Year: 2004

… And then there’s a whole discussion thread (same site) about libraries in which someone says she never goes to libraries because the thought of touching books that someone else has handled freaks her out, which is about the strangest reason not to go to a library I’ve ever heard. She writes, seeming to think...

Someone wrote in to I Love Books asking what it was like to work in a bookstore. Here’s one answer: You don’t sit around and read and discuss literature all the time when you work in a bookshop. You do tell customers where the latest Mitch Albom book is a million times a day. You...

From Tuesday’s Ann Arbor News: A 34-year-old man admitted he punched a pedestrian in the face in Liberty Plaza Park in downtown Ann Arbor Monday because he didn’t like the look on his face, city police said. The 53-year-old victim said he was walking through the plaza at 7:40 a.m. when he was suddenly punched...

There’s an article in today’s Ann Arbor News about cafes that you may have seen. I’m happy to say Ambrosia wasn’t mentioned in it once, not because I don’t wish Ambrosia long luck and much prosperity, but because it’s nice to know there’s a cool cafe that somehow manages to slip under the radar of...

A quote from his new book, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) In the Future Tense (quote courtesy New York Times): In America, it is acceptable to cut off any driver in a vehicle that costs a third more than yours. That’s called democracy. If that’s democracy, then Michigan has democracy...

Where to begin? The Pixies are back together for a reunion tour, are not apparently tearing each other limb from limb, and are like a breath of fresh air. Morrissey has relased a new album (with a sadly ironic cover photograph of himself holding a Tommy gun), You Are the Quarry, of which the Guardian...

Ref Grunt has closed its doors. Long live Refgrunt.com, although its posts appear to be dismayingly intermittent.

There are many cool things about Michigan weather, I’ve discovered. One is that it’s so unpredictable (within reason). Another is the months of snow, which I have to say I’ve missed. And another is that when severe weather happens, it reminds you that Mother Nature really is still in charge, not us puny humans. That...

Ambrosia, which is staffed by a bunch of avid, amiable fishing enthusiasts who would probably be much, much happier in Berkeley if it weren’t for the lack of walleye and lake trout, was all abuzz this afternoon about the near-tornado. “You could feel the hair raise on your arms and you could smell the copper...

I walked through the connector between the undergraduate and graduate libraries yesterday and today on my way to work. Late yesterday afternoon, an impressive storm was brewing that turned out to be the near-tornado of last night. This afternoon, a similar storm was brewing as I walked through. I stopped to look out the window...

Acording to Atlas of Michigan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1977), which places this paragraph above a path map of an apparently really nasty tornado that hit southeastern Michigan on 12 April 1965: Tornadoes are usually spawned by an advance of a strong cold front into a mass of warm, moist air from the...

Before Ann Arbor became Storm Central in the past 48 hours, birds were everywhere. One reader (and someone who knows her avians), Dorothea of the fantastic Caveat Lector, wrote to tell me that the bird I was mystfied about the other day was a yellow-shafted flicker, otherwise known as a Northern flicker, or by its...

Okay, Yankees, when the sky turns as dark and ugly GREEN as it did at 2:30 this afternoon, that means you’ve got yourself a tornado somewhere VERY. CLOSE. BY. This means get in the cellar, fool, ‘fore you get sucked up like Helen Hunt’s daddy in that Twister movie. But the sirens didn’t even sound...

The title of a paper given by MIT meterology professor and chaos theorist Edward Lorenz at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington DC on 29 December 1979: Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? From Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (1900): The...

We had a ‘possible-tornado-producing’ storm last night with blowing sirens and one-inch hail and minor flooding in Ypsi and a house burned after a lightning strike. It was all higgledy-piggledy for awhile around midnight. The native Californian was in denial about it all for at least a few minutes, lying in bed as the sirens...

How fun to get something like this in your e-mail box at midnight: ‘On Monday, May 17, the University of Michigan Administrative Information Services determined that a small selection of personal student data elements may have been exposed to some individuals within the University community through the Wolverine Access Web site. The data elements that...

More stuff on the Seattle Public Library from LISNews: The New Yorker calls the new central library “the most important new library to be built in a generation, and the most exhilarating.” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has been trumpeting the new library, with an overview and groovy QuickTime panoramas of various of the library’s floors. The...

