Here's a compilation I created of the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore reporting from Syracuse during the Valentine's Day Storm of 2007. It really shows Syracuse knows how to handle snow. It's also the first time I created a flash movie for my website. Enjoy!
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Searching for a job, and being international relations major, I have not excluded the possibility of moving to New York City in the not-so-distant future. I've received some comments about New York City crime, which has led me to do a little bit of research. Here are some tables comparing crime in New York City to that of Syracuse, Rochester, Boston, and Washington, DC:
Then I decided to find some crime rate comparisons of countries worldwide. I didn't find too much, but I found this table comparing a few countries:
What's up with Sweden!? It's pretty unfathomable to me that I'm nearly twice as likely to get murdered in Sweden than in the United States! You can read the report regarding this table here.
Well, I'm a month late on this story, but it's a great one. I was aware of it, but really read up on it for the first time tonight.
The Syracuse Post-Standard publishes a little multiple choice quiz weekly, where, as in many multiple choice tests in life, at least one of the answers is far-fetched, or even humorous. Here is the quiz question that started it all:
2. Bill O'Reilly put his spin on current events as the keynote speaker for Wednesday's Boypower fundraiser for the Boy Scouts. The Fox News personality was especially critical of:a) The American Civil Liberties Union, for pointing out flaws in the United States of America.
b) Liberal newspapers and other "secular progressives" for urging tolerance and generosity.
c) Syracuse University, for denying organizers the use of campus facilities because of the Boy Scouts' prohibition of openly gay members.
d) Former associate producer Andrea Mackris, for making him about $10 million poorer when he settled the sexual harassment lawsuit she filed against him.
The correct answers were a, b and c.
Bill O'Reilly attacked the paper in his show:
O'REILLY: Then a couple of weeks ago, I traveled to Syracuse, New York, to give a speech in support of the Boy Scouts, who had been thrown off the campus of Syracuse University after the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] complained.For my trouble, I was smeared twice by the Syracuse Post-Standard. The villains at that paper are publisher Stephen Rogers and editorial writer Mark Libbon. These men are not only unprofessional, they are incompetent.
Over the past few years, the Post-Standard's circulation has declined nearly 30 percent. It is a disgraceful newspaper, nicknamed "substandard" by some in upstate New York.
Now, we posted contact numbers for Rogers and Libbon on billoreilly.com, should you want to speak with them.
And that is what we'll continue to do. Any media person who uses smear tactics in any way, not just on me, but any way will be featured on The Factor and inducted into the billoreilly.com "Hall of Shame."
We will keep a running list of media smear merchants on the website, in addition to our "don't buy, don't advertise" list.
As you know, we debate issues all day long on this program. I have no objection to any media criticizing my stand on any matters of the day. But beginning today, the smear stops here.
You guys want to do that? We'll let everybody know about it. That's called accountability.
Apparently O'Reilly has a problem with smearing. That's why he countered with the following smears:
I don't have a problem with O'Reilly stating his mind, but it's ridiculous how he tries to play the "fairness" ticket. I wish he'd just admit he's a moderate-to-conservative republican so he can painlessly rant all he wants (as is his right), without attempting to gain sympathy from the American public for something he's not.
Saving the best for last, however, the publisher that O'Reilly insulted and who he told his viewers to more-or-less harass, is dead! And he's been that way since 2002! As Keith Olbermann responds after airing the O'Reilly clip on his show:
OLBERMANN: Hey, good luck with that. If Bill has actually found a working phone number for Stephen Rogers, then he's buried the lead. He's broken the biggest news story of the century, because Mr. Rogers is dead.
Thanks to the following articles/sites:
Last Friday there was a pretty strong wind storm that knocked out power a lot of places across Upstate New York. Fortunately my power only went out for about 15 seconds. However, check out how far the lawn chair on my front porch traveled (red circle):
The winds reached 64mph (103 km/h) at the Syracuse's airport. Downtown, a window of One Lincoln Center blew out and fell 12 floors. One woman barely escaped injury:
Read more:
Let's say you don't like one of your professors this semester. Shouldn't you be able to give him or her a review online? Apparently Syracuse University doesn't think so.
