ann arbor is overrated.

Ann Arbor’s very own Found Magazine will be appearing on Letterman tonight.

With this kind of exposure, it finally seems fair to ask: Is it just us, or is Found a bit, well, overrated? Sure, it’s a neat idea with a great design. But the very premise - send in stuff that you find - leaves itself open to ersatz discoveries. At least with something like Gawker Stalker, the reader-generated celebrity-sighting feature of Gawker, corroborative evidence or lack thereof will compel them to acknowledge that, no, it wasn’t really Jonathan Safran Foer who was being nasty to that bagel-store employee. (It was just a fictional character who happened to be named “Jonathan Safran Foer”. But we digress.) But with Found, how do you know that that hilarious love letter was actually picked up off the ground by a swingset in Toledo? Maybe the person who sent it in just made it up. There’s really no way to know. Whether this does or should detract from one’s Found-reading experience is a topic that could fill books of literary criticism.

We never want to discourage independent arts and media, but you’d think that Found was the only interesting thing going on in Ann Arbor. (Oh, wait. It is.)

Ann Arbor makes the front page of the NYT’s arts section as the place to go if you want to bring babies to a movie. We wonder if this will intersect with the other recent A2 trend of brutally assaulting theater shushers.

Lansing is underrated.

A while ago, we posted a Talk About Town item about Ann Arbor’s then-upcoming appearance in Skylights, the in-flight magazine of Spirit Airlines. One of our readers actually flew Spirit recently and send along a few excerpts from the piece, entitled “Ann Arbor: Hip, Artsy, Diverse, Cutting Edge.” (Disclaimer: we didn’t actually see a copy of this. We’re relying on our correspondent’s gracious transcription.)

A brief look at the students on campus will quickly tell you that this is
not your average “preppy” matriculation… all walks of life are
represented here. The sidewalk cafes and cappuccino bars are bustling with
book-carrying young adults: many dressed in Navy pea coats, tie-dyed
shirts, clogs and ponytails. And those are just the men! Much of the
student body originates from New York and the rest of the East Coast and
brings with it an extra “hipness” with wardrobes of the latest designer
fashion trends for Soho and Fifth Avenue. That adds even more “cool” to
the already “cool” culture that runs rampant througout the entire town.

…

It’s easy to see why the Ann Arbor region is so popular. The diversity is
“cool,” the culture is “cool,” and the historical sites are, well, “cool.”
We’re still asking ourselves: “Is there anything this area doesn’t have?”

Someone in Ann Arbor is auctioning off an Erdös number of 5 (via Notional Slurry.) We’re not sure what to say about that, other than that it could make for some great spam subject lines if this Erdös-number-lowering craze ever catches on (”embarRRwasEd about yr HUGE eRd0s numb3r?”)

If you were skeptical about a master’s thesis on daffodil-planting, how about a PhD thesis on old-timers hanging out at the Washtenaw Dairy at 8 am? Chapter heads include “Gathering Because ‘My Wife Wanted Me Out Of The House:’ Public Discussion As A By-Product Of Social Interaction.” (via DiaWebLog.)

And then the News with letters fills, that criticize the daffodils. A2 wouldn’t be A2 without some daffodil controversy. It seems that Susan Skarsgard’s daffodil installation in the Arb hasn’t been a universal hit. One skeptic sniffed that “the view was cut by the row of growing daffodils.” Skarsgard agrees that “there already are too many lines defining our environment,” but also feels that drawing a line on paper changes it. Yeah, we’re confused too.

Congratulations to Goodspeed, who takes Best Blog in the Daily’s Best of Ann Arbor awards. He seems especially thrilled at the implied Matt Drudge comparison in the story. Bloggers, the Daily writer helpfully points out, “don’t have to follow the rules of newspaper grammar and citing sources.” Unlike at the Daily. Where they would never, say, write “Heiftje” in a front-page headline.

