Way to be, Cuse!

No one ever claimed that Syracuse, NY was an ideal vacation spot, or that it was a sprawling utopia where all the residents exist to serve their fellow man. Granted, the campus is really nice. Really nice. It's actually a draw for incoming students who happen to visit the campus on the days when there aren't 60mph winds or a layer of snow thick enough to smother an upright midget on the ground.

That being said, the surrounding city is pretty nasty. Poverty and crime are rampant. I've heard that quite a few schools experience this odd contrast with their surrounding cities.Given that major universities and colleges tend to bring in a lot of money, I'm not sure as to what the explanation for this scoio-economic phenomenon might be, but I bet there's some pretty good literature about it somewhere out there.


Syracuse is probably one of the worst examples of this dichotomy. At one point Syracuse had the highest murder rate per capita of any city in the US. Meanwhile, on campus, probably less than ten miles away from most of these murders, snotty sorority girls are using their daddies bank accounts to buy garbage bags of blow and drive around their Beemers like Haley Joel Osment in a '95 Saturn.

One might surmise that it would be pretty difficult for the city of Syracuse to go even further downhill than it already is. However, within the past week I've come across two things on the Interweb that just further drag Syracuse through the proverbial mud.

The first item was this E-Bay advertisement for a house. The house was initially selling at $5. It's a total shitbox and is actually set to be demolished by the city... but hey, what's a $5 house amongst pimps? I'd bet that Bam Margera buys it and devotes a whole episode to demolishing it.

Earlier today, I came across this on Barstool, which is rapidly becoming my favorite website:

"(07-19) 16:37 PDT Syracuse, N.Y. (AP) -

A 20-year-old Syracuse woman who left children in her care to go pose for nude photos is facing several charges of endangering the welfare of a child.

Police say Michelle Rendino was supposed to be watching four young girls yesterday when she left them alone and went into the woods near Syracuse's Inner Harbor to have a man take nude photos of her.

A man fishing saw the children crying and called police. When police arrived, the oldest girl — a six-year-old — told police that "Aunt Michelle" went into the woods to take "nasty pictures."

Rendino says she asked the man to take nude photos of her so she could get back at her ex-boyfriend."

My favorite part is the quote from the six-year-old. While it really would have probably been a lot worse to bring the kids with her to this "nasty photo shoot," I really don't understand what was going through her head when she just left the tots on their own. At least hire a hobo to take care of the kids for a few bucks an hour. There of plenty of panhandlers on Marshall Street. My favorite hobo, Eli, would probably even serenade them with his guitar until they fell gently asleep.