Utica often likes to swing for the fences, and herein is one of its major weaknesses. The most recent example of this involves Oneida county executive Anthony Picente launching an air service development study. Picente hired a consulting group from Kentucky to ascertain the feasibility of having commercial flights fly out of Griffiss airforce base in Rome. Yes, Rome.

I have a problem with this for several reasons, the first being that I think politicians should do their own work and not hire consultants at an additional cost to the tax payers. It is bad enough that we have to pay Picente however much we pay him every year, but now he is slapping us with an added whopping bill for work which he could have done himself.

But never mind any of that because the idea of turning Griffiss airforce base into a commercial airport is a pipe dream at best – but if you ask me it sounds more like a crazy delusion. So not only is Picente wasting our money by hiring extra people to do his work for him (out of state people no less), but he is wasting our money on complete fantasy. It would be one thing if he was launching a study to ascertain the feasibility of attracting new companies to the Utica Business Park. But the airport study is so insane and nutty that he may as well be conducting a study to find out if a Utica moon colony would be a good idea.

This is government waste and ineptitude at its finest. It goes without saying that Onedia county cannot sustain a commercial airport, especially when Syracuse and Albany both have international airports. A big part of this is due to the fact that people in Oneida county never go anywhere, nor do they have the money to travel. But even if they did have money and a desire to see the world, the population of Oneida county makes an airport a bad gamble. The overhead of running an airport would far outweigh the revenue collected by the trickle – and I mean trickle – of flights flying in and out each year.

I think Picente knows all of this, but he is going ahead with his airport study anyway. Picente claims that an airport would create jobs and opportunities, but if you ask me, I think the money being thrown away on this study should be allocated towards more immediate job creation initiatives. If Picente wants to do a study, he should conduct a study on how many local jobs are being lost as a result of his idiotic airport study.

This is an example of Utica swinging for the fences again and placing its hope in far away, long shot dreams. We saw it in the nanotech and chipfab quests, we saw it in Roefaro’s master plan, and we’ve seen it in a hundred thousand other instances. The entrepreneurs of Utica need to rise up and start making things happen, because our elected officials have a long track record of letting us down.

Goodbye 2011!!! Let’s hope 2012 is filled with all the humor, irreverence, stupidity and poverty that defined the previous year…and hopefully my friend Rider will get laid so he will stop divulging his porno fantasies to me.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 4,500 times in 2010. That’s about 11 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 8 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 84 posts. There were 7 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 4mb.

The busiest day of the year was June 10th with 219 views. The most popular post that day was Skeleton in the Closet.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were oper.ru, topix.com, search.aol.com, getoffmyinternets.wordpress.com, and praxisblog.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for david carradine death photo, david carradine dead, david carradine death, david carradine dead photo, and dumpsters.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Skeleton in the Closet June 2009
1 comment

Dumpster Dining Etiquette 101 August 2009
4 comments

About September 2007
9 comments

Dead Hamiltons February 2010

The Top 10 Ways to Know You’ve Lived in Utica Too Long February 2010

Streets filled with Dreams.

Windows on the World. 

Railroaded.

Daybreak.

You, as a resident (tenant) of a HUD-assisted housing project, have rights and responsibilities that make your building a better home for you and your family. HUD stands for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, and it provides some form of assistance or subsidy to the apartment buildings which it has ultimate jurisdiction over.

As a resident of a HUD-assisted multifamily housing project, you should be aware of your rights.

• You have the right to live in decent, safe, and sanitary housing that is free from environmental hazards such as lead-based paint hazards.
• You have the right to be given reasonable notice, in writing, of any nonemergency inspection or other entry into your apartment.
• You have the right to be recognized by property owners and managers as having a voice in residential community affairs.
• You have the right to organize as residents without obstruction, harassment, or retaliation from property owners or management.

Your responsibilities as a resident of a HUD-assisted multifamily housing project are:

• To pay the correct amount of rent on a timely basis each month.
• To conduct yourself in a manner that will not disturb your neighbors.
• To not engage in criminal activity in the unit, common area, or grounds.
• To keep the unit clean and to not litter the grounds or common areas.
• To dispose of garbage and waste in a proper manner.
• To maintain your apartment and common areas in the same general physical condition as when you moved in.
• To report any environmental hazards to the management, and any defects in building fixtures, systems, appliances, or other parts of the unit, grounds, or related facilities.