The Daily Orange's big story yesterday was about four SU freshmen, who, after apparently feeling their writing instructor didn't "know what she's doing ever," started a Facebook group centered around this opinion.
For my readers who haven't heard about Facebook, it's just like MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, hi5, etc., except that it requires a college email address, and the required email addresses have been mostly limited to the U.S., although the U.K. and Mexico are now being invaded as well. More than 80 percent of American college students are members.
Anyway, so these girls started a group on this social network entitled "Clearly [instructor's first name] doesn't know what she's doing ever." As far as the article informed me, there was no threatening terminology to be found anywhere in this group. Besides the four founding members, there were approximately fifteen other students in the group.
To make a long story short, the instructor found out about this group and complained, which eventually led to these four students being placed on disciplinary probation until November of this year. One of them transfered out. Apparently SU has secretly made it a code of conduct violation to publicly criticize professors.
I find this highly alarming. Unfortunately my generation, unlike the one before it, is too passive to do anything about it. This incident differs from most of the hundreds of Facebook news stories that you can find online as it does not involve college administrators using Facebook to catch underage drinkers or to find out about potentially rowdy parties ahead of time. I was alarmed by this story because I feel punishment for non-treatening criticism is just plain wrong.
Apparently things are done a little different at the University of Louisville. There a Facebook group dedicated to criticizing a professor helped lead to the professor being let go. [Read more]
Last Friday night (actually Saturday morning), I was driving home from Fayetteville, the Syracuse suburb where I work. I had worked until about 10:15 and then went to Pizzeria Uno across the parking lot. I left there around 12:35, and around 12:55 I was standing at the traffic light at the corner of Coumbus Ave. and East Fayette Street. This is about one mile from where I live.
There's a bar there called Club DC, and as I was waiting at that traffic light, I suddenly saw about a dozen people streaming out of it, over to a parking lot across the street. The traffic light turned green, and I slowly drove forward, where I noticed they were helping a man lying in the parking lot, very close to the street. I thought he was just lying there from over-consumption of alcohol or something else, and I continued driving home.
Two mornings later, while sitting in the break room at Target and reading the newspaper, an article about Syracuse's first homicide of the year caught my eye. I was shocked to read that that man that I had seen lying on the ground was the victim. He had died at University Hospital shortly after I had seen him.
Congratulations New York State, you screwed up again! Can anything ever come to fruition in New York State? Hardly. Even in New York City, which gets somewhere around 99 percent of our tax money, nothing actually happens. The Freedom Tower hasn't even been started yet!
A little quote from Wikipedia:
New York's legislature is notoriously dysfunctional. The Assembly has long been controlled by the Democrats, the Senate has long been controlled by the Republicans, and there is little change in membership election to election. From 1984 until 2005, no budget was passed on time, and for many years the legislature was unable to pass legislation for which there was supposed to be a consensus, such as reforming the so-called Rockefeller drug laws. In 2002, 16,892 bills were introduced in the New York legislature, more than twice as many as in the Illinois General Assembly, whose members are the second most prolific. Of those bills, only 4 percent, 693, actually became law, the lowest passing percentage in the country. In 2004 over 17,000 bills were introduced. New York's legislature also has more paid staff, 3,428 than any other legislature in the nation. Pennsylvania, whose staff is the second largest, only had 2,947, and California only 2,359. New York's legislature also has more committees than any other legislature in the nation.
Until last year, state senators and congressmen weren't even required to be present in Albany to vote!
Meanwhile in Upstate New York, in my wonderful City of Syracuse, a.k.a "Neverland" nothing is progressing at all. Here's a little sample:
DestiNY USA: This meanwhile 20-billion-dollar (no typo) project was first announced on April 30, 2000. To sum it up, nothing has happened. While I am one of the biggest supporters of the project, unfortunately the city, county, and state can't agree on anything. Supposedly steel has now been ordered to start building the first expansion to the Carousel Center.