And Joel Hoard gives us the Worst of Ann Arbor, from Worst Acronym (”Your full name is the Coalition To Defend Affirmative Action, Integration And Immigrant Rights And Fight For Equality By Any Means Necessary, so by my calculations, your acronym should actually be CTDAAIAIRAFFEBAMN”) to Worst Band (”Whether you’re Oblivion, Donkey Punch, Funktelligence or some other marginally talented Ann Arbor-based band, you share two things in common: 1) You suck. 2) You’ll never be popular outside Ann Arbor.”) He finishes with the following assessment of A2: “You are easily the snootiest place I have ever visited, and the scariest part is so few people can see through your web of deceit and realize the ultra-shoddy city that you truly are.” Hussain Rahim also unleashes the A2 haterade that’s been building up for four years. “Granted, if I came from a farm, or liked hanging out with the same five people for four years, then a place like Ann Arbor may totally rock.”

Bert Sperling, co-author of the aforementioned Frommer’s Cities Ranked and Rated, has a rather amazing bio on Amazon:

Bert Sperling has been choosing our country’s Best Places for 20 years. He created Money magazine’s original “Best Places to Live” list, and his work continues to appear in the media on a monthly basis. His studies have become part of our national culture, appearing in The Simpsons, Jay Leno jokes, and questions on Jeopardy. His website, Sperling’s BestPlaces (bestplaces.net), has become a popular Internet resource, and provides content to other sites such as Yahoo!, MSN, eBay, and the Wall Street Journal.

Annually, his “Healthiest Cities for Women” study is featured in SELF magazine. Other recent projects include “Best Places to Retire” (MSN), “Best Cities for Women” (Ladies’ Home Journal), “Great College Towns” (Newsweek), “This Town Rocks! Best Cities for Teens” (Seventeen), “Best Places to Buy a Second Home” (Smart Money), “Best Places to Raise an Outdoor Family” (Outdoor Explorer), “Hot Dating in Small Towns (MTV), “America’s Best City to Live” and “Most Energetic City” (USA Weekend) and features in Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, Men’s Fitness, and Kiplinger’s.

Now, this is when the eerie realization starts to set in. Doesn’t that cover just about every best-of list that A2’s been on? This bio doesn’t mention it, but the “Least Stressful Cities” list that Ann Arbor appeared on a while back is also Sperling’s handiwork.

Could it be that the whole Ann Arbor bubble (the overvaluation kind, not the climate-control kind, unfortunately) is the work of one man? One very determined man who, by quietly taking over best-cities list after best-cities list, has singlehandedly created an empire of city bestness over which A2 rules with a non-pre-patinated copper fist? No, Ann Arbor never or almost never captures the very top spot on any of these lists - because that would be too obvious.

We think someone needs to tell the drawbridge crowd about this guy.

It may just be us, but there’s always something that seems a bit…megalomaniacal when Mayor Hieftje starts expounding on A2’s list mentions. “We’re the only city in the top 20 in the Midwest,” he tells a Washington Post reporter, when asked about A2’s sixth-place ranking in Frommer’s Cities Ranked and Rated. “If it were not for climate, we would have been number one.” When the U.S. News college rankings come out, at least the top scorers pretend to believe that ratings don’t matter much, that Harvard or Princeton or wherever has so many ineffable qualities that can’t be quantified by a raw score.

These rankings inspire the strangest kind of macho posturing. Poor 331st-place Laredo. “When you can travel the world and see the same thing all over, every city has to find out who they are and embrace it. Otherwise, cities like Laredo, if they’re running around trying to be like everybody, they end up being like no place at all,” says Frommer’s author Bert Sperling. Oh, snap! And Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce head Tim Halbert really sticks it to Newburgh, New York: “I’ve been to Newburgh, New York, Number 329 on the list. Try breathing life into places like that. When you drive into Charlottesville, the prosperity hits you in the face.” BOO-YAH!