Community

Concealed Carry

Concealed Carry: Appearing on bulletin boards in places including the Washtenaw Dairy and Stadium Hardware, Dan O’Bryan’s bold-lettered signs stand out among the usual postings for painters and handy people....

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Lane markings on Catherine

Q. How are drivers (and cyclists) to make sense of the new lane markings on Catherine St. between Fourth Ave. and Main? There’s a bike lane down the middle of the street with traffic on either side. Would any sensible...

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Rose Martin’s Struggles

A year ago, Rose Martin, the charismatic former director of Peace Neighborhood Center, incorporated Rose’s Good Company. She says her five-year-old, one-woman charity helps adults who “fall between the...

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Media Moment

Even in Ann Arbor, not everyone has air-conditioning–a truth apparently lost on some young local hoodlums. On a hot night in early August, a couple living on Ann Arbor’s south side were cooling off in their darkened...

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Pat Green

Pat Green is rarely at a loss for words. But even she winces when asked about The Salary.Whenever the Ann Arbor Public Schools’ financial struggles are discussed on local blogs, it’s certain that someone will gripe...

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The Missing Ticket

Jack Briegel lives off a quiet dirt road, in a home he shares with Jeannette, his wife of fifty-three years. If you go straight in from the front door, you’ll enter a living room decorated in Zen-like soft greens and earth...

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Stay-at-Home Seniors

Faced with death, W. C. Fields said he’d “rather be in Philadelphia.” Faced with old age, the postwar generation says they’d rather stay home.”In 2008, the economy changed, and that helped change...

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Newman’s Win

Town Center Plaza on S. Fourth Ave. looks just as it has for years: Eastern Accents, Bandito’s, and Salon Vertigo are going about their respective businesses, and even Fred, landlord Dale Newman’s parrot, is still...

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Squirrel heaven

When a west-side resident asked why he was seeing new varieties of squirrels in his backyard, U-M zoologist Philip Myers decided to check it out for himself.What he found was “squirrel heaven” in Eberwhite Woods....

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Visualizing 9/11

My bar mitzvah present to my nephew Jake, born and raised in Minneapolis, was a trip to the city that never sleeps. When I was twenty-three, I’d lived in Manhattan for five months, sadly departing when my funds run low and...

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Homegrown Festival

The rain poured down on us throughout my son Little Brother’s entire soccer game at Northside Elementary School. Adults huddled under umbrellas, kids wore raincoats under their jerseys, and even the boys on the sidelines...

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Ali Baba mural vanishes

“Those letters … have to spell out Mediterranean Restaurant,” write Mary and Katie DeBona, a daughter-and-mother duo who, while never having seen the mural featured in August, “recognized the writing on...

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Bijar Borweb puppies for sale

According to the dictionary, “conflate” is defined as “to fuse into one entity; merge.” We know that because we had to look it up when we read Marty Pernick’s edifying entry identifying the Fake Ad...

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Sunflower Splendor

“It was Mr. Monaghan’s idea,” says Todd Crocker.Many years ago, Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan requested mass plantings of summer sunflowers at the company’s headquarters. Though Monaghan sold...

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Chelsea to Ulaanbaatar?

Michael Kundak-Cowall has a dream: driving a tiny car from London, England, to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, partly to raise money for charity—and partly just for the sheer thrill of participating in the annual Mongol...

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Horseshoe Delight

The Huron River bisects Ann Arbor with a winding swath of beautiful ponds and flowing water. Its steep bluffs and rich floodplains are protected by a patchwork of parks that comprise more than 1,000 acres of open water, forested...

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Leaping Forward

Brandan Montgomery did very well at the public high school he attended in Washtenaw County. Too well for the effort he put into it, he says. He didn’t study, slept through classes, and still received As on tests....

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Loft Living

As an intern in Madison, Wisconsin, Grace Hong lived in a windowless campus apartment without air conditioning. When the native of the Philippines moved to Ann Arbor to enroll in the U-M’s Global MBA program, she says, it...

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Write On

In the summer of 2010, I registered my ten-year-old son for a writing workshop at 826michigan. Trouble was, he didn’t want to go. Writing outside school hours? Not going to happen. Executive director Amanda Uhle says...

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Getting and Giving

Ann Arbor’s Downtown Kiwanis Club has been “getting to give” since holding its first thrift sale in 1927. Over the years, the club has raised more than $5.75 million by collecting donations of used clothing,...

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