ann arbor is overrated.

Eugene Kang must have the establishment worried; now they’re playing the residency card. After years of Ann Arborites arguing that students aren’t real members of the community where they live, now it appears that they aren’t considered real members of the community where their parents live, either. Opponent Stephen Rapundalo charges that Kang’s academic-year residence in a 3rd Ward fraternity on the wrong side of Washtenaw makes him unfit to represent the 2nd Ward. But the most troubling sentence of the story, whose first paragraph seems to be missing again: “Michigan election law states that a person cannot gain or lose a residence while ‘a student at an institution of learning.”’ Is this true? Is it just intended to prevent students from running for office, or does it prevent them from voting too?

The new Observer (no, they don’t sell the Observer here in Chicago; we have ways of getting it, though) profiles a new store called Planet. Sorry — “infoshop,” as the store owners like to call their establishment, which offers “protest literature…fair-trade coffee, rebellious music and a spray paint and marker section for graffiti artists.”

“Like Europe’s infoshops, the Planet is part political center, part retail store, and part cultural statement,” runs the caption on a photo of one of the cofounders, draped in an American flag with the stars replaced by corporate logos. “I wrote a satire and I got in big trouble for it,” one customer tells the Observer. “It was about how we should introduce eighth-grade material to second-graders, and the teacher — the English teacher — didn’t even get it.” Yeah, the same thing happened to us when we suggested that we should introduce basic planning material to greenway supporters.

Also worth checking out: an story entitled “Democans or Republicrats?” about the increasing nonpartisanship of A2 politics that refers to Eugene Kang as “Eugene Wang” throughout.

Hilarious News story about a planning workshop at which “full-scale” greenway proponents, given maps of A2 with chits to represent developments and green space, appeared to think that they were playing a game of Risk to decide the future of downtown. “I think we used all of them,” said a Friend of the Ann Arbor Greenway proudly of her group’s green markers. But not every small group ran so smoothly. “Adrian Iraola, retired project manager for the DDA…said as soon as his group started, the greenway fans rushed to put green chits all over their map. ‘What gives them the right?’ Iraola asked. ‘And they are all over the place.’”

The News runs a good overview of recently increasing student involvement in local politics through the Eugene Kang candidacy, the New West Side Association and something called “Web page blogs.” We’d like to know what the first sentence was; “Yet few would argue that college students have a say in the Ann Arbor political arena” probably wasn’t it.

Fairy doors have started to appear throughout downtown, often decorated quite similarly to the buildings they adorn. Perhaps we’ll see a little concrete door at First and William put there by the parking lot fairies, who, as we all know, are deathly allergic to anything green.

A letter in today’s News urges a vote for city council candidate Stephen Rapundalo based on, as far as we can tell, exemplary attendance at his children’s athletic events in his “family oriented” neighborhood. “In thinking about the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and well, yes, the Soccer Party, in the end it is about Stephen’s many years of commitment to the families of our community,” the letter writer says of Rapundalo, who’s running against student candidate Eugene Kang in the Second Ward Democratic primary. Is this a subtle acknowledgment of Rapundalo’s recent Republican past?

Apropos of the pre-Art Fair “Townie Party,” the News attempts to define who, exactly, is a “townie.” The partygoers they interview set the bar pretty high. For one thing, you can’t leave, even for a little while. “You don’t go away in the summer and you don’t even go away for six months,” one resident says. And you have to be so wrapped up in A2 that even a trip to Novi takes you out of your “comfort zone.”

Iggy Pop on A2: “One of the greatest songs for me of all time is ‘Slum Goddess from the Lower East Side.’ When I heard that, I was like ‘I wanna have a slum goddess.’ There are no slum goddesses in Ann Arbor. I want one.” Do student ghetto goddesses count?

Ann Arbor doesn’t make the top 100 in CNN’s Best Places to Live list, but Saline (for which A2 is listed as the “nearest city”) comes in at number 43. A2 is well under the “best places average” in all but one of the categories of movie theaters, restaurants, bars, golf courses, libraries and museums. Yes, the exception is golf courses, of which Ann Arbor has twice as many as the competition. (Saline is behind in all those categories too, so we’re not sure how it made the list.)

Be sure to take the quiz on the site that tells you what your ideal place to live is; our results say that we should be living in Hackensack, New Jersey.

Today’s Ann Arbor News runs an unbelievably wrongheaded editorial arguing that the War on Drugs needs to extend further — into the area of prescription drug abuse, which they claim that the current War “scarcely touches.” Never mind that the DEA is already waging what many have called “a war on doctors” that has left many patients in chronic pain unable to get the medication they need. (As chronicled here in Reason and in Radley Balko’s blog The Agitator.)

UPDATE: The News claims that prescription drug abusers “now account for 30 percent of emergency room deaths.” But as Anna points out in the comments here, the figure is actually 30 percent of drug-related emergency room deaths. According to this Reuters story on the NIH site, “controlled [prescription] drugs were implicated in almost 30 percent of drug-related emergency room deaths,” which doesn’t even imply that all of these deaths were caused by abuse; some of them could have been the result of accidental overdose (or suicide, which is arguably not what the drug warriors mean by “abuse.”) We hope the News will be running a correction.