Ithaca Sucks

Ithaca Sucks

A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

rad watch

People need role models today more than they ever did.

Growing up, Ez remembers cutting out Dewar's Profiles from magazines and pasting them all around his bedroom. Now tell me you don't know what a Dewar's Profile is.

It's a lifestyle thing, stupid. Cool people drank Dewar's scotch. Architects, software engineers, magazine editors, jet setting photographers, guys who had penthouse pads, and dated sleek elegant blondes who shopped at a better cut of store than K-Mart. It wasn't about the booze, it was about status. Ez couldn't wait until he turned 21, be able to walk into a classy bar, no, not like the Chanticleer, more like Kilpatrick's --one with wood panelling, a shiny brass rail and cool,young, elegant professionals gathered around the rich dark wood bar, kicking back $7.00 cocktails. Ez imagined himself walking up to the bar, flashing a $50 at the bartender and asking casually for a Dewars and water with a little ice. Then all eyes would be on Ez; he'd be the apotheosis of cool and that was just fine with him.

But , when in Ithaca, do as the Ithacans do. And Ithaca's all about being rad. So Ez has decided to highlight some of the cool, trendy, rad people in Ithaca. Because we all need role models. So here's one of those young people to watch for in the future.

IS Rad Watch Profile

Megan Radcliffe-Brown
Street Name: Savage Moon Goddess
Age: 19
Occupation: Future Radical History Guru
Latest Books Read: Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States, Eckert Tolle's The Power of Now
Current Interests: Finishing all 7 Harry Potter books before September, organizing a cell phone distribution for the remote Tiriyo tribe of the Amazonian basin, " Hey, why should the hegemonic Empire deprive them of the power to organize their own social networks? Why should they have to depend on drums and smoke signals? "
(Hope they get those satellites in place.)
Greatest Achievement: Being the first person in Ithaca to watch Democracy Now on an I-Phone.
Favorite Beverage: Carmel Cinnamon Frappuccino from Starbuck's. "I like to go in to Starbuck's after class, plop down with a beat up copy of Emma Goldman, and just cozy up with a cool frap."
Favorite Place to Be: Loaves and Fishes Soup Kitchen at St. John's Episcopal Church. "I just love that feeling of solidarity I get, eating tuna casserole with the masses."

Way to go, Megan. She's our hero.

Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 8:06 AM

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Father and Son

The Thought Police were busy last night. Would you believe someone just wiped out Ez's email account? Yep. The familiar email address - iscentral@hotmail.com - that millions of you have written to, seeking advice with romance, finances, homeopathic remedies, which school to attend (not Cornell) and countless other life and death questions. Ezra had the largest storage cache in the industry. A pair of servers in an air conditioned room behind a Dunkin Donuts in Idaho were devoted to archiving Ez's vast correspondence with his fans. Now the record is gone, poof, vanished, donut powder.

F'ing A. Who could have done Ez wrong? Ez tried logging in to this email account this am to check on the morning mailbag, only to find that the idiots at Microsoft didn't recognize his account. You know how you click on the link when you forget your password? Hell, Ez couldn't even do that. He kept getting the account verification screen.

F C U K Y U O

ENTER THE CHARACTERS YOU SEE IN THE BOX. nOT CASE Sensitive. Why?
('cause you are a stupid idiot with the memory of a gnat.)

Three times, Ez filled out the stupid screen every times. MSN wouldn't let him answer the original password question he had formulated 4 years ago to deal with the exactly this situation - What was the name of Ezra Cornell's sled? Binkie.
What, you never saw Citizen Kane? Bummer.

Lately Ez has been lamenting the fact that you can't find Charlie Chan reruns anymore? Ez loved watching Charlie Chan on weekends. You remember when the tv screen was about 12 square inches and your imaginary universe was black and white. (Actually, Ez doesn't remember those days but his great grandfather told him all about them.) Ez went into Hollywood Video the other day looking for Charlie Chan reruns but came out empty handed. Let's face it, Buffy the Vampire doesn't replace Charlie Chan on a rainy afternoon.

Despite the obvious racial stereotyping directed at Asians -- Charlie was played by a number of non-Asian actors made up to look properly Chinese -- the plots of these serialized detective films always kept you at the edge of the couch as the main character and his bumbling offspring, Number One Son, battled a host of criminal geniuses. Actually, Ez just checked his references and found that a lot of the Chan movies were re-released on DVD by Fox Studios back in 2006.

What does all this have to do with anything, let alone the incursions of the Thought Police? Your guess is as good as Ez's.