Today’s LISNews links to a New York Times article about Fundrace.org, an intriguing site that allows you to track campaign contributions by neighborhood. This is information you can go down to any registrar’s office and legally view; nothing unusual except in the presentation and the speed of access to the information. One Ohio woman was...

According to the radio, not only are cicadas on the way (though so far the hype has exceeded the reality), but gypsy moths, European chafers, Asian longhorn beetles, Japanese beetles, mosquitoes, and of course the pervasive emerald ash bore are also about to make their presence known. (According to the Michigan State University Extension entomologist...

Still no cicadas to speak of. Steve says it’s not been consistently warm enough for them to want to come out. I have, however, seen lots of birds, including a number I can’t identify (I’m waiting for a field guide on hold at the University library to help with that). One of them I’ve seen...

Tony Randall passed on Monday, followed yesterday by Elvin Jones, probably the greatest drummer (never mind greatest “jazz drummer”) who ever lived. Jones was born in Pontiac and got his start in the Detroit jazz scene in 1949. He played on some of the greatest jazz albums ever recorded, including Charles Mingus’s Pithecanthropus Erectus, Sonny...

No titillating “overheards” from Ambrosia today; just a bunch of employees meeting over cheesecake and listening to their benefits person yack about how awesome Blue Shield of Michigan’s health coverage is. Why this company’s HR meeting was being held in a sidewalk cafe I don’t think I want to know.

In a mere 25 minutes or so, the first homo marriages in the United By-God States of Amurrica will take place in Massachusetts. [sarcasm] We’ll be hiding in the basement so that the Angel of Death and Divine Retribution ‘Gainst the Homos and Homo-Loving will pass us by as this cataclysmic event foisted upon us...

Before the dandelion adventure, we paid a brief visit to the University of Michigan Museum of Art. (We were thinking of doing part of the 16-site Wander Washtenaw event sponsored by the Washtenaw County Historical Consortium this weekend, but I didn’t get my act together enough to realize that it went on all day yesterday...

Haven’t seen this many dandelions in a town ever. Like with the squirrels, AA believes in plenty of something. Opus Bayley took a much-needed dandelion break in the park next to the Jewish Community Center. It’s been a fabulous day …

Looks like « someone wrote a really good letter to the editor of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal », right there in full red-meated Dubya country. Congratulations and keep your head down; those Texas fascists will be gunning for ya now: ‘Bush Priorities Questioned ‘Where did I go wrong? I’m a registered Republican because I believe in...

I had this conversation with a friend not too long ago: If you have a ton of books to choose from to read, what’s your strategy? I am myself addicted to having way more books around than I’ll possibly have time to read. This entails choices. Some books you’ll never get to. Some you can...

We went to the downtown area today and did some window shopping. West Side Book Shop was one of our stops. I’d never been there, and it’s a cozy, well-stocked store, if a little crowded and tilted more to the antique side than to the standard used-book trade. (There were some fantastic rare books on...

Meanwhile, 140 miles away, in Kendallville, IN, a petition is being circulated to stop a proposed $7.9 million library building. Once the opposing signatures are submitted, the library will have 30 days to gather competing signatures. Whoever gets the most signatures wins. The new building is being opposed for the usual reasons. [Story courtesy LISNews.]

On Tuesday night, Frisinger Park was jam-packed with cars and trucks and a girls’ softball team and their parents and boosters. Passing through the park, which I normally do on my way home as a shortcut, was inadvisable. Wednesday night was less of a zoo, although there were a handful of boys and their dads...

It was virtually impossible for me to sleep last night. The heat is upon us, and it definitely rises to the top in our house. It was only 65 degrees outside last night but it felt like a Dutch oven indoors, even with two high-powered fans at full blast in the bedroom, except in the...

In between thoroughly (and devastatingly, I might add) trashing the new Wolfgang Petersen “Troy” movie and bemoaning the scariness of having just graduated, two women in Ambrosia were discussing this afternoon why it was that a mutual friend always suffered from the affliction of people developing crushes on him. “It’s because he’s hot but non-threatening,”...

It just doesn’t get any more Fascist FunDumbMentalist than this: ‘The Roman Catholic bishop of Colorado Springs has issued a pastoral letter saying that Catholic Americans should not receive Communion if they vote for politicians who defy church teaching by supporting abortion rights, same-sex marriage, euthanasia or stem-cell research. Several bishops in the United States...