In 2004 DestiNY also announced a research and development project. Unfortunately this is stalling on a weekly basis because a couple businesses don't want to move. These businesses include a truck stop and the only company in the United States that produces those feet-measuring devices you see at shoe stores.
The project also includes a monorail and, will basically turn Syracuse into a huge tourist destination. Unfortunately the New York State Government keeps postponing finance-supporting hearings on DestiNY because, well its members rather go swimming.
OnTrack Extension: This has been planned since many years. OnTrack is Syracuse's commuter rail line. It has been around since 1994, and it is has been planned since its conception to extend the line across a road and connect it to the regional transportation center, which is served by Amtrak, Greyhound, and Trailways. This one is a no-brainer in a city such a city where most people still use cars. Hmmm... When do people not have cars... When they're using long-distance transportation. Maybe then somebody would actually ride OnTrack. Financing was supposedly approved in 2004 to start building this tiny bridge over Park Street bridge, but I haven't seen or heard anything since. The bridge was actually started back around 1998, but the freight company now known as CSX complained that its bridge's supports were being weakened.
New Convention Center Hotel / Hotel Syracuse:: Cities governments and their county’Äôs government often do not get along. As a result, a complete waste of resources occurs, as each has a presence of pride that it will not give up. For example, the city of Syracuse announced in December 2004 that a bank had paid off the debt of the recently bankrupt and closed Hotel Syracuse, the largest and oldest hotel in the city. It will now be sold to a developer and renovated for millions of dollars.
The government of Onondaga County, in which Syracuse lies, had announced about a month after the Hotel Syracuse’Äôs closing that it would build its own hotel near the Hotel Syracuse, a decision which kept this hotel closed. As a result, city and county are working on their own, separate plans, with virtually no cooperation. The two projects seem to cannibalize each other, as it seems both the city renovating the old hotel and the county building a new hotel, will lead to a superfluous number of rooms within one city block of each other. No progress has been made on either project.
New Building Downtown: In August 2003, the following story appeared in the Syracuse Post-Standard:
"The biggest construction project in downtown Syracuse in more than a decade will kick off next year and, by the time it is completed 18 months later, it will have transformed the core of the city's center, Mayor Matt Driscoll said.A preliminary drawing released by the city shows a seven-story building containing 40 apartments, 20 condominiums, 40,000 square feet of retail space and a 950- to 1,000-car parking garage to be built on the east side of the 300 block of South Salina Street.
The $30 million structure will replace a hodgepodge of six buildings of varying heights that have retail space on their first floors but are mostly vacant on their upper levels."
Nothing was heard about this project until late 2004, when this project was put "on hold." In 2005 it was announced that the project would be scaled back, but still built. We'll have to wait and see if this happens.
S.C.A.T. I seriously hope the name will be changed, as it means feces in slang! Anyway, I wrote about it in Is Syracuse Neverland? Part II It's too early to really criticize this gondola transportation network yet, as it was only been envisioned a couple months ago, but I have my doubts, based on the above history.
Syracuse-Toronto 'SkyDream' Gondola The Syracuse platforms are nearly complete, but those damn Canadians are behind again! See the full story here.
Update: In true Syracuse-fashion, there is another update! After I wrote this entry, I was looking for images. I coincidentally stumbled across an article from today that headlines the News 10 Now website. It's called "Another plan for Hotel Syracuse".
"'The renovation of the tower building and 191 hotel rooms. Renovation of the first two floors of the historic building. The retail and the lobby area,' Economic Development Director David Michel is t "An Israeli based holding company is finalizing a deal with the Chicago Bank that now owns the hotel property to launch a $19 million project. alking about converting the Addis Building into housing. And then, the last item is the renovation of the hotel parking garage.They're still finalizing their plans for the rest of the historic building, but they envision perhaps a few more boutique style hotel rooms and residential condominium units."
