue, promote freedom of ideas. Why, in Ithaca, has it become the roost for madmen and self-promoters who bring a limited range of ideas and interests to the table? What happened anyway to the Left? Are radicals in Ithaca camera shy? Or is this the age of the Patriot Act? When free speech is stifled or repressed, nasty speech fills the void. Is that it?

Here’s a guy like Angley who, at least on the air, passes himself off as a down and dirty, no holds barred, street fighting dude. He looks mean, talks mean, But he never manages to go for the head. His clumsy, barroom style of verbal kickboxing, if you can even call it that, depends on the ankle shot. In one sense, Angley is Everyman, filled with displaced anger and spewing resentment against a society that is corrupt, petty, cruel, unsympathetic to the plight of the little guy. But Angley’s ‘rage against the machine’ act is transparent and gets him no points because he comes across like some narcissistic jerk with an axe to grind, especially against the people around town who have shut him out, ignored and failed to recognize his ‘genius.’ Angley passes up his chance to speak for all the little guys in Ithaca and fails to tap into that uneasy fault line where the classes and races meet. It’s obvious he’s only on the air to blow his own trumpet.

The camera is his mirror. Angley likes what he sees because the mirror is filled with his own image. What other viewers see is a portrait of Dorian Gray after a hard night at the Chanticleer, a handful of diet pills and a Gimme chaser.

Ezra should go down and get on the air. Haha! Never happen. You all know he’s camera shy, has a tattoo of Mikhail Bakunin on his forehead and smokes too much to last an hour in the studio, fiddling with the dials.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 8:24 AM

 
anti-tourism

Some retired couple in Iowa is at this very moment looking over a glossy brochure flaunting the scenic highpoints of Ithaca, New York – intent on coming here for their summer vacation. Or maybe it’s the proud parents of a future Cornellian, visiting the campus for the very first time. Over there in Osaka, poring over the same glossy 4 ½ by 8 inch flyer in Japanese. Ithaca is gorges, state parks, a shimmering lake lined with marinas, lovely college promenades, glittering culture. Anyhow, Martha, it beat’s looking at cornfields all summer. Or the 24 hour harsh luster of neon billboards.

Suckers. Wait til they get here and discover the potholes, the empty store fronts, the snobby liberals, the last remaining withered, dead leaves of the counter culture. You can keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Ithaca.

They’re coming. The tourists in all their myriad shapes and sizes. Lugging digital cameras, camcorders, bug spray, credit cards, New York State phrase books. Soon they’re be strolling down the Commons past the bottle pickers, the hippie drum circles, the teenagers bumming smokes, the trendy boutiques that are so pricey that native Ithacans can’t shop there.

We need to head them off at the gorge. Adopt stern anti-tourist measures. Declare war on tourism. We want to keep Ithaca poor, wasted, sucking for air, decaying in its own natural juices. Who wants more hotels rising from the debris of our dead metropolis? More boutiques and bistros advertising blackened salmon specials?Who wants to be constantly telling people where Cayuga St. or how to get up to Cornell? Its Ka-u-ga, ok, buddy?

Got any ideas how we can ward off this summer’s tourist invasion? Ezra does. First, we send out a news story to the wire services that every single Ithacan has come down with mad cow disease. Or that there’s been a rash of legionnaire’s disease reported in Tompkins County. That there are crazed VFW guys, frothing at the mouth, pulling army surplus howitzers down Rt 13 to kill every fucking last tourist that ventures down the road from Syracuse in an SUV. Maybe we can take pictures of Cayuga Lake showing that it glows green in the dark. How about putting out the word that Cayuga Lake has disappeared? That it got sucked up to Cornell in a giant straw and never came back? Throw in for good measure a story about how some whacked out grad student in Chemical Engineering up at Cornell sprayed Agent Orange over a good part of Ithaca and environs from a crop duster.

OK. A few tourists will get through. We have to be ready to deal with them. We can get all the 4 to 8 years olds in town, dress them in rags and send them out to harass every tourist who shows up on the Commons. Got chewing gum, Mister, Salvia, Ecstasy? You want to meet my sister?

Then we put signs up along the highways – Tompkins County Leper Colony – 5 miles. Or another sign idea – Ithaca Nuclear Testing Area – Visitors Restricted.

By Ezra’s ghost, we’re on to something here. If there are no tourist dollars coming in, prices will start falling. Then we can enjoy some of that blackened salmon at fire sale prices.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 8:17 AM

 

death walk

The message is out.

If you have a death wish, visit Ithaca. If you're dead, you may already be there.

It's official. The city of Ithaca has declared open season on pedestrians. No fooling. Check out the headlines. Anybody with a SUV can hit and drag a pedestrian 50 feet to their death and simply drive away. Sure, you might end up with a ticket and a little damage to your car. But the next model year is out already so you can just hop down to Bill Cooke and pick up a brand new 2006 GM Tsunami. It weighs 42,000 lbs, has steel plated side panels, bullet proof glass, 8 ft high tires, a nice Ben Hur setup on the grill which allows you to spear your victim like a kebob. You can run over a small elephant without noticing much more than a slight vibation in the sound proof cab. Now you're heind the wheel and you can head over to Home Depot for the red light special. That what's this guy from Bersksire did after running over a 120 human being on Albany St. The da handed him a traffic violation. It was in the papers Friday, don't take Ezra's word for it.

Forget the art walk. Take a stroll down death alley. Cross the street when the light is green.

This could catch on. This has tbe potential to be bigger than the crow hunt in Auburn. Hunters invited in by the city blasted away, bagging nearly a 1,000 birds,
sending a strong signal to those little black suckers. This could bring folks in from as far away as LA. People are going to be taking the Ithaca ramp of the LA freeway. Cascadilla Creek is going to be running red.

In Ireland it is customary to mark the site of traffic fatalities with a little cross. At this rate Ithaca is going to resemble a big cemetery. .

