ann arbor is overrated.

“Ann Arbor Police believes they will catch the people who are stealing cars in the city and leaving them in the Fourth and Washington parking structure downtown,” says the News. “[A]ll the cars had been stolen in various areas in the city after their owners either left the keys in them and unlocked or had left the cars running and unattended.” And they want to catch the criminals? What about an education campaign telling car owners not to leave their keys in the car? We can probably guess that these aren’t student cars.

At least these thieves keep the cars in the community, unlike some of those non-locally-based criminals who abandon them in Detroit. Support your local car thieves!

“Frustrated by years of burglary problems in the off-campus student neighborhoods during the holiday break, Ann Arbor Police Department has vamped up its educational efforts urging students to lock their doors,” reports the News, which makes the new campaign sound sexier than it probably is. Sexier than actually providing any statistics about how many student burglary victims had functioning door and window locks provided by their landlords and failed to use them, anyway.

The Freep investigates the safety of student housing, featuring prominently one student whose experience with a house fire caused him to come out in support of the ban on, as one of the subheadings puts it, “dangerous couches.”

Metafilter engages in a little Michigan bashing in a thread about the Toledo War. “[T]here’s an intersection when you’re heading east on I-94, I think it’s US-23 though it might be 275, where the road splits 3 ways and the choices are ‘Flint / Detroit / Toledo.’ If anything was gonna convince you to just give up and turn around…” writes one poster. “[A]nd do what? … head back to jackson?” is the reply. But another participant reminds them, “Don’t forget Ann Arbor.” As his ZIP puts him in Cambridge, though, he would seem to have the luxury of doing so.

Judy McGovern is less than optimistic about the willingness of the U of M to go along with recommendations in the Calthorpe plan that the town and university work together on such major planning initiatives as putting some benches on the Diag (the only concrete suggestion she quotes), using the report mainly as a jumping-off point for yet another screed against the university. “How about townies’ concerns about pedestrian-unfriendly buildings that loom over streets? Take a look at the beauty going up on South Thayer and Washington streets.” Apparently, she’s concerned about the ability of pedestrians to fight their way through those thick shadows that the building throws on the sidewalk.

Oh, and A2 appears on some more best-city lists. “Three hurrahs in one week. That’s not bad, even for a city that regularly makes such lists,” write Geoff Larcom. Except one of the awards, from Forbes’ “Life 2.0″, is actually from over a year ago.

Slate’s media critic Jack Shafer recently observed that the words “should” and “must,” once banished from The New York Times’ editorials, were making a comeback. “[S]hould-and-must editorials,” the editorial page’s editor thought, “made it sound as if the Times’ message to readers was, ‘You must, by God, because we said so, and we’re the fucking New York Times.’”

The News has been going on something of a “should” and “must” bender of late; of its last six editorials, the titles of four boast a “should,” and two a “must.” One even has both: “Voters should not settle for flawed system; Public must be informed about corruption.” Because they said so, and they’re the fucking Ann Arbor News.

Geoff Larcom praises Ann Arbor’s walkability, even though the city fails to appear on a recent list of walkable cities compiled by the American Podiatric Medical Association. According to an A2 podiatrist, “Ann Arbor’s mix of parks, the river and a navigable downtown that has easy terrain and the added bounce of college students” make it ideal for pedestrian traffic. While we’re sure that all of these things, especially the “bounce of college students,” make for nice scenery, we’d prefer a Kroger downtown.

Gawker’s New York-centric Are You a Hipster? quiz will probably leave most Ann Arborites with a sense of utter befuddlement (Misshapes? Isn’t that the new yoga/spinning hybrid they’re offering over at V ie: Fitness and Spa?) so we think it’s time to rewrite it for an A2 audience. More suggestions welcome.

1. Have you ever commented on Past the College Grounds?
2. Without looking it up, can you fill in the blanks in this sentence: “The Technology Center is on _______ between _______ and _______, but why are you going there? That place sucks now. Oh wait, I mean, it burned down.”
3. You’ve seen Davy Rothbart and [enter favorite member of Pas/cal here] at a bar, but you didn’t make a big deal out of it, right? After all, they’re just dudes hanging out.
4. Have you been in a photo, even in the background of a photo, published on the inside front page of the Ann Arbor Paper?
5. While having a conversation with someone in a bar, has the topic ever turned to how much you both hate AAIO, even though you both agreed on “how nice he, or she, is in person?” (Wait, that doesn’t make you a hipster, it makes you a blog dork.)
6. In the past six months, have you been to two Madison House shows? (anybody can luck into one).
7. Do the following letters (and numbers) mean anything to you: A2H20?

An Old West Side resident is not happy with the way that the residential parking system is being implemented in his neighborhood. “[H]ow highhanded to nearly quadruple the fee ($25 for sticker and guest tag versus $40 for the sticker alone) and replace the guest hanger with a clumsy, unworkable mechanism of begging the authorities for permission every time I have a guest or contractor…It should be noted that we, the residents of the Old West Side, initiated this program in order to help us with a difficult parking situation.” Unfortunately, they don’t have absolute power over how the program is carried out. “Most of us would be better off with the situation we had before we chose residential parking.”

“Funny how our granting of the power to ease and protect the parking situation has become their perk to give or withhold at their whim.” Well, it’s one of the most hilarious things we’ve read in a while, anyway.

If you’re riding the Link on a Tuesday, be prepared to contend with puppet shows. “You think that anytime you get on the bus, something will happen,” says the art professor who’s organizing the event. Like, say, a broken back door that has to be manually closed at every stop, or a trip that terminates prematurely after a collision with a car? (Okay, those were experiences we had on blue U of M buses, not the Link.)

As the News says, “A bus is nothing if it’s not an active venue for art.”