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Newsflash to the rest of the country: It’s colder than a witches tit in New York. The Northeast keeps getting battered with snowstorms and wind chills in the negative teens.
To that end, the tourism website for the city of Ithaca, home of Cornell University and Ithaca College, decided to say “fuck it” and told prospective travelers to go to Key West, Florida, instead.
On Sunday night, VisitIthaca.com put up this message:
“That’s it. We surrender. Due to this ridiculously stupid winter, Ithaca invites you to visit The Florida Keys this week. Please come back when things thaw out. Really, it’s for the birds here now.”
The website also crossed out the words “Visit Ithaca” and featured pictures of beautiful, scenic Key West, as opposed to bitter, frigid college students and native Upstate New Yorkers freezing their nuts off in a gorge, or something.
Bruce Stoff, the director of the Ithaca/Tompkins County Convention & Visitors Bureau and genius behind this prank, talked about the genesis behind the idea, namely that they’re sick of living like Mr. Freeze’s wife in “Batman & Robin”: “It’s gone beyond sub-freezing temperatures. Now it’s sub-zero temperatures”. You can probably imagine that any city that “warms up to zero” might want to have a little fun to distract them from the monotony of sub-zero temperatures and perpetually grey skies.
Personally, I went to college about an hour up the road from Ithaca in “sunny” Syracuse, and I can definitely vouch for the horror that is an Upstate New York winter. It snows every day from October to March and you don’t see the Sun until April/May. People celebrate 45 degree weather by sunbathing on the Quad. It can get pretty depressing around this time of year. How do you deal with that? Well, you either get stone drunk, or create fantastic municipal satire like the good people in Ithaca created on Sunday.
Or, more likely, some kind of combination of both..
[via Miami Herald]
Image via Shutterstock
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God, the money I could’ve saved if I went to OCC.