ann arbor is overrated.

Pseudo-intellectual Craigslist personals in A2 getting on your nerves? Maybe Troy is more your speed. “[D]on’t be smart,” the poster requests. “I’m looking for a woman who doesn’t pretend to be smart. I’ve tried to meet ’smart’ women only to find that they have little social grace or street smarts.” Could it be this guy after realizing that understanding and laughing at his Gödel jokes are two different things?

We can’t come up with a better summation of this Talk About Town item about a Victorian Valentine’s Day tea disrupted by tear gas from the melee surrounding a KKK rally than Suds and Soliloquies: “A sedate, hoity-toity, pretentious event juxtaposed with an absurd, riotous, sociopolitical protest — that’s Ann Arbor in a nutshell.”

The movie selection in Ann Arbor is so bad that The New York Times has a reporter on the case, devoting an entire story to the situation in A2 that typifies the unavailability of many films to “moviegoers beyond both coasts.” Both coasts? Wait, we thought Michigan was on the third coast.

A Michigan Theater employee quoted in the story says that “she avoids talking about movies with friends back East, so they won’t spoil the endings of ones she hasn’t seen.” But of course one Ann Arborite manages to put a positive spin on it. “What if I lived in the Upper Peninsula or something?” an art professor asks. His reference, the Times reporter helpfully points out, is to “the state’s northernmost wilds.”

The Craigslist “Casual Encounters” section, from what we are given to understand, is for just that: ads for anonymous sex. But in A2, even casual encounters are meaningful. This one that was recently brought to our attention (probably not safe for work) at least starts out pretty much as you’d expect. “Don�t ask me my name. Don’t ask me where I work. Don’t ask if I’m married or have a girlfriend.” Sure, fair enough. “Ask me if we have free will.” Um, okay, if you get off on that sort of thing.

But most importantly, “I’ve never set foot in a Wal-Mart.” Is this the Ann Arbor equivalent of “drug and disease free”?