Deadman walking. That's another term for pedestrian in Ithaca, New York. Stop to check out the metal horse on the Commons and get pancaked by someone driving some shiny monster that resembles a 21st century metal stage coach.

It's not funny. The only thing that's funny is how we all sit down and take what
gets heaped on our plate. The whole county is up in arms because a couple of demonstrators splatter blood on an American flag at the Triphammer recruiting station. The IPD and the DA give some guy a mere ticket for spilling the blood of our citizens and who says anything? Spilling innocent blood in Iraq is called patriotism.

Of all the sucky things Ez has seen in Ithaca, this takes the cake. Maybe you already had a suspicion something like this was going to happen. A huge parking garage going up between the library and the police station - a big new hotel. All these out of towners pouring into town. With their Jeep Crushers, GM Turbo Tanks, their Chevy Slayers, Nissan Threshers, Cadillac Doom Machines. You know, if you want to drive in from Jersey to visit Sean or Neil or Rachel on Parent's Weekend, you can probably kill a couple of pedestrians and still make the sale at the Bon Ton.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 3:24 PM

 
Buddha Voodoo

Mondo Ithaca. That’s right - if you thought that the 12 Tribes and their over- the-top jungle juice café was a little bizarre, hold on to your bagels. Ezra has a scoop that will make your snow cones melt.

While the rest of Ithaca is digging out from the latest snow storm and losing their mufflers to the biggest potholes in upstate New York, a growing number of locals are sneaking off to South America to dabble in the forbidden rituals of Candomble.
Google it. We’re talking Macumba. Quimbanna. In Haiti they call it Santiera. In any language, it’s that old black magic and it’s pretty potent stuff. Brought to the New World by millions of African slaves, West African animism or spirit worship has survived into the 21st Century, probably because it offers a better explanation of the universe than Catholicism, Capitalism and Consumerism.

So, you ask, are there actually Ithacans out here practicing voodoo, cutting off the heads of chickens and sticking pins into little dolls? ( Actually, many Ithacans enjoy a few mcnuggets now and again but they let someone else butcher the bird and you don’t call it voodoo even if has ritualistic overtones.) Well, take if from Ez, the truth is stranger than any fiction. He’s uncovered the first known congregation of voodoo-practicing Buddhists. That’s right, Buddha Voodoo and this new mystery religion has all the potential to be the next new thing in Ithaca. For bored Ithacans who have worked their way through radical politics, communalism, Hara Khrishna joyfulness, Green Party joylessness, ecological evangelism., in addition to sex, drugs and rock n roll, Buddha Voodoo is comfort food for the fidgety soul. Besides, you can make soup out of the rest of the chicken, a bonus for that frugal Yankee in all of us.

Why Buddha Voodoo? Here’s the facts. Ten years ago, a bunch of Buddhists with cash to burn decided to go the Club Med route and lure rich Americans and Europeans to glitzy meditation centers located in lush, tropical settings like Cancun and Bahia. As most of you know, Buddhism is not one of those guilt-ridden, angst-driven religions that set up a conflict for its members between the things of this world and the joys of the next. As far as Buddhists are concerned, this world is an illusion, false consciousness, nothing but smoke and mirrors. If you meditate enough, you can learn to enjoy a good steak, some chocolate mousse for dessert and a few drinks at the bar without botching your chances to be reincarnated as Bill Gates or some higher consciousness. So Club Buddha provided just the right setting to mix tantra, mantra and moolah.

The only problem is that several of these Club Buddhas were located near the cradle of Voudon or Voodoo. That’s like locating an ice cream parlor next to a candy store. You stop by for a scoop of Rocky Road and, by the time you make it back to the van, you ‘ve wound up with a box of chocolates.

And that’s how it happened that a couple of Ithacans wandered off the zen garden path to the seedier side of a little town named Comba de Santos or Comb of the Saints and found themselves communing with the orishas, praying to Exu or Oxcala, depending on what babalia or voodoo priest you meet. It was a little mysterious, a little outlandish, a little dangerous, sitting in a lotus position in a darkened room with dozens of candles flickering on the floor with strangers all around them, the sound of spooked chickens clucking in the next room, listening to the strange, foreign sounding words being chanted by the wild-eyed priest clutching a statue. But that’s why they had become a Buddhist in the first place. The way the words dharma and karma rolled off their tongues. Their restless spirit had already taken them to India and Tibet. They were the young and syncretic.

Besides, as mix and match goes, Buddha Voodoo wasn’t a contradiction in terms. It wasn’t like you had converted back to monotheism. There were all these spirits and it was fun to learn their names, to hang their pics on the fridge. Like Yemanji, the water goddess. And, if you found the very thing the orishas liked the most, a tasty rooster, or some small mammal, the spirits would reward you just like your credit card company. Help you improve your golf score, win the new bid, pick the next big stock. Not to mention the dolls. Yes, the dolls. Remember the prof who gave you a C in Chaucer. Well, all you had to do is run out to JoAnn’s Fabric, buy some material, clip, sew, clip and then stick in a pin. Instant payback! The guy who threw off your grade point average would be flopping around up there in the faculty lounge like a Macumba chicken.

Ez is giving out some free advice now. Listen up. If your boss or your neighbor, your mother in law, whoever, has just returned from Brazil sporting a deep tan, just keep your chickens indoors. And don’t mess with them whatever you do. They’re probably beheading chickens under a statue of Buddha in their rec rooms. And you really don’t want to mess with them.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 8:30 PM

 
eighth wonder

During the day Carl and Enzo attend classes up at the School of Architecture; they appear to be just another couple of nerdy looking grad students toting laptops and backpacks filled with 30 lb textbooks.

