W is for Weather and Ithaca:

Cornell meteorologist Paine
Said the weather would be like his name.
But the weather in Feb
Ithacated instead,
And we had crazy warmth and some rain.

This limerick of mine took second place in a contest on limericks about Ithaca in the Ithaca Journal in the early 1980s. The weather is indeed a factor here, and one can never tell what it will do. It may rain with perfectly blue sky overhead, or change from a furious blizzard to bright, calm sunshine and back within minutes, or precipitate a weird mixture of rain and sleet and snow that cannot be properly identified. When the weather is acting so strangely, it is called ithacating, a term I used in my 1981 text The Science of Programming.

Well, we need something to complain about, for Ithaca is a great place to live. Ithaca is the most enlightened town in the US (Utne Reader, 1997), the best emerging city to live in (Cities Ranked and Rated, 2004), the fourth best city to relocate to (website Relocate America, 2006), one of the 12 hippest hometowns for vegetarians (VegNews, 2006), and one of the 12 great places you’ve never heard of (Mother Earth News, 2006). Ithaca has its own currency —the Ithaca Hour, Ithaca’s $10.00 bill, is accepted by many establishments and is used for barter. And Ithaca’s Namgyal Monastery is the North American Seat of the Dalai Lama —probably because the town of Varna is about 5 miles away, so Ithaca is Nearvarna.

Come live in Ithaca —but not too many of you. We like to keep the city population about twice the zip code (14850) and the metropolitan area around 100,000.