Three girls coming into the ‘Media Center’ for Career Day presentations on cosmetology today: ‘See, this say media center, but a media center where you go to use computers and stuff. And this ain’t no media center. This a LIBRARY. It full of books.’ Yeah. What she said.

I guess I was grossly mistaken when we moved here; I thought we would be paying much less for gas per gallon than we did in San Francisco. A week ago, I was waiting for the interminable light at Packard and Stadium to change and the price at one station on the corner was raised...

Ann Arbor isn’t the liberal bastion I thought it was; while ‘guest teaching’ today at a central AA middle school during a Career Day assembly, I passed a science classroom which was empty except for the teacher. She had the radio blaring out with full throated and ‘kill all the liberals in the colleges and...

Yesterday I was riding one of the Hatcher elevators with an undergrad who was helping a co-worker cart some ficuses somewhere (aren’t ficuses always either standing in a corner of an office or being carted somewhere?). The co-worker asked him what he was planning on doing after graduation. “Oh, I don’t know, go to law...

Three weeks ago, NPR’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty recently did a report on Catholics and John Kerry that has raised some temperatures in the blogopshere. I won’t go into all that, but one blog quotes the reporter as telling American Libraries in February 2000, “Reporters should be thinking about big ideas and can get bogged down...

It’s an absolutely lovely night outside. Humid, but a perfect temp, with the Big Dipper directly overhead, night sounds all around—it would be a great night to camp out, if my tent wasn’t in Oklahoma. And yes, I heard more cicada sounds while I was out there with the beagle. The vanguard of Brood X...

Frank pointed out the cover of Section E ‘Connection’ of tonight’s Ann Arbor News (Motto: ‘Still the World’s Worst Website). Headlined Highs and Lows of Clothes (ain’t that alliterative?), it’s a discussion of how, for today’s teen girl, ‘less is more.’ I think he regrets bringing it home. It provoked a longish rant, which you’re...

A bicyclist and I came to the same narrow passageway in the sidewalk on Maynard in front of Ambrosia and Madras Masala at exactly the same moment today. (There were people at the outddors tables in front of Ambrosia, making the sidewalk even more crowded.) Should I have yielded, or should he have? Neither of...

Speaking of the local election story, the front page article on the subject mentions that Ann Arbor mayor John Hieftje has a Republican challenger in this year’s election—former City Council member Jane Lumm. It would be nice to know what Hieftje and Lumm’s positions are on local issues. The article doesn’t go into that. Neither...

In today’s Ann Arbor News, there was a huge (why so huge, I don’t know, but it obliterated a far more important story about upcoming local elections) front-page article about high school kids and their midriff-baring and short-skirt fashions and the “tensions” that said fashions are creating. Apropos of not much, in the midst of...

On tonight’s broadcast of The Connection (an NPR-affiliated radio show): Blogs offer a constant rush of political opinion: the gloating, the jeering, and those knockout punches. But not everyone thinks bringing punditry to the people is a good thing. New Yorker writer George Packer argues that by blurring the line between journalism and pure rant,...

From this morning’s Free Press: Historically, Brood X has sidestepped Wayne, Macomb and most of Oakland counties. They were, however, spotted in Bloomfield Hills the last time they came out in 1987. Go a little west, though, to Washtenaw, Lenawee and southern Livingston counties and you’ll run into them. Millions of them. Hundreds of millions....

Nancy Pearl was on NPR this morning, recommending older political novels to serve as an antidote to all of those scary partisan election-year non-fiction diatribe-tomes on sale at your favorite bookstore. (Some of her recommendations: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Ward Just’s A Dangerous Friend, and Henry Adams’ Democracy). She’s got a really...

We’re having regular thunderstorms and thunderstorm forecasts this time of year. Having never experienced thunderstorm season in the Midwest, I find it fascinating. Last night, for example, a fairly rambunctious storm rumbled through at about 11. Tonight, on the other hand, while I was at work, there was a brief burst of rain and thunder,...

It amuses me, I’m not sure why, that there are more articles on the upcoming cicada infestation in the Washington Post (a search of the Post website shows 17 separate articles on cicadas in the last week alone) than I’ve seen in the local papers, although I suppose the Post’s cicada watch amounts almost to...

My god I didn’t think it was possible, but it’s true; the Boy Emperor is incable of learning from his mistakes and « is beginning the march of war on Syria »: ’[The Boy Emperor] will order economic sanctions against Syria this week for supporting terrorism and not doing enough to prevent militant fighters from...