But Carl and Enzo are not your ordinary architecture students destined to design the next generation of Arby's and Bed Bath and Beyond. They want to build the city of the future. A city unlike any other city, housing thousands of low income families, perhaps somewhere in South America. Their city will be built totally of recycled materials, using stuff that people in the United States throw away everyday. Carl and Enzo have collected at last count 431,276 empty cigarette fliptop boxes. Their apartment downtown is overflowing. Karl and Enzo sleep on the floor in the living room because their bedroom is crammed with neatly stacked white and gold Camel Light boxes, red and white Marlboro boxes, blue Newport boxes. The bathroom is 75% filled to capacity, the closets are brimming. Carl and Enzo rent a garage in Dryden that houses 32,752 empty cigarette packs. Another storage unit in Danby is packed floor to ceiling with 24, 524 precisely stacked red and white 1 ½” x 1” x .3 inch boxes all donated by a smoker named Dave Jacobs. Once a month Carl and Enzo make a pilgrimage to Dave Jacob's grave site in Holy Name cemetery. They promised Dave before he passed away from a combination of cancer, heart disease and asthma that they would name a street in their city after him. The Dave Jacobs Blvd. Dave would have liked to think that his life counted for something.

Smokers all over Tompkins are knowingly or unknowingly contributing to the city of the future. Carl and Enzo approach people on the Commons, huddled in doorways, stamping their feet to keep warm as they puff away. The two wannabe city planners talk with mounting excitement, and will occasionally yank out a cardboard tube from their backpacks and roll out a detailed plan of the a city they plan to build for the poor, a city that recycles, built entirely of those annoying little cardboard boxes that you never know what to do with after you’ve finished the pack. 25% of the folks Carl and Enzo talk to have tried to recycle those suckers themselves, using them to house anything from paperclips to discarded razor blades. A farmer out in Groton actually shredded his empty Camel boxes into chicken snacks. Carl and Enzo gladly accept donations. They’ll come out to your house in their rusty VW bus and collect your contributions to the city of the future. Neither Carl or Enzo smoke. They exchange knowing smiles as they load the empties into the van. Maybe they're hip to the fact that most smokers won't live to the city of the future.

You can call them at this cell phone number to arrange a pickup. (315)472-9875.

Carl and Enzo estimate that they will need in the neighborhood of 4 billion packs to get the ball rolling, another 50 billion to complete the square mile wide project. Carl and Enzo have done the math. They're saving up to go to China next year to visit another wonder of the world, the Great Wall, and start canvassing for donations.

Carl and Enzo. Thinking outside the box. That's what they train you to do up there on the hill.



Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 8:52 AM

 
Wal-mart, New York

A new chapter in Ithaca’s history has been written. People are going to be talking about this for years. It’s huge. Big enough to replace the weather as the chief topic of conversation at Collegetown Bagels.

The I’s have been dotted. The ink is drying on the contracts. The little things that have slipped below the radar the last couple of weeks suddenly add up. All the secret visits to Arkansas, all the guys in cheap suits with Southern accents sneaking into City hall at all hours of the day and night, room service delivering bottles of Wild Turkey to the penthouse suite at the Holiday Inn, Lear jets with the large familiar yellow logo parked on the tarmac at Tompkins County Airport.

You can read it on the front page of the Ithaca Urinal tomorrow or you can read about it tonight right here at Ithaca Sucks.

The Wal-mart Corporation of Bentonville, Arkansas has bought out Ithaca, New York lock, gorge and bottle. In a matter of days every rusted Volvo in Ithaca will be sporting new bumper stickers. Wal-mart is gorges. Cops will soon be wearing the new uniforms – the ones with the cute little visor caps and the name tags that identify them as Customer Service Representatives. The smiling sun will wave over City Hall. Carolyn Peterson will be standing behind the counter, wearing prince nez glasses, sensible shoes and a bright new blue tunic, selling municipal bonds.

This is not a triumph of the human spirit. This is a sell out to corporate interests. This is a victory for greed, pure and simple. It’s a natural.

You’ve come a long way, Ithaca, from sleepy peddler village to dying upstate community to urban hyper-mart but you’ve remained loyal to your core values. Yankee enterprise, the power of the almighty $, the business of America is business. Hey, it’s expensive to run a city. Filling potholes, plowing the Commons so panhandlers can get around – nobody else shops downtown anymore – sponsoring those rinky dink festivals with the falafel booths. How many cuckoo clocks do you have to collect sales tax on to pay off the latest toxic spill?

No, they needed something big. A new hotel wasn’t going to do it. A movie duplex didn’t cut the mustard. More parking? For what? There wasn’t anything left downtown to draw that many people to fill all those parking spaces Al Cohen had sold the city. A pothole festival was too ridiculous to consider. The previous administration had co-opted the biggest retail space downtown for the public library creating the most literate group of people on welfare and unemployment in the United States. It was time to consider a bold move.

So now, when there’s a water main break on Seneca, just get on the phone and call for a week mop cleanup. Forget Ithaca Hours, we’ve got dollar off coupons now with Ezra Cornell's picture on the front. He's holding an axe. To chop prices.

The new bumper stickers alone will pay for a year’s worth of snow removal on the Commons. People will need to know how to get to Wal-mart, New York from Buffalo. Sell them a map. They’ll want to buy a tee shirt, a plastic water bottle, a snow shovel. Blue light specials on the Sam Walton Commons.

It sort of makes perfect sense doesn’t it?

Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 8:58 PM

 
the “f” word

What do Carolyn Peterson and George Walker Bush have in common? At first, you might not think there is a connection. One is a mayor of blue town, usa - a real granolaville complete with hippies, environmentalists, and card carrying social workers. There is a rumor that leading members of the Ithaca liberal intelligensia looked into the possibility of annexation with Canada. GWB, on the other hand, is the leader of the free world which seems to be shrinking all the time thanks to his efforts to spread the corporate gospel.

Wait a minute now.

