The sorry state of Michigan’s on-campus housing is making students nationwide more content with their lot. “I think they’re great. These rooms are bigger than graduate student housing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor,” one Delaware freshman says.
Well, huh. Who would have guessed that the council’s second NIMBYest member would facilitate a second vote on a project that he successfully voted to defeat because of his perennial concerns about building height? If this is Stephen Rapundalo’s attempt to make himself look like a fair-minded guy, it’s kind of working.
“A few months ago, I mentioned that I’d just met a middle-aged Grand Rapids woman who had never been to Ann Arbor until that day. I wondered if that proved A-squared is not in fact the center of the universe,” writes Jo Mathis. But wait — it gets even better. She manages to find a guy out there who didn’t hear about Tree Town until he was in his twenties.
An A2 resident who views the anti-Israel protesters at Temple Beth Israel as “cordial neighbors” sees an argumentative fallacy in a counter-protester’s sign:
[W]hen [the counter-protester] turned toward me, I was able to read what was written on it: THESE PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS … Being analytic by nature, I first began to think of the logic of the statement in the abstract. The ad hominem fallacy — the use of language directed against an opponent in debate rather than against the opponent’s position — was well known to the ancient masters of rhetoric, and its popularity has regrettably not diminished over the centuries. It occurred to me that the anti-protester’s banner would have been more to the point had it read: THESE PEOPLE ARE WRONG … “These people are wrong'’ is a statement that challenges, but in so doing challenges the challenger to back the claim fair and square — it implies a good, clean intellectual fight.
Yeah, why couldn’t the guy just have made a reasoned, intellectual argument against his opponents’ position that Mayor Hieftje is a racist, cowardly cracker and the media is controlled by Zionists?
The Detroit News profiles some local blogs (we were interviewed for this piece, but they refused to quote us unless we were willing to have our name printed.)
A group of Easy Street residents were successful in their effort to stop sidewalks from being installed on their street. So much for a walkable Ann Arbor. But we have to wonder why sidewalks, which enhance walkability for the whole city, are paid for by the individual residents of a street, while traffic-calming programs, which almost exclusively benefit the homeowners on a block, are funded by the city when neighborhood groups request them.
If you’ve found your comments disappearing, it’s not part of some new memory-hole moderation policy. We recently discovered that our new spam filter has been “retro-spanking” comments — marking them as spam after they’ve been approved. We’re trying to fix this, but if you’ve been retro-spanked, send us some mail. (Unless you like that kind of thing.)
All of the comments wrongly marked spam have, as far as we know, been restored.
“A drunken 18-year-old man said he punched and kicked a moving car simply because he felt like doing so,” reports the News Police Beat column. Not sure why that’s the lead, except that perhaps usually in A2 this sort of thing would be intended as a blow against the auto-industrial-Zionist complex.
The newly launched AnnArborTownies.com (thanks, Larry) hosts its first blog, 1 View of Ann Arbor, and it’s a doozy. Ever wondered why the city is suddenly insisting on putting these concrete “sidewalk” things everywhere? “I think it is a Public works project to support the cement workers (read hispanic).” Want a solution to the affordable housing problem? “[C]an’t somebody have the courage to stand up and say ‘Get the pinhead carpet baggers out of our houses?’ All the affordable houses in Ann Arbor are occupied by students, and look like crap.” There’s even a sexist Mary Sue Coleman joke thrown in.
Well, we’re back. They still somehow managed to hold an election while we were gone, which Chris Easthope won (for which we take total credit.) And another “right building in the wrong place” was approved. Is there ever a wrong building in the right place?
Today, newly hired “Monday Night Football” announcer Mike Tirico waxes rhapsodic about the Deuce. “Tirico’s life away from the booth is in Ann Arbor … a place he chose because it’s near his wife’s family and a major airport.” Well, not that near, as we found out last week, unless he means Willow Run. But there are even more reasons to choose A2 other than its 45-minute, public-transportationless commute to an airport where the only meal option is Quizno’s unless you’re flying Northwest. “The longer we’ve been in Ann Arbor the more we’ve loved it because the energy in a college town is second to none … And unlike a lot of college towns, Ann Arbor has its own culture and is a wonderfully diverse place for kids to grow up.”