Gerald Manly Hopkins once penned the lines, the child is father to the man? Something like that came to mind when Ez was uploading images to his blog this morning. He had uploaded the paranoiac mug of J. Edgar Hoover first, then the shot of a smiling, self-assured, imperial Bill Gates only to find the order reversed.
What Ez had hoped to prove was that the idea of a vast empire of control and surveillance dreamed up by the little, gender swapping G-man had come to fruition under the aegis of Bill Gates and Microsoft. Hoover had a file on just about everybody including Dr. King. Can you imagine what he would have done with a little computer age technology? Holy Bonnie and Clyde!

But perhaps the real Age of Surveillance has just begun? The McCarthy era was just a tryout for Big Brother.

Does Bill Gates have any kids? Do they look like J. Edgar Hoover? Are they playing with little plastic machine guns?

What does all this have to do with Ez's email? Well, sometimes Ez gets this sneaking suspicion that someone planted spywear in his computer. Maybe some budding cybercop at Cornell? Or was it the innocuous looking NYSEG meter reader? Or could it be Carolyn Peterson.

Anyway, Ez's new email address is : ezrakidder@gmail.com. Please write.

PS: Thanks to a loyal reader, the mystery has been cleared up. Remember Renfield in the novel and movie of the same name, Dracula. You know, the guy who ate flies. Well, let's imagine that they let him out and he went to school for computer science and learned to hack email accounts and assorted dirty cyber tricks like that. Yep. He hangs his diploma from one of those online factory schools or is it CORNELL? right next to his fly strip. Did you know that he was hired by a consortium made up of all Ez's enemies, CU, NYSEG. CP (her honor) to send nasty messages to people under Ez's email moniker? As a result, Bill Gates, who is probably in on the plot, shut Ez's email account. Well, Ez apologies for the nastiness and wants you to know that he will persevere despite these outrageous attempts to shut him down and destroy his credibility. Onward, Christian soldiers. The truth will prevail.

Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 9:02 AM

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Why the Dalai Lama's Visit is Important (Release No 2)

It's surprising that no one has asked Ezra what he thinks about the Dalai Lama's upcoming visit to Ithaca. Instead, they picked some cheese ball who takes a god awful picture to orchestrate the official sounds of self-satisfied clucking in an Ithaca Journal guest editorial. Yup, that guy looks like his picture was snapped after being arrested for having sex with an underage frozen butterball turkey in the men's room at Stewart Park. Not that there is anything wrong with consensual sex but, let's face it, that's hardly consensual.

Well, what makes the Dalai Lama's pending visit so important? First of all, it makes Ithaca look like it's some dime plated holyland, a spiritual place as it were. Instead of a wasteland of stoned out hippies and zoned out young people obsessed with personal shopping and owning the last techno toy to flip out at parties, Wow, man, I can push this button on my G-phone andsee, I can track what my dog in Wisconsin had for dinner as it sluices down Rover's gastrointestinal system. Aren't you terribly impressed?? Wanna see what this button does?

Wow, Ez is forgetting something. It's the time of year when everyone in Ithaca under the age of 25 walks around like they are in a state of perpetual heat. Which means you can catch all the wonderful varieties of sexual display. Gee, Myrtle, don't the kids in this town wear any clothes?

Do you think Carolyn Peterson reads this blog? That just popped into Ez's head this very second. Like maybe she's worried that Ez's campaign to unseat the Prune Queen is gaining steam. As if Ez was going to tip his hand, show what was tucked away in his bag of campaign dirty tricks. Yeah, Carolyn, Ez has the pictures. You know what pictures Ez means. Juicy juice. Carolyn riding around in a tank at the School of the Americas, shouting Whippee!

Yep, the Dalai Lama's visit is important because it elevates Ithaca above common cloth cities like Germantown, Pa and Yuma, Texas. The Dala Lama has, to Ez's knowledge, never made an appearance in Yuma. And, anyway, there are 2,262,000 hits for Ithaca New York on Google and only 1,640,000 hits for poor little eat-your-heart-out Yuma. We all know that the Dalai Lama checks those kinds of things out before he makes out his itinerary.

Only kidding, lamaheads. The Dalai Lama strikes Ez as an all right guy. Do you think he'll stop in Trader K's while he's in Ithaca to find something dressy to wear in saffron? He 's trying his best to save Tibet from becoming a big outlet for cheap Chinese products . MSN reported today that there are 1 billion Chinese shoppers scouring the planet for bargains on pink flamingo lawn ornaments. And he's also trying to save places like Ithaca from the devastating entropy of consumerism, the bottomless pit of yuppie narcissism and the narcolepsy of the high life. Oh please save us, Dalai Lama, from the frightening ordinariness of bouncing between Starbucks, Simeons and Felcia's Atomic Lounge. From the need to be cool and keep up appearances, from the compulsion to score the very latest gadgetry, from the need to increase download speed, and widen the income gap. That's a big mission. Let's hope he can do it.

Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:11 PM

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