Why has the frigging paperclip on Ezra’s screen, that ridiculous iconic reminder that we live in the worst of all possible times, that surreal companion to Ezra’s morning crap, hunched in front of the keyboard, morphed into a atomic nucleus with a silly punctuation mark spinning around like an electron? Yo, if you haven’t figured it out yet, Ezra sometimes composes the old morning blog as a Word document and you know what he has to contend with, don’t you? Mr. Paperclip. Maybe, you don’t know what Ez is talking about.? Maybe you think he’s losing his marbles. Get the meds. Flip through the DSM IV. Maybe the animated office supply character on Ezra’s screen isn’t a standard feature of Word 2000. Maybe it’s a hallucination. How would you know if you happened to be a born again neo-primitive who had just spent 15 years, hunting and gathering in the backwoods of New Jersey, refining your cave art, cracking walnuts with a tire iron? You re-entered civilization and decided to write your memoirs and suddenly, you were confronted with Mr. Paperclip and all this technology that tells you when you’ve made a spelling error or formatting blooper. Or, how about if you really did have problems with reality, were walking around with a bona fide psychiatric sticky tag and suddenly noticed that this icon on your screen was blinking at you and staring intently at everything you wrote. And what's with the body language? And what's with the sly faces? Why is it making those faces? Does it talk? Holy shit.

Did Ezra lose more than his train of thought, you ask? Nope. We’re talking about appearance and reality this morning. How reality is manufactured, that's right, factory produced by the media, by politicians and all their corporate sponsors. Ezra hates to admit it but all those Frenchies in theoryland like Baudrilliard may be right. Not that Ezra pretends to understand what they’re saying. It’s a frigging simulacrum, that's what it is, where is spell check when I need it, like those sly Frenchies have something on than Bill Gates? You better believe that Microsoft 2005 will have the latest theory buzzwords in spell check. Count on that.

So what does Carolyn Peterson have to do with George Walker Bush? They’re both politicians who have raised enough dough, or in Carolyn's case, baked more zucchini muffins to sell at bake sales than anyone else, bamboozled more retirees, squeezed more flesh, sat through more Rotary meetings to get themselves elected. Prior to being elected, they could say anything they damned well pleased as long as Dan Rather wasn't in the room. Once elected, politicians can say just about anything they damn well please and most people will believe them because they have taken on the role of authority figures in our lives, replacing our parents and teachers. With rank comes privilege. They get to be addressed as your honor, ride around in bullet proof cadillacs, surround themselves with flunkies like Marty Luster or Paul Wolfowitz.

Mr. Bush tells the world that there are WMD’s in Iraq. He even hints that there may be WMD’s planted all over the world, in places where we don’t own all the oil rights yet, and that it’s our duty to spread Freedom and Liberty and the American banking system to all those backwaters where there are fewer than 5 ATM’s. It costs 1,000 American lives to find out that, not only are there no WMD’s in Iraq, but that people over there are not lining up en masse to receive the sacrament of American Democracy.

Getting back to Ithaca, Carolyn Peterson has let it be known that 2005 is the Year of the Pedestrian. Can you believe that? Ezra is not making this up. It was in the Ithaca Urinal last Saturday. In a letter to the Editor. The Year of the Pedestrian. Is that why the city is erecting that mega-parking garage behind the Library at the cost of millions? Could that explain why the parking ramp on Green St
now resembles a working model of Crick and Watson's double helix? Is that why some poor woman was mowed down by a SUV on Albany Street, dragged fifty feet to her death, and the driver walked away with a slap on the wrist from the new Police Chief? And a complimentary snow shovel at Home Depot? Hey, Carolyn baby, the word is not getting out to the speed demons on Seneca St who sometime forget to slow down at the traffic lights. Your message is also not getting out to the absentee landlords in Ithaca who never shovel their walks. If this is the Year of the Pedestrian, you better issue snow shoes. SO look at it this way. If you're stupid enough to believe that 2005 is the Year of the Pedestrian, you’re probably stupid enough to believe that there were WMD’s in Iraq.


According to the independent accountants who get paid to sit in the audience with hand clickers during inaugural addresses, Bush used the “F” word 27 times, the “L” word 25 or some variation or another. That’s important to know because the speech otherwise wouldn’t have made any sense, having been typed out as it was by a team of Texas ranchers assembled in the Oval Office, armed with dictionaries, a copy of the US Constitution and a lunch bucket filled with bananas. The same squad of ranchers were later sent to Iraq to help out with the upcoming elections.

Ezra used to get his mouth washed out with Palmolive or Irish Spring as a kid when he used the other “f” word. Christ, if the nuns ever heard you use an "f" word, forget it. You owned a corner of the room for a year. Maybe even a trash can to sit in so that the other kids in the class got the point. You had a garbage mouth. Bush obviously has immunity because he stood up there in front of the nation and rattled out "f" words like a machine gun right in front of all those Supreme Court justices dressed like nuns. It’s not fair, is it?

How does Ezra get away with comparing a word like freedom with the real "f" word? If you live in Iraq or some other part of the world coveted by US corporations. American style democracy must seem a lot like gang rape. A lot of Iraqis have lost their entire families, their homes, their livelihoods, their dignity. Words like “freedom” and “liberty” lose any kind of meaning when they are tossed around on the point of a bayonet, scribbled on the walls of Abu Grahv prison, placed in context of those dark places we've created like Guatanomo Bay outside the pale of international law. Words like freedom and liberty have suddenly entered the pornographic lexicon of power and corporate mind control. You have the freedom to vote, yes, but the candidates won't be announced until the day of elections because we've sort of created this mess over there. Oh, and we've preseleted them. And written the constitution.