Residents in HUD-assisted multifamily housing can play an important role in decisions that affect their project. Different HUD programs provide for specific resident rights. You have the right to know under which HUD program your building is assisted. Contact your management agent for this information.

If you live in a building that is owned by HUD and is being sold, you have the right to be notified of, and comment on, HUD’s plans for disposing of the building.

HUD regulations give residents the right to press for improved conditions by organizing independent resident associations. These associations encourage residents to become involved in the decisions that affect their homes without harassment or retaliation by property owners or management.

For more information regarding your rights and responsibilities as a resident of a HUD-assisted multifamily housing project, contact:

• Your property manager or management company.
• You local HUD field office.
• The housing counseling agency in your community.
• HUD’s office of inspector general hot line at 1-800-347-3735 or 202-708-4200 to report fraud, waste, or mismanagement.
• HUD’s website.

If you believe you have been discriminated against, or would like information on what constitutes housing discrimination, call 1-800-669-9777, or call your local HUD office of fair housing and equal opportunity.

Your local government tenant/landlord affairs office, legal services office, and tenant organizations may also provide you with information on additional rights you have under local or state law.

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/1/business-places-10_Utica-NY_2903.html

Who’da thunk, Utica is one of the top ten worst places in America to do business, even coming in behind Detroit. The only places Utica beat out were Flint, MI (obviously) and Modesto, CA.

Strangely, Vallejo, CA was voted in the Forbes list as one of the very worst cities in which to do business. It fell two or three rankings behind Utica. I’ve been to Vallejo many times and I have to beg to differ with the Forbes people. Besides having a sexy name and cool Pacific Ocean breezes, Vallejo is a hilly commuter city of tract homes situated outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. It is home to a Six Flags theme park (which I’ve been to more than once) and it used to be have a Marine World Africa U.S.A. park (which I’ve also been to before the grounds for the park became the current Oracle headquarters). It is a nice place to live if you don’t mind rubbing shoulders with a lot of Spanish-speaking people – a pristine oasis of opulence and culture compared to Utica’s dreary streets of rusty abandonment and decay. I can only suspect Forbes’ decision to place Vallejo below Utica on the list of worst places to conduct business is part of some inside strategy to humiliate Vallejo and also retain the current status quo of centralized business meccas in America (e.g. New York City, Silicon Valley, etc.).

Being a Utican, I would move to Vallejo in a heartbeat.

There is one old man, however, who we’ll call Old Man Joe who frequents Hope House who does not display the typical rough cunty behavior that makes Hope House seem like a prison cafeteria. Joe is a quiet and lonely poor soul who, no matter what sins he committed in his youth, invokes a feeling of pity in the stomach of anyone that crosses his path - anyone except for the dimwitted Hope House volunteers and flunky paramedics who work for Kunkle.

Today Joe (who can often be seen walking along Genesee St. wearing his poisonous pet snake wrapped around him like a long scarf, or clutching a brown bag of booze, or smoking what look to be joints but are probably just hand-rolled stogies - collapsed under the weight of his miserable fucking existence. It was hot today, and the heat may have had something to do with Joe’s fainting spell, but never mind – Joe is an old (prematurely aged) sick man with yellowing, grey skin and wild stringy white hair. His hollow eyes and gaunt features betray his inner demons and nightmares, but mostly Joe’s life has become a millstone for him, a heavy weight he would like nothing more than to throw off so he can float away to wherever it is he’s going after this world.

So Joe fell over sideways at Hope House and hit his head on a heater. Perhaps his body was finally shutting down on him, or perhaps he had a vision of his dead mother, or perhaps it was from all the booze he drank or drugs he took this morning. Whatever the reason, the idiotic women who volunteer at Hope House seemed confident enough in their medical knowledge to offer their highly skilled clinical judgment as to what the fuck was the matter with Joe. According to them, he was faking. “He just wants to go to the hospital so he can have a clean bed and 3-square meals per day.” Oh, for fuck’s sake! When the paramedics arrived, they seemed to concur with the volunteers’ professional medical assessment that Joe was faking something awful and not actually dying or about to die. They said, “Oh, we know Joe” and then they proceeded to ask him to sit up (as if Joe intentionally pulls these kinds of stunts every other month or so).

