Wild Ithaca

Well, it seems like since I moved here, the calm town became very wild. There were 3(!) crime instances here in the last two and a half months. However, even when the crime does happen, it is still not very ordinary… Here are two examples from the yesterday's "crime alert" email:

"The Ithaca Police Department is investigating an incident reported to their agency on October 19, 2006, at approximately 5:30 am.
The incident reportedly occurred in the 400 block of E. Seneca St., approximately two hours before the report was made to police. An unknown subject knocked on a resident's door, once the resident opened the door, several masked intruders forced their way into the apartment and demanded money and marijuana. One of the intruders was armed with what appeared to be a rifle or shotgun. The resident reportedly surrendered money and marijuana to the intruders, who then fled."

Maybe that is me, but I find the mere mentioning of the resident surrendering marijuana to the intruders, as part of a police report, amusing. It is ok to hold an armored-robbery-worthy stock of marijuana at home, but stealing it is a crime… OK... But wait! Here is another one:

"The Ithaca Police Department is investigating a trespass complaint that occurred on College Avenue on October 15, 2006. The incident occurred at approximately 5:30 am but was not reported to the police until approximately 10:30 am. A female resident reported that she was awakened by a subject who reportedly was removing her bedroom covers from her. The subject reportedly fled the room when the resident was awakened. The resident fell back asleep. A few minutes later, the female resident was again awakened, by the same subject turning a light on in her room. The intruder again fled when the resident was awakened this second time. The victim described the intruder as an Asian male, in his 20s, wearing a light colored shirt and blue jeans."

And I keep on asking myself: What would you do after being woken up by a stranger trying to pull off your covers? Would you go and check your house? Would you check your locks? Would you call the police? Or maybe just a friend? No, no, no, no!!!! Usually people just turn on the other side and keep on sleeping. That's normal. Happens every day… Unless of course someone turns on the lights - that's wrong!

The mystery of the floating bar

A few days ago, Lisa pointed out that my blog was broken. And indeed it was. Now I figured out what it was about. Apparently, Blogger has a really weird feature… when you place a picture which is too big for the post area or a link that is too long, it simply shifts the side bar and puts it down. Nice, isn't it? And apparently there are many people who suffer from this problem. I found this idea on the blogger's help group and simply changed the source pictures for my post about the book sale. The really weird thing is that when I insert the pictures, I give them exact dimensions, so I really don't understand why the size of the source would matter. Any ideas?

Dangerous Ithaca

Here is a message I received a few days ago in my email:

Campus Crime Alert
Oct. 13, 2006

The Ithaca Police Department is investigating a strong arm robbery that occurred on October 10, 2006, at approximately 9:30 p.m. in the 500 block of E. Buffalo St. The victim, a Cornell student, was walking on E. Buffalo St. when she was approached by a male subject. The subject knocked her purse from her hand, picked up the purse from the ground and fled west down the Buffalo St. hill. The subject was described as a male, 5 foot, 6 inches tall, medium to heavy set build, wearing a dark-colored, hooded jacket.

Students and others are reminded to be aware of their surroundings and to walk in well lit areas.
Contact the Blue Light Escort Service at 255-7373 to arrange for walking escorts around campus.

Report suspicious persons on campus to the Cornell Police at 255-1111 or, off campus, to the Ithaca Police Department at 272-3245, or dial 911 in the case of an emergency.

This is the first time I heard of crime in this town. And as it happened (well, almost), they actually sent an alert to the entire campus! I find this amusing. And yes, the university police offers escort services for those who afraid walking alone in dark. Well, after all there was a "strong arm robbery"… first one in two months.

What a dangerous place this world…

Weather

I was checking the weather for tomorrow, trying to figure out if it is going to rain and look what i saw:

(pay attention to the low temprature tomorrow)

Couldn't help myself from posting this. Now i am back to my home exam.

Prelims

I guess those of you who visit this blog from time to time, noticed that I didn't update it for a few weeks. Well, this is a sign that I started the semester and it is rather busy. These days, thanks to Columbus, we are having a Fall Break – 2 days to extend the weekend. But this is not a real break. In the best tradition of the Israeli academia the whole break is dedicated to preparations for exams which are called here "prelims". Some of them took place before the break and some are supposed to be after. The difference between prelims and midterms is that there is only one midterm exam in a class, but there can be several prelims. For example, on Wednesday I am going to receive an exam in communication theory class and there is going to be another one later in the semester.

But let leave the techniques aside and, risking loosing the few readers I have here, let me have a prelim for you. It's an easy one:

What would you do at 5:30 (am) on Saturday morning?
a. Sleep
b. Preparing to sleep
c. Go to take a spot in a line for a huge book sale that opens at 8:00

Exactly! Last Saturday, Erik, Josh and I woke up at 5:30 to go and sit in line for the Friends of the Tompkins County Public Library book sale. Apparently this is one of the largest book sales in the country and it has about 250,000 items. Basically, as I understand it, what happens is that there is an NGO which collects used books throughout the year and then sells them in a huge sale, lasting 3 weekends. It is so huge that people actually stand in line to get to the sale first. We arrived there around 6:00 and I got number 150(!). We were told that there was one guy who actually slept two days in a tent in order to be the first. So, we were relatively sane and spent only two hours on approximately 10 degrees cold sipping coffee and chatting.

The sale itself was rather impressive. It is a huge hangar with stocks and stocks of books which are sort of organized according to topics.

I got some books. Keren would be proud of me for now I can read the actual Popper, Kuhn, Durkheim, etc. I also got Adam Smith's "Wealth of the nations"… now I have to read it all…