really, really random.

by sam on 04/25/2006

I’ve been sitting here for about 20 minutes staring at my computer screen, thinking about how I really want to write something, but I can’t think of a subject. So I pull up a copy of the NY Times…

This article about the image problems the Cornell students have made me laugh. Because in a 2-page article about how these students sometimes feel like they’re attending a state university and not an Ivy, nowhere is it mentioned that several schools at Cornell are essentially public (Ezra Cornell convinced some folks back when he built Cornell that it was deserving of the federal land-grant school money that was being handed out to form state university systems, which is why New York didn’t get a “real” state university system until the 1960s – because of this, about a third of the “colleges” at Cornell are priced at significantly lower rates for New Yorkers). Not to mention that everyone has college envy. I went to an Ivy law school, where students walked around in t-shirts with the Penn logo and “Not Penn State” written where the university’s name would ordinarily be. The joke around the law school (at least in the first few weeks), was that the number one reason students gave for attending Penn was “because I didn’t get in to NYU” (no joke, however, was a member of my first year class who made it off the NYU wait list a week into classes and actually withdrew from Penn and moved from Philly to NY to take them up on the offer).

May be this will work on short shuttle flights, but the idea of standing on airplane flights is just a bit screwy. As if your legs don’t get stiff enough sitting down. As bad as my feet swell from flying normally, I just have visions of walking around with balloon-shaped feet for days if I ever have to resort to one of these things. Imagine having to pay a premium to actually sit in one of those awful coach seats.

Jane Jacobs died today. She was a New York legend, facing down the likes of no less than Robert Moses in his attempts to destroy her neighborhood with his cross-manhattan expressways, and advocating for urban density as a net positive in city life. The best urban critic around, she eventually moved from Greenwich Village to Toronto.

That’s all that piqued my interest today. I did have a rough morning. Got home last night to a building notice that, due to some necessary boiler repairs, the heat and hot water would be turned off from 11 p.m. last night to 4 p.m. today. Then, I woke up for no reason at 4 this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. Because it was too cold. I ended up not having to take a cold shower though, because I was up so early that I managed to get the last of the warm water that was still in the tanks. So that was something. I don’t even know why I’m still awake at this point, except out of habit.

Tags: , ,