From the Front Lines of Bad-Ass Cascadilla St.

My landlord has become passionately embroiled in an effort to keep the city of Ithaca from turning the park across the street into a full-sized basketball court, complete with floodlights.

Because there's nothing better to do, people are getting really emotional about it. Landlord walked up and down the street, circulating a petition against it. His work's won some press, not least because there are people that believe protesting the installation is a racist act, I guess against the black kids that use the (constricting?) basketball courts that are already there.

Well, hell. You say a thing like that and it starts to be true. Sometime over the weekend, people crept up and down Cascadilla, slashing tires at random. We were scandalized: it's like being in Boyz n the Hood, except anticlimactic and painfully suburban.

Never mind that this house is chock-full of minorities. Given our selfish, irrational despise of jumbo basketball courts, we apathetically await burning crosses on the lawn ... or maybe a really mean chalk drawing on the pavement.