ann arbor is overrated.

A Current columnist describes the experience of cleaning houses in Ann Arbor (remember Ann Arbor? A little town in Michigan, just like Saginaw and Grand Rapids, that we sometimes write stuff about at this here weblog?) “I’m not a happy camper,” her boss, a Jordache-wearing martinet declares. “You’re not dusting my U-M knickknacks well enough.”

Oh yeah, and there’s a Josh Steichmann piece about blogs in the issue too, where we’re quoted making some kind of specious comparison between blogging and that old chestnut about everyone who listened to the Velvet Underground starting their own band. Also appearing in the story were Goodspeed, blasting the news judgment of the Daily; George Hotelling, discussing narrowcasting; and Steven Cherry, issuing a general call for bloggers to “get off their ass and do something.”

The Saginaw News writer who questioned his city’s coolness has some very outspoken readers. One voice mail tells him, “I was reading your article in The Saginaw News, (expletive). For someone who feels the way you do about Saginaw, you should move.” Boy, don’t we know what that feels like. Unfortunately, we’re less accustomed to reader comments like this one: “you brilliant creature/how long have you been here you brilliant creature/what part of this earth did you walk first/are you devine from owsterspace or frome a mixture of beasts that slowly died of thirst.”

A letter in the Grand Rapids Press alleges that defenders of the Holland Tulip Time pirates “did not think out the consequences of this disruption,” the most dire of these being the possibility of a pirate walking in front of a paradegoer’s camera just as “a fun picture” of the photographer’s child is being taken.

Saginaw questions its newfound status as “coolness capital,” derived from a Richard-Florida-penned Money Magazine list that can be read only as a cry for help from the coolness guru.

The Ann Arbor News again promulgates the fiction that Ann Arbor is buckling under an onslaught of coffeehouses, among which the new Starbucks on Main Street is “an exclamation point.” Of the five non-Starbucks coffeehouses they mention, none closes later than midnight or plays interesting music (except for Espresso Royale once in a while), and two are actually pricey restaurants that also serve coffee.

“It’s part of what makes Ann Arbor a cool city,” the president of the Ann Arbor Area Convention and Visitors Bureau says in the article, which also quotes a 27-year-old “longtime coffee shop employee” with a degree in English from U of M.

We came across a group of pedestrians the other day wearing light blue T-shirts that read “Ace Deuce Freedom Trail.” Could it be - one of Boston’s most overrated tourist attractions, exported to A2? We’re sure Ann Arbor somehow played a pivotal role in the American Revolution.

Also, Goodspeed has a good post on porch couches, which he reports may soon be the target of a city ban. And right after we picked up a Kiwanis Club replacement for our two couch cushions that were stolen by either drunk undergrads or the Old Fourth Ward Association.

Someone doesn’t like Arlington, Massachusetts.

We’re intrigued by the prominent placement of this description of Karen Sidney in an Ann Arbor News profile of the accountant/lawyer/gadfly who’s been making FOIA requests for documents related to the city budget: “As an attorney, Sidney said she specializes in finding money people may be trying to hide. She calls it ‘investigative accounting.’” While the article doesn’t make any specific allegations of corruption in A2 finances, its cautious but insinuating tone makes us wonder if there’s a story about to break soon. (via Goodspeed)

The New Republic takes a rather credulous look at Found. “[T]his record of daily life is undoubtedly more ‘real’ than most reality programming…People in all their foibles, fears, eccentricities, and boring normality are offered up, pinned almost like butterfly specimens to the page,” writes Elana Berkowitz. But even one of the letters quoted in the piece seems too good to be true: “I’m sorry but I don’t think that we should continue to have a relationship together, at least not as a couple. I love you but things have not been the same since we found out that we were related…”

The first post of this weblog (which we don’t necessarily suggest you go back and read) appeared on May 17, 2002. It seems a little self-indulgent to have a second-year-and-one-day anniversary post, but here it is.

A lot has changed since then. When we started doing this, it was mainly because we wanted to have a blog on some very specific topic that hadn’t been done yet. A search for “ann arbor blogs” yielded next to nothing (although Goodspeed Update predates us, somehow we didn’t discover it until later.) Hating Ann Arbor seemed about as specific and unmined a topic as you could get.

In some ways, Ann Arbor is a lot less overrated now than when we started. Oh, it’s not any better - it’s just less overrated. Even the News has developed some self-awareness, tempering its boosterism with a little skepticism. Whether it’s due to the Cool Cities campaign, competition from Ypsi or just one of those overvaluation/backlash cycles, the idea of Ann Arbor as Midwestern utopia is no longer unquestioned. The idea of Ypsi being cool was barely on the radar as recently as a year ago; now it’s almost a contrarian position to prefer A2.

It’s not, of course, un-overrated enough for us to stop doing this. And we have to be around for the coming counterbacklash.

But the main thing that’s changed is the explosion of blogs. A search for “ann arbor blogs” will now get you ArborBlogs, a thriving community of blogs from all over the A2 area (in which Ypsi is geographically, but probably not enthusiastically, included.)

A reader once wrote that she felt sorry for us, that we should make some friends here and stop being so miserable. But we’ve met so many amazing people through this site that her sympathy was misplaced. Doing this blog about how much we hate Ann Arbor has made us much, much happier here.