Jesus fucking Christ! If I ever hit rock bottom in my life like Joe and continue to fall through until I wake up to find myself dying one day in a godforsaken shithole place like Utica, I cringe at the thought of being perceived in my death throes as some sort of goddamned faker who only wants a little bit of unconditional love and attention from some highly incompetent doctors and nurses. Fuck!

I know that if I were a real medical doctor (say a pathologist) and I knew half as much about Joe as I don’t want to, I’m sure I would discover that it is nothing short of a miracle that the guy is even still alive in the first place. Graced with such knowledge about Joe’s medical and personal history, I would probably want to scold the paramedics for asking him to sit up and for following the advice of the dumbshit volunteers that claimed he was faking his collapse today. How can people be so fucking pigheaded? One look at Joe will reveal that he is sick, not just physically sick but mentally sick as well.

Perhaps Joe shouldn’t even be walking the streets but the world should be protected from people like Joe (and vice versa) by placing him in a group home which can properly and adequately oversee and provide for his needs.

This is what gets me about Utica: the number of individuals walking the streets getting into all kinds of mischief who need proper treatment, care, protection, and support. When something eventually does happens to these individuals – like it almost happened to Joe today – they receive very little compassion and help. Joe could have very easily been dying and the paramedics were telling him to sit up and shake it off, as if he were some tough guy who had simply gotten punched but he was going to walk home and be alright. Joe’s friends might tell him this, but paramedics should be trained to respond to every call as if it is serious and life-threatening.

Every time I saw Joe showing off his lethal pet snake in public in the past, I knew something wasn’t right. What kind of city allows unstable people to walk around in broad daylight with dangerous snakes coiled around their necks? A city that allows vicious unneutered pit bulls to roam alongside their owners without muzzles or leashes, I suppose.

Holy mother of fuck! How could Utica have its head so far up its asshole and not even know? I shudder when I envision Utica 10 or even 5 years from now. There will be riots. There will be fires that will devour huge portions of the city. There will be mayhem and hand wringing and state takeovers and forced relocations. Sometimes I think I am the only one who sees all this coming, but the chatter on sites like Topix/Utica reveals that many everyday people in the Mohawk Valley are just as fed up with the same stupid bullshit that makes us here at the Utican go crazy.

This place has been circling the shitter for so long there is only one way for things to go now. That reminds me, I have to take a dump.

If you refer to Hope House (or any soup kitchen) as your favorite restaurant…YOU might be a Utican!

If you take pictures of trash lots littered with crack viles and call it “art”…YOU might be a Utican!

If you donate sperm for free cookies and then try to inject those cookies into your vein…YOU might be a Utican!

If you are so illiterate that you have to sign your name with an X, but you have an important job that requires you to wear a suit and tie to work…YOU might be a Utican!

If you are an attractive woman who thinks charging jobless lowlifes for sex is doing God’s work…YOU might be a Utican!

If you show up at crack dens wearing a three-piece suit…YOU might be a Utican!

If your refrigerator is half-filled with cheese wheels and your attic closet is full of nightmares and bad memories…YOU might be a Utican!

If your baby carriage has 30-inch chrome rims…YOU might be a Utican!

Hamilton-

Fucking stanky hellhole. Two major steel companies reside in this shitty industrial city in Southern Ontario. These companies dump innumerable amounts of shit into Lake Ontario – where dead fish now line the shores.

“Dude, where do you live?”
“Hamilton.”
“…. Shit, man. I’m sorry.”

Hamilton is an ungodly small town (though, it’s more of a street) in the middle of the fuck of nowhere in Tasmania. Some of the people there survive only by incest, and there is no form of police force whatsoever. Some say God himself took a dump there, where a small take-away store now stands in its place.

Hamilton, man!
Redneck town.

People of Hamilton, Earth, we here at The Utican want to say that we feel and share your pain. Please be aware that hope, happiness, and joy await you with smiles just around the corner.