ann arbor is overrated.

If everyone doesn’t stop being so nice to us, we’re going to lose our edge. Maybe that’s Geoff Larcom’s sinister plan. Writes Larcom, “When your father is a city official, you marry your high school sweetheart, then you live and work here, the old glasses can get a teensy bit rose-colored about Ann Arbor. For perspective, I self-prescribed a trip to ‘Ann Arbor is Overrated’…This is a skeptic with fresh eyes who enjoys tweaking the city’s fascination with itself.” Larry Kestenbaum, whom Larcom interviewed for the column, offers some insight as to how to square Ann Arbor’s high cost of living with its at least superficially left-wing politics.

The one quibble we have is that the headline, “Bloggers offer us some food for thought,” on a column just about this site and its posters implies that we’re the only blog around. The Ann Arbor blogosphere (sorry) has grown exponentially in the past year or so, and it’s been exciting to watch.

Also, Talk About Town reports that Ypsi’s water tower has made it into Esquire.

Our suggestion that students go out and get some nice porch furniture from Restoration Hardware seems to have fallen on deaf ears, for Judy McGovern sees fit to mention the epidemic of “upholstered furniture” on porches in her round-up of the top stories “you won’t hear” in 2004. Once the offenders whose gauche furniture choices are a blight on Tree Town have been herded into dorms, she writes, “year-round community members” will “agree that city living is better than commuting.” Year-round community members, like grad students. All right, that’s probably not what she meant. Year-round community members like that hippie guy who sits on his peace-slogan-scrawled front porch every day, on furniture that may or may not be upholstered, and whose front yard contains a large mirror and other assorted objects?

Hmm, that’s probably not what she meant either. But - a modest proposal emerges. Why not hippie dorms? After all, in a “bohemian” place like A2, there are bound to be a few free-spirited types who take the city’s propaganda literally and clutter the landscape with outré bric-a-brac. If we could put them all together under one roof, problem solved! (All right, we suppose that these places are usually called “co-ops”, but we like “hippie dorms”.) We could then get Pottery Barn to decorate the newly hippie-cleansed neighborhoods.

Now that’s what we call city living.

When you pay $6 for soap, you want it to have both a high and a low note.

And is there any good way to describe a house fire in Hell other than the phrase that the News headline writer resorted to?