At least Carolyn doesn’t use any of the “f” words in her speeches. She's been known to say "fondue" a lot.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 8:25 AM

 
negative news

Are you tired of reading the canned news you get from the Ithaca Urinal, the club news that passes for community news in the Ithaca Crimes, the official news from the New York Mimes? Sick of watching the talking heads on the tube reading what they consider the news from a teleprompter? Ever wonder why they don’t tell you what’s happening in Miramar or Brazil? Does Don Rather know where Miramar is? Do you feel more cosmopolitan catching the limey beat on BBC? Until they broadcast the soccer scores from Liverpool? Fed up with experts and sound bites, A little disgusted that all the news you seem to get comes to you from a corporation? Hey, it’s just another commodity, right? A product. Maybe you ought to consider that you get as much information from the back of a cereal box? Perhaps you get as much information from a supermarket tabloid?

Or is it the content? Maybe you’re sick and tired of hearing about Iraq? Tsunami victims? Hey, we sent them enough money already. Can’t they get off the front page? The good thing about getting news from MSNBC or those other chirpy web news services is that the really depressing stuff disappears within a couple of days and you get back to the serious stuff like rating the new model year of SUV’s. Yeah, and they advertise services where you can find killer babes in your neck of the woods.

A couple of people in Ithaca, New York must have been as depressed as you are about the style and content of the news. They got together and produced this zippy new rag called Positive News. It’s all about the good things that are happening in the world. Imagine that! No more sad, sick and cynical shit about war, famine, plague, death, natural disasters, man-made disasters, the corruption of power, the power of corruption, corporate misuse of the world’s resources, man’s inhumanity towards man, man’s inhumanity towards every other species on the planet. No more headlines about snipers, baby swipers, sick motherfuckers killing their girlfriends, sick motherfuckers killing their entire families, sick motherfuckers killing entire ethnic groupings. Not a word about Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson, Martha Stewart, Kenneth Lay. You know, the typical stuff that brings you to the edge of your toilet bowl.

Nosirreebob. The Positive News only prints news stories that are wholesome, inspiring and edifying. Or at least, that’s what Ez thinks they print. Because he can’t really bring himself around to reading an entire issue of Positive News. Think about it for a second. Really get your mind around it. Are these people on drugs? Like, who decides in the first place what’s positive? What if there’s nothing positive that week, like 99.9% of the planet just contracted ebola from a can of devilled ham that was dropped out a plane by George Bush, Donald Rumsfield and Condi Rice and the only people that survived are millionaires? Would you consider it positive that a couple of people survived?

From what Ez can make out without having to really open Positive News and process the contents is that this is a newspapers about do-gooders. Do-gooders who win the Nobel Prixe for Peace. (Since Alfred Nobel, the guy who invented dynamite is the same dude who endowed the prize, this is like General Motors giving Ralph Nader some kind of award or other. ) Do-gooders who do good things for the planet. Do-gooders who do good things for poor little people from other countries who don’t have it so good. Do-gooders who don’t want to trash the fucking system that makes sure these poor little people don’t have it so good. They want to make the system care. They want to improve the system. They are not pissed off enough to throw a brick through someone’s window. They are not angry at all which only goes to prove that they must have it pretty good. They don’t have to work at Cornell Dining, scraping dishes. They don’t have to work in restaurants serving latte drinks to yuppie college students, live with 16 other people in a 3 room apartment, pay $650 to some jerk mechanic to get their water pump fixed only to have their brakes fail the following week. Which means they have plenty to eat, plenty of time to do good. They are professional do-gooders or else amateur do-gooders trying to break into the tight little club of professional do-gooders. These are not people who Ezra would ever invite over for dinner.

Then Ezra read the credits. He knew at a glance, the scales fell off, he had it all figured out. It was a sinister liberal plot after all. There was no mistake.

Marty Luster and Paul Glover were, according to the credits, associated with this attempt to burn the Outhouse. Just like the Nazis burned the Reichstag. It was as plain as day.

Marty Luster is the Ithaca city attorney. Former state assemblyman. Right hand man to Madame Peterson. The people that brought you Progressive Ithaca, that semi-mythical hamlet where the races mix harmoniously, where the only poor people are the poor in spirit, social work capital of the world. . The folks that paid off the editors of the Utne Reader to rate Ithaca one of the most enlightened cities in Amerika. Despite the fact that it was New Paltz, New York that issued wedding licenses to gay couples, not Ithaca. Despite the fact that the city of Ithaca issued an eviction notice against a minority businessman and got their tails sued off. Despite the fact that Ithaca’s African Americans are marginalized and that the black community center is barely able to keep its head above water. Yessireebob, here’s a guy who knows how to hang one of those deodorizer bulbs in his toilet bowl.

And Paul Glover, Ithaca’s Mr. Fantasy himself. The former anarchist who made a convenient switchover to the Green Party, tried to run for mayor, garnered the Ecstasy vote. Dear Mr. Fantasy, please bring the trolley back, give us Franco-American harmony, happy money, happy Tuesdays, dancing in the streets.

Ezra says, follow the money. Where the fuck did these dudes get the money to put out this slick, five color, 15 page digest of pleasantness? Do you know how much dinero it costs to put out a newspaper basically the size of the Ithaca Crimes? Do you think Wal-Mart could be footing the bill? After all, it was Wal-Mart that turned the smiley face into a universal symbol of American progress.

Maybe Ez will have to dig a little deeper. In the meantime, Ithacans, take heart. You can always get your negative news right here at Ithaca Sucks.

Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 4:44 PM

 
perma-freeze culture

In Ithaca, New York, conversation invariably rolls around to the weather. This is partly due to the fact that the weather in Ithaca changes just about every 20 minutes. This metereological anamoly explains why folks walk around in bermuda shorts in the middle of winter and it also explains why 75% of Ithacans can be seen lugging around Aldi's bags. (For the benefit of out-of-towners, Aldi's is a chain of discount grocers that specializes in off- brand canned goods like Chicken of the Lake tuna, Mel Torme pineapple chunks, shit like that.) These folks carry around a change of clothing in those easily recongizable plastic sacks - mittens, parkas, carharts, sun screen lotion, hawaiian shirts, sun glasses, stuff ther're need when the next front rolls in.