That's Syracuse for you.
There is no place in the world that I have lived in that has such an insane amount of ideas for bettering the life of its citizens than Syracuse. At least once a month, a new, big idea comes out, claiming not to be just a vision, but also being feasible.
Most of these ideas over the past few years have been in relation to the DestiNY USA Project, an entertainment, hotel, and research project that has now reached an estimated cost of nearly ten billion dollars. It was first proposed April 30, 2000, but, save for a "groundbreaking," no construction has happened yet. A good point to be made though is that billions of dollars need a lot of raising, which requires a lot of planning, so there is still a good amount of hope in this project.
In fact, DestiNY USA developers The Pyramid Companies keep the public excited by constantly adding features to the project at a periodical rate. Besides the local news stations and the local newspaper no media outlets really care anymore. In fact, the last article many out-of-town papers published was about a quickly-dismissed rumor that the project was dead, which occurred nearly two years ago. They actually published the dead rumor, not its correction around three days later.
But Syracuse remains hopeful that something besides snowfall amounts and a great college basketball program will set it apart from the rest of the country. Help comes from numerous little, often non-descriptive "unveilings of plans," which "keep the dream alive."
Besides entertainment complexes, hotels, and technology parks, there is another favorite topic of dreaming: Transportation
It was a craze started by DestiNY USA's plans, which have included a monorail from the beginning. This monorail would run from Syracuse's Hancock International Airport to Syracuse University, via DestiNY's structures, Alliance Bank Stadium, the bus and train station, and Downtown. Estimated cost: $750 million. Later Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) was also added for parking lot connectivity.
This past Sunday, The Post-Standard featured a plan by millionaire Tom McDonald which appears to much cheaper to build and efficient for Syracuse's size: A gondola line. There's already even a name for it, S.C.A.T, short for Salt City Aerial Transit. Its cost: About $5 million for the first segment, which would run from Syracuse University to Downtown, about a third of its route to the bus and train station. And, like a ski lift, its gondolas would be only a short distance apart, which would mean no more waiting for that infrequent CENTRO bus or OnTrack train. Furthermore, because gondolas cost very little to operate, this system could run all day and night.
This is the most viable idea yet. McDonald says he can raise the $5 million easily, and that only thing he would from the government is permission to put up the system. This bypasses the major blocker to most of the above-mentioned visionary projects: Taxes. DestiNY, for example, wants tax breaks, which has led to long battles between the Onondaga County and city, two government levels which never seem to be able to agree.
A similar system is installed in Morgantown, West Virginia which has a pretty sucessful rail-based PRT system which has small units as well. Morgantown only has 27,000 people and a university with only about 6,000 more students than SU. It was built in the 70s and is pretty expensive to operate because of its heated rail, a problem the gondola system wouldn't have. It has about 15,000 daily riders.
I just hope something new is built around here soon... I'm bored!
Further reading:
DestiNY USA
Post Standard: Will Gondolas Link SU and Downtown?
Wikipedia: Destiny USA
Wikipedia: CENTRO
Wikipedia: Morgantown PRT
Wikipedia: OnTrack
Today I read a quite funny article by Jeff Kramer, who writes a weekly humor column in the Post-Standard. This week he compared Syracuse to Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch, and managed to find over a dozen similarities.
Is Syracuse just another Neverland?
This past week Syracuse Police began teaming up with the Onondaga County Sheriff's Department and the New York State Police to crack down on crime in Syracuse's worst neighborhoods, which has gotten horribly ridiculous.
Hardly a day passes without reading or hearing about shootings. Today I got to read about five people being injured Saturday in two separate shootings:
"Three teens were shot just after 2:30 p.m. when a shooter walked through a convenience store parking lot, firing off shot after shot in a spray that went in several directions." -The Post-Standard
Wonderful... And the closest-to-home incident in the past few months was last month's discovery of a body in the park at the end of my block.
