posts tagged with: ithaca

I’m sorry, but once you have kids, you stop being cool. Really.

The sooner you accept this, the happier you’ll be. If you wait until your kids grow to be teenagers and forcibly prove it to you, the shock may destroy you.

Truth!

For some weird reason, almost nobody came to work today. It snowed last night, but only a few inches and this is Ithaca, so people should be well used to that by now.

It probably says a lot about me that on days like this I wonder if the zombie apocalypse has started and I’m missing it. Of course, I’d surely find out later (with my luck, I’d leave work only to be munched on my way out the door).

In quasi-related news, studded snow tires: 4/~$850. Yep. Life is a money-sucking misery.

For the zillionth year running, Ithaca has once again voted local pizzeria Pizza Aroma as the best pizza place in town.

I don’t get it.

Pizza Aroma pizza is gritty, doughy, and boring. The cheese tastes more like milk than cheese. The tomato sauce is overpowering in its marinara-y blandness. After one and a half slices, you feel like you’re eating vomit.

New York style pizza, it isn’t.

Imagine my surprise when, after I complained to a co-worker about Pizza Aroma’s laudations in the face of execrable taste he disagreed. And when I offered up Gino’s (Ithaca’s only NY style pizzeria, ironically, as Ithaca is in NY) as my favorite local pizza place he went so far as to say the crap pizza in the mall’s food court was better. As he’s generally an okay sort of guy, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, and even subjected happicow and Peter to a Pizza Aroma dinner taste test, in case all previous experiences with them (all two!) were flukes.

And we all came to the same conclusion: BLEAAARGH. Ithaca, what is wrong with you? Why must you continue to encourage the perpetuation of such terrible food?

Happicow calls it hippy pizza. Maybe it tastes good while stoned? Maybe the secret ingredient is hemp?

Anyway, I think the local bad taste is because we all hail from the only part of the U.S. that actually makes good pizza, and Ithaca is just far enough away from there to think that their bland pizza is good, and to disdain the flavorful stuff for it’s lack of bland (”The spices! They add flavors! They buuuuurrrrrrn!”) :)

I think I’m taking this all way too seriously, but stuff like this makes me wish I lived in a real city. Sure, all non-NY pizza is terrible, but at least in, say, Chicago, they have the decency to make distinctive terrible pizza; as opposed to pizza that is mostly terrible for it’s lack of distinctness. I can respect that. I don’t agree with it, but I don’t think people who prefer Chicago-style pizza are crazy- just wrong.

Ithacans on the other hand…

Today I was walking through the commons, and one of those pamphlet-weilding religious whacks was gonna offer me one of his tracts or whatever, but thought twice of it when he saw my black dress, eyeliner, fishnets, and knee-high Dr Martens. It was great- he turned to me, and started to offer his paper, thought twice of it, and kinda pulled back and pretended to be looking off in some other direction. He then tried to give one to Peter (a friend visiting from New Jersey), who was walking a few feet behind me and looking much less gothic. Peter pretended to be one of the enlightened, and the pestering summarily ceased.

So, in short:
(a) When asked “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior”, say “I certainly have!”, in otherwords, be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
(b) Look to be what a born-again would consider “Satanic”, in otherwords, be a wolf in goat’s clothing.

I don’t know whether metaphorically pretending to be other livestock works as well or not, but these two methods seem rather effective (with the caveat being that the latter method may make the braver zealots try harder, unless you are very intimidating; and that the former method makes you a lying bastard).

Yesterday after work I went for a walk in a local cemetery, where I saw this:

Yep, I actually found a largely-intact hunk of skeleton, just sitting there. It was about human-length, so at first I thought that perhaps someone had gotten into some mischief (there were other signs of [minor] vandalism in the cemetery, though nothing so large as exhuming a body), but upon inspection of the girth of the ribcage I concluded that it was possibly a greyhound-shaped dog, or more likely, a smallish deer.

I still think it was there as a result of some mischief (possibly voodoo! wooOOO!) though, as the caretaker lives on the grounds and I find it extremely unlikely that he/she would simply let an animal rot to nothing more than a skeleton on his front lawn (the smell alone during this process would surely cause it to cease).

I nearly took it home to clean and hang up somewhere, though it seemed rather grody, so I wasn’t particularly akin to touching it. Plus, cleaning something so large would have probably been out of my league. Doubleplus, if it was there as a result of some voodoo, I probably don’t want to mess with it anyway.

And no, I’m not glowing yet (I still have nearly four years left!).

Today was my last day at SGN. I think I got everything that was likely to be gotten into order into order, and have wiped the hard drive on miinips1, which is now my ex-laptop. We went out to Sangam’s for Indian buffet on Cornell’s dime, and I left a pile of text files and a few sheets of legal paper with notes on them for my replacement. I’ll probably have to volunteer some more effort to the cause over the next week or so, ‘cuz the project I was working on yesterday won’t be tested by people other than me until this weekend.

