ann arbor is overrated.

“It’s comforting, really, that in this town of culture and education and wealth, one that boasts the second highest concentration of people with doctorates in the country (Cambridge, Mass., is tops), that a defining characteristic of our environment remains the 24,000 unpolished undergraduate students that populate our town eight months of the year,” writes Geoff Larcom. “It keeps you humble.” Good thing we have all these university students to keep things from getting too cultured and educated around here.

We’re much looking forward to Goodspeed’s upcoming Web-based series that promises to be an unsparing look at the sordid, high-stakes world of the Michigan Daily. The intro to the series outlines some of the complaints that the Black Students Union had when they launched their boycott against the Daily, and we had to laugh at one of them: “The frequent misspelling of minority student names.” This is a news organization that spells the (non-minority) mayor’s name wrong in a front-page headline and doesn’t correct it in their Web edition.

We’ve been linked to by a suicidegirls.com page, although we don’t know which goth, punk or emo chick linked to us since we’re not a member. Does this mean we’ve finally arrived?

Well, now they tell us. After suffering through a few days without power the weekend before last, it turns out that DTE doesn’t even provide our power at all. According to the Ann Arbor News letters page, “authentic power never comes from outside sources or through objectivity (i.e. electricity, televisions, cell phones, etc.). Authentic power comes from going within oneself and ascertaining what is placed there by a higher source.”

With all the chain-store hand-wringing of late, how come no one seems too alarmed about the slick new American Spoon store on Liberty? Sure, the other stores are also in Michigan, making it something of a local chain, but the company’s products are available nationally. Those products are, of course, boutique “fruit butters” and “spoon fruits,” which may have something to do with the local non-outcry.

After years of placing in the top ten on most best-college-town rankings, A2 must be a little surprised not to see itself on the Princeton Review’s list of the top twenty schools in “Great College Towns” that came out this week (via Goodspeed.) But it shouldn’t be so unexpected - the Review’s rankings, unlike many others, are actually based on a poll of college students. And we’ve never disputed that Ann Arbor is a great college town in which to grow up, raise kids, retire or run your own slumlord empire. Making the top five were schools in New York, Washington, Chicago and Miami.

The U of M was, however, tenth in the category of “Lots of Hard Liquor.” Let’s not lose sight of the things that really matter.

Okay, a minute after we posted that, umich.edu came back up.

Here’s a story about how “the big blackout of 2003 could have had a big impact in Saskatchewan if it hadn’t happened so far away” to make up for our bad timing.

emich.edu is up. umich.edu is not.

Also, Mlive is currently publishing through a Blogspot site (via rjwhite.) Draw your own conclusions.

We could make a snide remark about what the blocks-long backup this morning at the gas station open on Jackson Road would have been like with the new one-lane/center-turn-lane proposal, but we’re feeling a bit somber today.

Now a few hundred miles away, a “Buffy” line comes to mind: “Anya? Last time I saw you, you were fleeing in terror. How did that work out for you?”

When we first heard about the plan, proposed by some residents of the street, to narrow the Huron-Jackson “corridor” to two lanes in each direction with that Michigan standby, the center turn lane, we put it in the “step away quietly, let it die a natural death” category of ideas that appear every so often among amateur city planners in A2. But now the city council appears to be seriously considering the proposal, which aims somehow to reduce speeding - an earlier article on the topic brings to light the alarming findings that some minority of drivers go 6 or 7 miles over the 35-mile-per-hour limit. The residents, who bought houses on a street marked along its length with interstate-shaped signs reading “Business 94,” are outraged that their street is being turned into some kind of local expressway.

More posting backlog - the Daily renders “Hieftje” as “Heiftje” on its top front-page headline. They spell it once correctly in the article, though.

Goodspeed is all over A2 housing issues of late. In an extensive entry on sprawl, he points out an argument of the anti-anti-sprawl crowd that makes a lot of sense: that the city has encouraged sprawl by consistently opposing any development involving “high-density projects or tall buildings.” He also discusses the practice of building small “granny flat” apartments, and how it’s been disallowed by a city council bowing to neighborhood groups who fear that it wil reduce property values.