The other reason people in Ithaca constantly talk about the weather is that they have nothing else to talk about. Nothing fucking happens in Ithaca to talk about. People who live in the suburbs race home from their jobs to hop on John Deere's and ride around for the next three hours mowing the grass or plowing snow (sometimes in the same day.) Folks in town just go out to bars every night and collect those little round drink tokens. Once a month they round all their tokens and get blitzed, ending up in the emergency room at the hospial to get their stomachs pumped just so they will have something to talk about. There's nothing vaguely resembling culture in Ithaca - at least, not for under $25.00. Theater tickets cost $25, music festival tickets cost $25, movie tickets cost $25 if you take a date and stop for a lae night latte . Who can afford culture in Ithaca on the money you make rolling pizza dough or scraping the remnants of black bean frajitas off a lot of dishes?

Ezra is stretching the truth. People under 25 do talk about something besides the weather in Ithaca. They talk about permaculture. Of course, nobody under 25 has ever fully explained to Ezra what permaculture means either because they don't really know what it means or they just don't feel comfortable talking about it to someone over 25. After all, anybody over 25 knows that, if anything is transitory,it's certainly the culture. This shit is being canned, reinvented, changed, cannibalized, turned inside out, every 5 minutes. Now that isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Think about this way. You grew up in the 1950's listening to Mario Lanza records. Would you want to listen to Mario Lanza records for the rest of your life? Would you want to be frozen in time, constantly reprising the hoola hoop, big tail fins, tv dinners, bouffants that look like bee hives, all of that shit? There are folks that roll around Ithaca trapped in their own private time warps. There are Jerry Garcia look a likes, '60's stoners, '70's-style radicals, Yippie wannabees, '50's conformists, Stalinist holdouts, guys who relive D-Day and collect Nazi paraphanalia, every imaginable type of time-looped specimen going back as far as you want to go. Hey, change is good. What's the story with permaculture anyhow?

Ezra started thinking about this crap driving through Trumansburg Friday morning. There was a big freak snow storm that morning that coated everything with theat cutsey Currier & Ives patina of snow. So it looked just like a post card. Ithaca and environs often resembles a post card which is why folks around here confuse appearance with reality.

Now Trumansburg is one of those picture post card types of towns that blend turn of the century architecture with 60's counterculture. The hippies all settled there back in the late 70's, grew rich, buying up property or running bistros with names like the Rongovian Embassy, the Jack in the Beanstalk Dry Cleaner's, the Cabbage Patch Auto Supply Emporium, you get the drift. In fact, this legendary bar in Trumansburg which really is named the Rongovian Embassy, just reopened after being shut down by the cumulative impact of DWI stakeouts and the death of Jerry Garcia. Dod you know that for a time nobody in Trumansburg could drive because they all had their licenses pulled? Nobody could even get to the Rongovian Embassy unless they lived downtown.

So, on this nasty, cold winter morn, here Ezra is rolling through this too cute for words gemeinschafty little town frozen in time with the 1890's brick facades, the hippie dippie bistros with hand painted signs - past tofu pup millionaires getting out of their BMW's, their pony tails just a bit on the grey side, going into the Ye Olde Coffee Bean or equally trendy homegrown coffee joint for a $3.50 AM cappuchino. Ezra couldn't even afford to rent a parking meter in this town. Fucking A. As they say. If this is what they call permaculture, give Ezra that good old fashioned mass market, out of the package, still evolving culture any old day.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:25 AM

 
living wage theater

The curtain is coming down on one of the longest running liberal pantomines in Ithaca. Somewhere off in the wings, Walmart is slouching towards I-town, having vanquished the anti-development forces arrayed like a bunch of puny denim-armored St. Georges' shadowboxing that old price chopping monster. You can almost imagine the beast's smiley faced gorgon's head just brimming with this huge, complacent grin. The last feeble salvo in the battle has just been fired by valiant Pete Meyers of the Living Wage Council in a letter to both local newspapers. You can read it in the Jan 5th issue of the Ithaca Crimes.

Ezra's got to chuckle. He's been watching this tired old drama on and off for the last 15 years. The first round went to the hippies amd liberals. As stadium sized big boxes sprang up all over the country, Ithacans sucessfully resisted the siren call of big retail. They had a mall, a couple of strip plazas, some fast food joints and that's pretty much how it stayed for years and years. Woolworth's pulled out of downtown Ithaca and the illuminati had their way, forgoing the promise of tax revenue and magnet stores, turning the space into the new public library. Of course, the cost of running a library that size forced the County to cut services and reduce hours. Nonetheless, the anti-development forces were supremo.

Then Al Cohen came along. Al was a politican's politican. He smiled and waved at you even if you had just rolled into town for the first in a '54 Studebaker with your couch tied to your trunk. You were a potential voter. Al loved people, especially developers and chain store scouts. He loved to get free tickets to football games, free rent from club owners, free motorcycles, free blenders, free anything. Al wheeled and dealed while Carolyn Peterson and her liberal Fall Creek property-owning buddies just sat around, bobbing their heads like spring operated canaries. Before you knew it, Rt 13 was all parcelled up, tax abatements were passed out like jelly beans and Home Depot, Lowes, Bed & Bath, Barnes & Noble etc etcetera rolled into town, changing the appearance of Ithaca forever.

Sure the progressives fulminated, wrote reams of letters, tossed gravel at a couple of bull dozers. But the deed was done. Everybody out in the 'burbs had bought SUV's and they all needed somewhere to go on weekends.

So, meanwhile on the last barricade, Pete Meyers is writing," In fact, Wal-mart not only creates jobs, it also destroys jobs. A study of 1,750 counties where Wal-Mart opened a store showed that after five years retail employment in these counties has increased by an average of only 50 jobs." That's 50 more jobs than Pete Meyers and his cronies created, running their all-volunteer Peace and Justice Gift Shop above Autumn Leaves. Maybe Pete is afraid that Wal-Mart will open their own Peace and Justice Gift Shop and compete with his operation.

