ann arbor is overrated.

Naming your band “Ann Arbor” just not enough to pay tribute to the diversity and people of our fine city? How about your kid? “Madison” is getting overused, anyway.

The AP has a story on thwarted college-student voters. “Local politicians are very unsure about students,” a professor at Salisbury University in Maryland says. “They enjoy having students pay (sales) taxes and contribute to the economy. But they are wary of how students could influence politics at a local level.” Indeed.

The story also cites a study about how students who must vote absentee are less likely to vote at all, confirming our theory that the nice liberals who live in a lot of these college towns could have an effect that they might come to regret on a very close national election.

Jonah Goldberg, who was rather enthusiastic a while back about efforts in college towns to keep students from voting, strikes again, this time arguing that only “the mentally challenged” are less informed voters than 18-24-year-olds. Young voters are unqualified, he claims, because they have “less education, less experience, less money, less property, and many fewer responsibilities than older people.”

We’ll start with “less education.” Like Goldberg, we don’t have any conclusive national statistics, but a Detroit News article reports that, in Michigan, 80 percent of 18-24-year-olds hold a high school degree, compared with 69 percent of those 65 and older. And a college education is more accessible and at the same time more necessary today than it was in previous generations.

“Less experience” is accurate, of course, but we wonder how much Goldberg would like the results of an election decided entirely by Medicare-benefit-receving, AARP-belonging seniors.

“Less money, less property” - we won’t argue there. If you’re a supporter of a white-male-landowner voting system, this is a compelling line of reasoning indeed.

“Many fewer responsibilities” - if the draft comes back, he’ll have to refine this part of the argument a little.

Goldberg is against young people voting mainly because he thinks they will vote Democratic. He pooh-poohs the notion that “youth issues” are anything other than standard Democratic rhetoric, as he did in his remarks about college-town voting. But college towns tend to be pretty solidly liberal. Here in A2, it’s two Republican council members, Marcia Higgins and Mike Reid, who have been among the most skeptical about the couch ban. If anything, an energized student vote could become a powerful check on local NIMBY liberalism. As for the national elections, we wonder if these college-town officials have ever considered the effect of suppressing a large population of voters in towns that are often Democratic oases in swing states.

Leighton observes A2 law in action - a complaint about someone who put their trash out a couple days before trash day. Also on the trash front, Ann Arborites are none too happy about the new city-mandated garbage cans, for which users of more than one 62-gallon container will be charged an extra fee. We’ve been unable to find much on the specifics of the plan, which will be implemented in non-student areas first, but we wonder if a household of, say, five adults, which probably generates less waste than five households of one adult each, will be charged extra.

Even though Ann Arbor is just barely a suburb of Detroit, the Detroit News comes out in favor of the couch ban. No word on what the Toledo Blade and the Cleveland Plain Dealer think about it.

Murph’s account of the city council meeting, at which the first reading of the ordinance was again postponed, is almost as good as having been there ourselves (although it took us a couple hours, rather than the estimated 20 seconds, to link to it.) We wish we could have been there to watch a feisty Fifth Ward U of M mom face off against a former Boy Scout from our beloved Old Fourth Ward, though. Most surprisingly, even though we’ve never met a student who listens to WAAM, 82% of their listeners are against the ordinance.

A family emergency has required us to go out of town, so we’re going to miss the first reading of the couch ordinance at City Hall at 7 pm tonight (and we’re also going to have to schedule the meetup for later.) We hope some of you will be able to make it.

Said councilmember Joan Lowenstein of the Fire Department’s report on porch couches,”There was a line in there that said, ‘What usually happens, somebody dies and then some legislation happens.’ But in this case, it is far worse - we have waited to act until Old Fourth Ward homeowners had to endure the tragic sight of torn upholstery.” Okay, we’re kidding about that last sentence.

The report contains some shocking news - 77 fires have been caused by couches since 2000! Less shockingly (but somewhat surprisingly after their editorial last weekend), the News fails to put this statistic in its proper, or any, perspective. They could start out thus:

• Most of the fires involved couches dragged into the street and burned. No attempt is made to differentiate between couches that were dragged from inside a house and those that originated outside.
• Only 3 of them involved couches on porches.
• The Detroit News reported that all couch fires represent 4 percent of calls to the fire department.
• We’re not sure what percentage of fires set intentionally involved couches. We wonder who could figure out that kind of thing. Maybe one of those people who makes phone calls and takes notes and writes about what they find out…we think they’re called “reporters.”

The report of the fire department and the proposed ordinance can be found here (go to “Current Packet”, page 89.) The fine for an outdoor couch will be $100, the highest possible for a civil fire infraction - an illegal “recreational fire” will set you back half as much. And, just as neither rich nor poor are allowed to sleep under bridges, “the prohibition applies to all residential properties and does not delineate [sic] students and other renters.” (Other renters? Oops! We’re sure they meant to say “other residents,” because this ordinance isn’t in any way targeted at a certain economic class.)

And the fun doesn’t stop there. Keep reading for an added bonus: a proposal to bring back the pedestrian Breathalyzer tests.

Ask Metafilter has a thread filled with advice for the A2-bound. We’re continually surprised how often Zingerman’s is slammed as overrated - to us, it’s one of the only Ann Arbor attractions that lives up to a good deal of the hype. At least the Bobo luxuries it peddles are hard to find elsewhere, and accessible to the student budget as a rare treat.

A new naked porch man, merely an inferior imitation of the real thing, has appeared. Another reason to ban couches - that rough upholstery can be a real skin irritant to habitues of the naked porch scene.

Also, you may notice that we’ve turned off comments on older threads due to an avalanche of comment spam.

So how does a 9 pm Leopold’s meetup on Thursday (the 12th) sound? (Update: or next Thursday, the 19th?)