ann arbor is overrated.

Ice Cream Motor’s take on the whole “creative class = Whole Foods” thing: “I want my supermarkets looking comfortable and modern. My bars, I want trashy, old and well-used.”

Talk About Town reports, about a month after the term “Michigan hookup” was coined, that A2 is now the eighth best U.S. city for dating.

The campus appears to be in the grip of a “blogging craze.” “Several people at the University,” reports the Daily, “are following this trend.”

We’re not sure how Zac Peskowitz manages to conflate Richard Florida’s creative class theories, which at least purport to exalt the gritty, low-rent artist (we’ve heard that “artist” has now become a euphemism for “hipster”) life, with the sensibility of Whole Foods, even if both can be said to promote “design as the centerpiece of a holistic consumption experience.” What can’t be said to promote design as the centerpiece of a holistic consumption experience, after all? The Daily did print the cedilla in the headline correctly, though.

More posting backlog: we probably don’t need to tell you to be at the cool cities meeting next Tuesday. We’re hoping to see a lot of you there.

Sorry it’s been so long - it was the compilers project that wouldn’t end, it just went on and on, my friend, some people started coding it not knowing what it was…anyhow you get the point. And all we’ve got is this bedraggled little story from mlive’s travel section about how the “key ingredient to Ann Arbor’s coolness” is its food. The News seems to have discovered the Fleetwood, which they characterize as hardly “spotless” in the same tone as when New York magazine discovered the grittiness of bowling in the 80’s.

A much-linked-to Village Voice essay on blogging that’s both sporadically funny and completely self-indulgent (hey, just like blogs!) floats the idea of a blogging “caste system.” With “Bloggers who live in Williamsburg and work at Condé Nast/are in a band” on the top and “Non-bloggers who live in Queens and operate barely solvent literary magazines, the literary magazine being, as we all know, the blog of 2000, the old black, so over, etc.” on the bottom (the author edits Pindeldyboz, which we always forget to read), it’s a comprehensive hierarchy. But how would such a ranking work in A2? Is our Condé Nast allmovie.com or the Current? What about our Williamsburg - is it the Old Fourth Ward, or, likening Ann Arbor to Manhattan and Ypsi to Brooklyn, Depot Town? Is the Ann Arbor Observer roughly analogous to the New York Observer? We can only offer the following non-exhaustive hierarchy:

• Bloggers who live in the Old Fourth Ward and work at allmovie.com or mlive.com.

• Bloggers who live in Ypsi and are in a band that plays Hamtramck a lot or room with someone who works for allmovie.com. By the way, we just found out that “Hamtramck” has three syllables. Our life will never be the same.
• Bloggers who live by north campus and write for the Current or the Observer.
• Bloggers who live in the central campus student ghetto and work for the Daily.
• Bloggers who post anything at 11:16 p.m. on a Saturday.

Could Bob Evans be replacing Bill Knapp’s in the hearts of Ann Arborites? A “Connection” reader asks for the recipe for Evans’ “Colonial salad dressing.” The cornstarch, water, vinegar and margarine-based dressing also contains a lot of celery seed.

The Daily emphasizes the importance of networking in finding post-college jobs. They quote job counselors and researchers who advise students to form connections in the fields they’re interested in, as positions these days tend to be unadvertised and handed out through “referrals and word of mouth.”

So how do students make these connections? Well, going by the examples of successful job searches in the story, there are two ways. Best of all, choose the right family to be born into. Almost as good is choosing a roommate who was born into the right family.

Mlive’s latest “find a job you love in the place you love” ad centers on the idea that leaving Michigan will upset your dog’s morning routine.