Later, I went over to my new place of employment for a party; where I found out that my purple hair is actually more popular with them than I had, in my wildest dreams, hoped. Apparently, the purple hair implied creativity, which they were looking for :) They just may not want to introduce me to some of the more conservative clients at a first meeting…

After that I spent some time buying cool stuff at Target (I’m always surprised at just how much cool stuff they carry), buying other stuff at Greenstar (like Boo-opoly!), and realizing my keys had been locked in the apartment, where I was not (I borrowed happicow’s), before going to Nokturna at The Haunt with Rob. Surprisingly (?) he really dug it, and at the end of the night ended up inheriting a small pile of my black makeup (eyeliner, lipstick, nail polish [I had extras]), wanting to get his eyebrow pierced (apparently that’s not new), and wanting to buy big black stompin’ boots.

Yeah, I am a bad influence. But I make the world a better place (for some definition of better which basically equates to ‘more interesting and anti-establishment’)! >;-)

Usually on Wednesday nights I go to The Haunt, a local club, with Rob. Usually, we try (and fail) to acquire zombie wings, and enjoy goth night with DJ Draven (who pretty rocks). Tonight, we arrived only to find out that there was some bleeding hip-hop bee-bopping show going on instead. Bah.

Not really wanting to dish out the cover for that, as cash is rather tight, we just left without even trying for the wings. Instead, we went to a diner (which, judging by the awesome transvestites and the waitress whose laugh sounded like someone letting air out of a balloon, existed in the Twilight Zone [oooOOOooo!]).

This makes two weeks in a row I’ve missed out on going to goth night, as last week I was kinda sick and Rob didn’t decide he wanted to go until it was too late to actually go. The last time I was there was for the Crüxshadows masquerade on 10.30. I bet Travis (our bartender) thinks we’ve given up on the idea of ever gettin’ those wings… There’s a good chance they actually have them now, too.

Last night, I went and saw Doom with Rob. It really wasn’t nearly as bad as the preview and common sense would make it appear to be (assuming you ignore all mention of genetics and pretend that they are talking about magic instead- more on this later). The beginning of the movie dragged a bit, but once it got going the whole thing was quite a bit of fun and went by rather quickly. At the end of the movie I turned to Rob and asked him whether the movie was only 20 minutes long… then I looked at my watch and realized it was actually nearly 2 hours long.

As for the effects, the CG wasn’t nearly as bad as the previe made it appear to be- I imagine that the preview used graphics which weren’t yet fuly rendered (why they would shoot themselves in the foot like this is beyond me). In the preview, the 1st person perspective aspect of the movie looked like it would last most of the movie, but in actuality it was only for a few minutes and was the most fun part of the movie- it really was like live-action Doom.

Now, back to the stupidity that was the ’science’ in this movie. Apparently, 10% of the human genome is still unknown, but many people believe it contains the genes that code for the soul, that determines good and evil *eyeroll*. Also, to radically change a creature’s genetic structure to match your own, all you have to to is inject a portion of your DNA into that creature. Yeah… whatever. IMHO, the move would have been much more enjoyable had they let go off all the pseudo-science and gone the same route the games went- just say that monsters from hell are invading our plane via a portal humans have screwed with / created / whatever on the moon. Sure, there’s suspension of disbelief involved, but at least you aren’t fooling anyone about working in a fantasy environment, and people who have actually passed 8th grade bio won’t feel their brains melting from the crap that tries to get passed off as reasonable science.

Anyway, Rob and I figure that this movie is probably worth about $5.50 to see in theaters, as parts of it really are quite fun (assuming you enjoyed the games).

In other news, Ithaca also had its first snowfall last night. It starts… (duh duh duh)

Today I went to the second science cabaret: Electric Air, which consisted of a lecture about the history of the theremin and electronic music and a short concert of ambient electronic noise by a local theremin-wielding band.

I quite enjoyed the lecture- very informative (also, very entertaining when we saw a video [which Marty is acquiring] of Moog playing a theremin). The music… not so much. Parts of the ’song’ were enjoyable… mostly, the less ambient parts that had some sort of actual rhythm, but most of it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

I just watched Cannibal: The Musical, which was a pretty entertaining movie. I quite liked the soundtrack; it was really shpedoinkle and made my heart full like a baked potato. I think I may purchase it.

Earlier tonight Rob and I went to The Haunt on a quest for Zombie Wings (I would pay, Rob would eat, I would get the shirt). Unfortunately they ran out of zombie sauce (and salt potatoes). Bah. We’re gonna try again next week (lucky Rob gets two meals out of the deal).