ann arbor is overrated.

The News explores the diverse uses of canola oil in its recipe column today. For instance, there’s this recipe for Soup with Chicken Dumplings:

2 tablespoons canola oil

2 tablespoons canola oil

2 tablespoons canola oil

2 tablespoons canola oil

2 tablespoons canola oil

1. Put the first 4 ingredients into a blender and blend them to the consistency of a mousse. Using a scoop or 2 teaspoons, shape batter into little football shapes and drop them into boiling turkey or chicken stock. Cook 4 to 5 minutes and serve.

Also featured in the column: Fried Rice, Savory Vegetable Cakes or Beef Tamales — all requiring no ingredients other than canola oil in two-tablespoon increments. Someone’s in the pocket of the canola oil lobby. (Or possibly this is somehow related to the Web error that Mlive has been experiencing lately where every item on a page has the same title.)

The Ann Arbor News runs a feature on blogging, “where personal information, and sometimes insults or threats, are posted for all the world to see,” and efforts of various schools to contain the medium, which are starting to sound more and more like the war on geeks that Jon Katz has been documenting for years on Slashdot. Says one local eighth-grade counselor of those nasty, sarcastic bloggers, “They’re certainly not going to see the people crying on the other end.” But maybe the technology will someday advance to the point where that’s no longer the case.

We’re going to be living in Chicago for a month this summer, so we checked out the place we’ll be subletting while we were in town this weekend. It’s a four-bedroom in an old beautiful building less than a block away from the University of Chicago campus with two bathrooms, huge windows in every room and pristine hardwood floors. The rent, which we’re told is fairly typical for the area: $415 per person.

A2 isn’t the only town that’s described by cutesy slogans like “surrounded by reality” and “the People’s Republic of…” This column from the Capital Times (about a one-week-old CafePress store; clearly it’s not just A2 columnists who have trouble coming up with material) attempts to pinpoint the origin of the phrases as applied to Madison. Yeah, but we bet Madison doesn’t have any trees. And its name isn’t two words that begin with the same letter, so any exponentiation references are out.

Josh Steichmann has an interesting post at Arbor Update with original reporting on the Ann Arbor Public Schools endangered salamander controversy. Didn’t we totally predict this in 2003?

We admit that we’ve found it difficult to maintain any interest in the “debate over the debates” that’s been raging over the greenway public hearing, even with the Hieftje intimidation allegations, so we’re glad that it seems to have been resolved, at least for now. Although Margaret Wong still isn’t happy: “I don’t think a single public hearing will be enough to bring out the depth of public comment that the greenway deserves,” she told the News. Yeah, one hearing just isn’t enough to take in the full spectrum of the greenway debate, considering the intellectual complexity of what we’ve seen so far from the Friends of the Ann Arbor Greenway. How can one hearing capture satin and grosgrain ribbons, booing and sighing — all in the space of an hour or two?

We were wondering why Main Street was so crowded last night; as far as we could tell, nothing special was going on except for a hair salon’s “Midnite Madness” sale that involved selling hair products until 10 pm. But it turns out that we had stumbled into the Main Street Area Association’s Moonlight Delight event, at which “retailers stay open several hours past their normal closing times.” Shopping several hours past six — now, that’s our idea of a crazy time. Some late-night shoppers probably couldn’t even make it to the Farmers’ Market until 8 or 9 this morning.

Anonymous unprotected sex (link probably not safe for work) is so much better when it’s with someone who’s probably dropped out of three separate PhD programs. “I am well endowed in terms of girth. I am well educated (three Masters from very elite universities),” writes an Ann Arbor man in search of “barebacking.” But does he shop at Wal-Mart?

The New Haven Advocate explores the trend of naming children “after funky college towns situated in otherwise boring parts of the country,” as exemplified by Madison and Austin, choosing Ann Arbor as the next college town name ripe for appropriation. Otherwise boring parts of the country?

The Friends of the Ann Arbor Greenway offer a list of talking points for those on their mailing list who intend to send letters to the News:

Good letter themes include:

- the recreational benefits of a Greenway; the beauty if [sic] would bring to
the downtown area,

- support for the “radical” idea that City Council should hold public
hearings so that citizens - not just the DDA - can speak about their
visions of the downtown area,

- there is zero public greenspace in the downtown area; the Greenway
proposal would mean less than 1% of the greater downtown area would be
dedicated to parks,

- there will be massive redevelopment of hundreds of other sites that will
produce density and housing - the Greenway provides balance, not conflict
with increased density,

- token parks that are called “a greenway” provide no balance, just a
public relations smokescreen for a maximum development plan.