ann arbor is overrated.

Our car hasn’t been in such good shape of late, so over the last few weeks, we’ve been experiencing the adventure that is living in our walkable city without motorized transportation. Today’s installment: kitchen twine and/or toothpicks. We were planning to make a dish that required one of these items. Kerrytown Market had neither, so it was on to the People’s Food Co-op, a short walk past the 40 or so vendors and five customers at the Artisans’ Market. The co-op had no kitchen twine, but they did have toothpicks, they were excited to inform us — little containers of about 15 toothpicks infused with “essential tea tree oil,” with or without cinnamon flavor.

Ann Arbor’s ideas of what constitutes “essential” do not always agree with ours.

The Daily Tarheel compares tensions between Chapel Hill and UNC to those between Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan. For example, “Ann Arbor residents became enraged when university officials began purchasing off-campus buildings to create more student housing.” Almost as enraged as they were when university officials decided to demolish an on-campus building to create more student housing, and when they didn’t create any more student housing at all and let students live off campus.

Dr. Mandrake skewers alleged local cultural heavyweight Found Magazine (of which we’ve always been a bit skeptical as well.) But don’t imagine that the Ann Arbor found-object craze ends with twee little scraps of paper. The Residential College is hosting a Found Instruments Concert Friday. What’s next, an A2 restaurant that serves found food? “Tonight’s special is from the dumpster in the alley by the blue lot on State…”

The late-90’s dot-com “-ent” school of company naming is still hot in A2, as evidenced by web design company Sagient. Sort of like Sapient (which also offers work that’s “on time and on budget”) but with more sage.

Ann Arbor Monk describes himself as “the guy your mom warned you about” on his Google text ad, but it’s unlikely that anyone’s mother specifically advised them to stay away from leather-gloved, transcendentally meditating bodybuilders with the musical taste of a Caltech computer science major from 1996 who like to “debunk…the industry of cool” in their spare time. We somehow find his forthrightness almost endearing in this town of facades, though.

It’s a tough call, but we’ve decided that Washington between Main and Ashley is the most useless, pretentious block in the city. After brunch at Zola today (after waking up in our Ashley Mews loft and shopping at Kerrytown Market, of course) we looked across the street and saw, all in a row:

• A key store.

• A restaurant called “Soup du Jour” that’s open only for lunch and looks like the kind of place that 6-year-old girls would love to have tea with their American Girl dolls.
• A bright yellow-orange restaurant named “Logan.”
• A hair salon called “Salon in the City,” whose windows are decorated with a city skyline and the names of actual cities.
• The Earle. Sorry, the earle.

And as if that weren’t enough, on the same block recently we saw a black London-style taxi with un-London-style checkered trim bearing the name of A2-based cab company “A cab.” Capitalized and punctuated thus, if we remember correctly; the period is part of the name.

Except for the earle, most of this stuff seems pretty new. When did all this happen? We don’t remember this block as being a good place to get anything that anyone might possibly need, but at least it was useless in a fairly unobtrusive way.

You may have been annoyed if you were delayed on State Street today by a large group of very slow walkers, but you may not have realized that they were actually sophomore dance majors participating in an important study: “The Slow Walk is the study of ’slow’ movement in a public area — a sort of sociological and psychological study as well.” The project is preparation for the junior-year Out-of-State Personal Check Payment Attempt When There’s Ten People in Line Behind You.

News reader Mary Ann Hitt compares the Council’s rejection of the Easthope-Johnson proposal for the Greenway to the Bush administration’s plan for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife refuge. So if you’re keeping track, the DDA’s plan for a parking lot at First and William is marginally less bad than putting a landfill or a war zone there, and about the same as an oil drilling operation. No word on how it would compare to a nuclear waste dump or a bioweapons facility.

Ashley Mews is entering the Final Phase of its operation, according to signs posted outside the townhouses that read simply “Ashley Mews, Final Phase” and then list a phone number. Apparently, this phase involves launching a website with breathless prose that almost rivals that of LoFT 322. But instead of employing Urban Hip [tm] to attract potential residents, the Mews goes a more traditional route. “In the finest tradition of Boston’s Back Bay and Georgetown in Washington D.C., the Ashley Mews brownstones and lofts blend the excitement of contemporary, in-town living with the urban grandeur of a bygone era.” Once this way of life could be found in cities all along the East Coast; now that Boston and D.C. are desiccated and past their prime, you have to go to Ann Arbor.

The condos in the 414 Main building that are also part of Ashley Mews don’t inspire any ludicrous geographic comparisons, but are, if anything, more opulent than the townhouses. Offering “complete customization to compliment [sic] your discerning taste,” they have “a level of luxury exceeded only by your imagination.” Of course, at LoFT 322, your home is your canvas, which implies that the level of luxury is roughly comparable to your imagination.