ann arbor is overrated.

We wrote this thing for Consider Magazine a while ago for their “Is Ann Arbor Over-rated?” issue. (Yes, they hyphenate “overrated,” although at one point they split the difference by making it two words. We do not. It’s a choice everyone has to make at some point.)

Now it seems to have appeared (although not on their website, so here’s a reprint) opposite Ruthie Freeman’s piece “Ann Arbor: Bright Lights, Big City.” The respective pull-quotes: “Ah, there, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, you take me into deep waters.” And, “There is romance in a big city, a city like Ann Arbor that offers…a cosmopolitan passion for newness and change that keeps a person’s heart rate going as they hurry from cafe to cafe in a sea of people who don’t go to sleep to dream.” A summation of the whole A2 debate — arch stuffiness versus heartfelt wonder.

So, we’re back up after exceeding our allotted bandwidth. A victim of our own success? Actually, no. A victim of referrer spammers.

Over the last couple months, we’ve noticed that almost all of our top referrers are referrer spam sites, accounting for, we would guess, about 30 percent of our traffic. And there aren’t just a couple that we can easliy block. There are new deceptively named referrer spam sites that seem to pop up every day. In practice, it’s like a DOS attack. Any advice on how to deal with this would be appreciated.

A preservation activist urges the U not to tear down the Frieze for the new dorm; doing so, she writes, will “[destroy] memories and our link to the past.” Memories and our link to the past? What do we need with those? you may be thinking. Well, “Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter Ani DiFranco notes [that they] ‘reinforce our humanity.’” Time for a chorus of “The Frieze Is Not a Pretty Building.”

Jo Mathis’ latest column, in which prominent Ann Arbor men list some of their favorite things, probably isn’t going to dispel any stereotypes about A2 testosterone levels. Writer Ronald Ahrens is a fan of “[o]rdering flowers from Calyx & Corolla…They offer exotic blooms like Bordeaux Miniature Calla Lilies and different kinds of orchids (as cut flowers!) and lovely unique vases,” while Mayor Hieftje prizes k.d. lang’s “Hymns of the 49th Parallel.” Oh, and we find out that Police Chief Dan Oates uses Microsoft Outlook.

You may have noticed that we like to follow conservative media — when they’re wrong, they’re laughably wrong and when they’re right, they often say something new. The Michigan Review repays our interest in its latest issue. Yeah, there’s the predictable piece defending Larry Summers because boys are good at math and girls are good at language (that’s why English faculties at prestigious universities are so overwhelmingly female-dominated), but without the Review, we wouldn’t have found out about the slippery situation of Michigan physics classes using a private online program that stores students’ sensitive data on non-university servers. Writes Carrick Rogers, “Students are given a choice between suffering a penalty by not completing their coursework or providing personal and scholastic information to a third party that sets the terms of agreement. Pearson Education is therefore not answerable to the University of Michigan or its student body under any contract.” (That’s a bad thing, right? Even by free-market-libertarian standards?)

On CTN tonight (staying home and watching Channel 16 Friday night is the new going out and partying), we were watching what we assume was the City Council debate about 828 Greene, and we almost choked on our coffee when Wendy Woods suggested that the apartment building have residential advisors to keep the kids in line and make the building “more welcoming” to the neighbors. In loco parentis, emphasis on the loco.

Jean Carlberg then stated the very, very obvious — that “there’s no evidence that students would welcome this” — and pointed out that students move out of the dorms to get away from this kind of regulation. And anyway, she said, the council can’t require this kind of thing.

Woods responded that lots of students move off-campus because there’s no space in on-campus housing and would actually prefer the dorms (presumably for that comforting sense of rules and boundaries, not because of the location or the lack of shady landlords), and suggested that council not try to regulate RAs for the building but instead make the landlord realize that it’s in his best interest to do so. She further suggested that naptime in the new building be set to 1:30 in the afternoon and that bathroom access be controlled by handing out passes in the shape of little ducks.

The new MSA housing rating site (you’ll need a U of M account to access it) is endlessly entertaining. Well, not really endlessly. There aren’t that many ratings posted on it so far. Our favorite: “The landlord…actually had to change our joint unit into two separate units, including my room into a dining room and my roommate’s into a kitchen, for the city inspector at one point.”

Landlords have been almost universally opposed to the site, because they believe that only disgruntled tenants will post. And, in fact, just about all of the reviews of private houses are mixed or negative. So what about dorms and apartment complexes? You’d expect the dorm reviews to be pretty harsh, since the U is not known for its lavish housing, and unlikely to retaliate by kicking someone out of the dorms for a bad review. But actually, the dorm reviews are overwhelmingly positive. And reviews of large apartment buildings and complexes are at least half positive, with none of the horror stories that appear in the house reviews. The tenants with the most to lose — it’s not too hard to figure out who you are if only four people live in your building — are the ones who have gone out on a limb the most. At some point, perhaps these smaller landlords will realize that it’s not the tenants, it’s them.

“America isn’t divided by region or religion. America is divided by jerks. Who wants to bring a bunch of jerks together with the rest of us? Let them stew in Berkeley, Boston, and Ann Arbor,” P.J. O’Rourke writes in his “Alternate Inaugural Address.” Having just returned from Boston (for the Mystery Hunt!), and braving single-digit temperatures here in A2, we can only wonder how we got stuck in the least appealing of the three stewpots.

We’re pretty impressed with Rese Fox’s first month or so on the MSA. She’s sponsored a resolution supporting the new dorm on the site of the Frieze Building, tried to find some common ground with landlords and observed the Old Fourth Ward Association’s Christine Crockett expressing concern that State Street will become “tawdry” under student influence. Now if she could only do something about those LSAT classes…

Now the A2 boosters can add spam to the list of great things from Ann Arbor.