Pete continues, " A Congressional study estimates that a Wal-Mart store like the one in Ithaca will result in taxpayes having to pay $750,000/year for things like housing assistance, Title I expenses, health care programs, tax crdits and deductions for low-income families and low income energy assistance that many Wal-Mart employees may be eligible for. Pete must have gone to school up on the hill at Ezra Cornell's School of Sophistry. Holey moley, Pete, you're not even a tax payer, having no known source of income. You're probably a tax resister, fercyingoutloud. Why are you worried about the taxpayers? And doesn't the fact that there were no jobs for people prior to Wal-Mart moving in mean that all that money was going out anyway for welfare and low income maintenance? Hey, look again, Pete. Half the city eats at Loaves & Fishes, the local soup kitchen. Maybe some of the folks who work for Wal-Mart will stop coming around to the kitchen and start eating at the company lunch counter. And, Pete, by the way, people around Ithaca could use those 50 jobs!

Ezra is no patron of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is what it is. It supplies cheap shit to the masses who have all been suckered into believing that being able to buy cheap shit is the real meaning of life. Whoopdedoo. Ezra just wants to know why progressive do-gooders like Pete Meyers were never able to come up with an alternative economic model for Ithaca that would make Wal-Mart the unappealing option for thousands of consumers and their families. That is, if you overlook the swap shops, the trendy boutiques, the snooty bookstores, the bagelries, the co-ops that charge $3.00 for an organic avocado, the shopper's world that provisioned Ithaca prior to malls, fast food huts and big box paradises. Come on, Pete. Not everybody gets a free lunch!
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 9:19 PM

 
citizen cornell

Ezra drove up the hill past the entrance to Llenroc today on his way to the Magic Mountain. Why Ezra was wending his way up to the Magic Mountain in the first place is a subject for another blog. Readers of Ithacasucks know how Ezra feels about Cornell. The feeling is mutual, he's sure. All the checkpoint huts guarding entry to campus come equipped with a grainy photograph of Ezra as a young blogger. Usually covering up the Osama Bin poster. Persona Non Gratis. Ezra is less welcome up at Cornell than the head of Al-Quaeda, a known terrorist organization.

Anyway, Ezra glanced up at the massive stone pile that represented Ezra Cornell's power and preeminence in the universe. A chill came over him. How totally different are the lives of the rich and powerful from the lives the rest of us lead, he thought. Imagine heating the frigging place. Imagine shovelling the driveway in winter.

Ezra's second thought was - why didn't he just name it Lenroc? Couldn't he drop an "l" and make it less Welsh sounding? All is vanity.

Think about it for a moment. Ezra Cornell was the Citizen Kane of Ithaca. Llenroc is EC's Hearst Castle. He was the wealthiest, most influential, most powerful man in Tompkins County. Fuck the Tremains; they may have got there first and donated a few acres to build parks but EC made up for lost time, parvenu that he was. He founded the local college, the library, the banks. He even started his own church. He owned a lot of the land. Once he started building his little neoGothic matchbox empire on East Hill, he controlled the whole Monopoly Board. His son became governor of New York, a buddy of Roscoe Conkling, Chester A Arthur, Grover Cleveland and all the political grandess of the Gilded Age in America.

Imagine how those cats lived! How many frigging butlers did he have, ferrying those
sherry trays around from one end of Llenroc to the other? How many scullery maids did EC have down in the kitchen, fussing over the frilly anklets for the Thanksgiving Day turkeys? Holy shit.

We're talking American Brideshead. We're talking robber barons. Masters of the Universe. Gilded Age. Age of Excess. And Blogger Ezra is wondering if his car will make it up the hill.

The parallels are interesting. We're living in a different age now but little has changed in how the rich enjoy their wealth. It's a new Gilded Age and billionaires are scoffing up Van Gogh's and Picassos to hang in their bathrooms. But what has changed is how people have become just a bit more uncomfortable talking about the trappings and accouterments of big money in the same way. Millionaires like to walk around without ties. They sport the Common Touch. Except for Donald Trump and he's not really that rich.

Ezra Cornell was rich. Once he got rich, he never looked back. Did he have a favorite sled as a child? Did he whisper something mysterious, barely audible on his death bed? Like Telegraph Pole? Or Big Red Hockey?
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 9:25 PM

 
What If Department

As usual, Cornell University is far ahead of the curve. slam dunking the competition. Yesterday, the university sent out a bulletin announcing that it would be starting up the first Alternative History program in the US this coming Fall semester. That's right, folks. The What If Department.

For those of you in the know, Alternative History is that trendy new branch of history that marries sci fi with historical methodology to ask questions like - what would have happened if the South had won the Civil War. Yo, dude, we'd all be whistling dixie.

CU has hired the foremost alternative historian on the planet, Dr. Lee Harvey Spengler to head up the program. Dr. Spengler hails from Chicken Rice University in Camden, NJ, a school long known for its cutting edge curriculum. Founded by scions of the Campbell Soup fortune, Chicken Rice University was also the first school to offer courses in the history of product development and the phenomenology of soup. Dr. Spengler, who, incidentally is a distant descendant of that famous pessimist and depressive, Oswald Spengler, has a reputation for mixing and matching academic disciplines. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the topic - What If Spinoza Converted to Buddhism? Since graduating from Chicken Rice University in 1982, Spnegler has authored several books, including The Industrial Revolution Didn't Happen, and Japan Won!.

Dr. Spengler has assembled a faculty of heavy hitters from all over the world - alternative economists, alternative physicists, alternative geographers, alternative sociobiolog ists, etc etc. What better place than Ithaca, New York - the alternatives capital of the universe - to launch such an exciting program, you ask? Well, Dr. Spengler would have preferred Trenton State College but, unfortunately, that little known two year college in New Jersey, just couldn't come up with the dough.

