A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 
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