Ezra has peeked at the new prospectus and definitely approves. Yep, the fools on the hill are finally on the right track. Ezra is particularily excited about the course outline for Alternative American History 101 which covers topics like Vietnam, the 51st State; Adolf Hitler, 29th President of the US; and Worker's Paradise, What if Eugene Debs Got Elected?

Who knows? Ezra might end up there on the hill, wearing a beanie and sporting a Big Red sweat shirt. Can you imagine that? Ez a beanie boy?

Well, Ezra has been mulling over a couple of topics for his doctoral thesis. He's particularily fond of two that he came up with to plumb the detours of local history. It's a toss up between:

What if Ezra Cornell had been born an African American?

and

What if Jeffrey Dahmer Attended Cornell?

Pretty interesting stuff, eh?
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:00 AM

 
Cult of the Baristas Revisited

All over Ithaca people are disappearing. Young people, middle aged people, old people. One by one.

So far it's been very gradual, almost imperceptible. A few here, a few there. Not like Latin America, you know, the military junta disappearance blues. That doesn't happen in America the beautiful (to distinguish the US from americas with small 'a's, those less beautiful Americas ruled by dictators and paramilitary gangs.) People aren't herded out of bed in the middle of the night, taken to a football stadium and 'disappeared' , only to have their skeletal remains discovered in a bog decades later.

That's not America the beautiful. Yet. We have 4 more years however.

In America, the 'disappeared' are usually called runaways. That is, when the people who vanish are not small children, abducted by an estranged parent, or sexual predators who haven't yet appeared on America's Most Wanted. (Only in America. Sociopaths and psychopaths have their own tv series.) Teenagers run away from homes that are too restrictive or parents that are too oppressive. Or they run away to catch up to their dreams in big cities. Sometimes they end up in hippie communes run by Charlie Manson wannabees. Occasionally the disappeared find themselves washing dishes, making wraps, and serving coffee to yuppie college students.

Yes, it's happening in Ithaca. Right here in I-town, rhymes with Pie, stands for pie in the sky, it's a lie, can't you see, and see rhymes with 'c" for cult.

Ezra's on the case. Call it the case of the Cult of the Baristas. Right, Holmes?Watson, come here. Ezra needs you.

Ezra has seen the spider like tentacles of the Reverend Billy Bob, what ever his name is, you know, the dude from Arkansas, curling around Ithaca. Ezra has seen how they operate. Those adepts of the Secret Sandwich, the cohorts of the Mate Factor.
They're at work as we write this. Making wraps, brewing batches of their evil tea-like drink, lacing it with drugs that gradually reduce the will power of unsuspecting patrons. They're worse than the tobacco companies for crying out loud. You go in for a lunch special, you know, half a wrap and a cup of soup. First, you're sucked in by the exotic ambience, the palm trees, the sweetly fragrant tropical plants, so mysterious and inviting, especially if you live in a world of perpetual winter like Ithaca. Then, they give you a free cup of Mate Factor. Before you know it, you're making wraps somewhere in Vermont or Ithaca, New York, growing a beard, wearing baggy, distinctively unsexy clothes that you wouldn't even find at the Salvation Army.

Ezra has seen them chatting up their prospective victims on the Commons. Overheard snatches of converation. "Hey, do you want to believe in a God that doesn't forgive you?" Do you want to work for nothing, turn over your checking account to the Reverend Billy Bob, sleep in a tennis complex? Do you want to be a barista of God? Or do carpentry for the shady construction company that goes around the country, building restaurants that serve as fronts for the Rev. Billy Bob's sinister empire?Hey, you get Saturdays off.

Ok, Ithacans, you thought they were here just to run a restaurant?





Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:26 AM

 
New Year's Resolutions

So, did ya have a good time last night? Was it worth it? Mixing all that wine, beer, champagne, scotch, bourbon, gin, absinthe, Peruvian plum brandy, bizarre. exotic varieties of spirits from every liquor distilling backwater in the world? Did you have a good time, hugging the ceramic maiden, read lowly toilet bowl, spewing out all matter of green liquids, blue fluids, yellow ooze, black death? Does it feel like you have a bleeding ulcer in your brain? Maybe it's a hemorroid. Hey, maybe it's even a brain tumor. Better make those New Year's resolutions now, You might not live long enough to keep them.

Ezra's made a couple of resolutions of his own.

Since it doesn't look like he's going to get out of this flinty, soulless peddlar village any time soon, Ezra's decided sometime in 2005 to:

1) to book the presidential penthouse of the new Ithaca Hilton next December 31, hire about 50 prostitutes, ladies of the evening, what have you, assemble 30 of the loudest, most raucous bands in all of Ithaca, throw a 75 hour party catered by the Green Star, announce that he is the second coming of Dick Clark and, then throw himself off the roof at the appropriate moment;

2. enroll at Cornell University's Nanotech Institute (College of the Small) and learn how to build a phazer or what have you ray gun and zap everybody in Ithaca. This will solve the housing and employment problems for once and for all. You can fit about 100 people who are now the size of mice into every studio apartment. The unemployed can work up at Cornell in laboratory experiments, ingesting pharmaceuticals for the big drug companies and biotech giants that fund research up there on the hill. Ithaca will be more democratic because you can quadruple the size of city council;

3. write a biography of Al Cohen.

4. be nice to Cornell students who parade up and down the Commons, yapping on their cell phones, helping the local economy by driving up the price of rentals, throwing their daddy's plastic around in marginal boutiques, seducing eachother endlessly over shrimp scampi at the local bistros. Even though they make Ezra puke.

Well, none of these resolutions seem very practical. When all is said and done, beyond resolving to quit smoking and begin to enjoy 7 months of winter, there aren't many pathways to self improvement or personal redemption in Ithaca, so Ezra pretty much resolves to grow nastier by the minute.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:29 AM