If you’re trying to make an impression and you need to knock one out of the park, look no further than The Oasis Hot Tub Gardens. Seriously.

Continue reading Valentine's Day in Ann Arbor starts with the Oasis Hot Tub Gardens...

The Bar at 327 Braun Court

Richard Retyi | Contributor

Bold predictions require adventurous statements. I'm not one for hyperbole, but Geronimo: The Bar at 327 Braun Court will be Ann Arbor's most popular bar in 2012. Book it.

Student bars, brew pubs, cocktail bars, martini lounges — that's the landscape in Ann Arbor. On the surface of things, The Bar isn't much different. It's a cocktail bar committed to high-octane drinks but services the beer crowd with semi-ironic snub-nosed bottles of Genesee.

But people can get their craft cocktails and blue-collar brew elsewhere. What they can't get anywhere but The Bar is a place that feels like the living room of the coolest person you’ve ever known.

Continue reading Ann Arbor's most popular bar in 2012 - 'The Bar at 327 Braun Court'...

The Parlour Room

"When I use the term apartment gallery, I get a range of responses from blank stares to intense questions," says Ayling. "Alternative spaces are pretty natural in Chicago, but they seem to be rarer in this area."

Continue reading A new kind of art gallery in Ypsilanti - The Parlour Room...

Duke Wagetha (left) and his son Cody.

Richard Retyi | Contributor

"A lot of people say the holiday season hasn't started until they drink the cheap booze in the trailer," says Duke Wagetha, CEO at Flatsnoots Christmas Trees Headquarters.

Tree camp, as Duke refers to it, is located at 3500 Washtenaw Avenue across from the Arborland Mall. It's hard to miss — a giant parking lot full of Christmas trees and a multicolored 1951 Vagabond trailer covered in wreaths.

Continue reading The only place in Ann Arbor to get your Christmas tree...

Art by C. Jason DePasquale

Since college, I've only been without access to laundry facilities twice. Once was in an area north of downtown Chicago called Ravenswood and the other was in Jacksonville, Fla. The laundromat experience was so wretched in Ravenswood that when I had to seek outside laundry help in Jacksonville, I found a nice place that washed your clothes and charged by the pound.

I don't like laundromats, but I realize people have to use them. One of those people is my pal C. Jason DePasquale. I see him check in on foursquare at one of Ann Arbor’s premier laundromats — Mr. Stadium — every once in a while. His check-ins had me missing the good old days of Ravenswood. I wanted to see how times had changed. I wanted to see if Ann Arbor was different. I wanted to slum it.

Jason agreed to accompany me to three different businesses to give three laundromats a spin. Here is our unscientific appraisal.

Continue reading The best and worst laundromats in Ann Arbor...

For my entree into your high school football experience — and by "your", I mean anyone not Canadian — I chose the annual Ann Arbor backyard showdown. The Ann Arbor Pioneer Pioneers (I know, it looks like a typo but it’s fun to write) hosted the Huron High School River Rats on Homecoming, mixing good old-fashioned American gridiron with good older fashioned European monarchy.

Continue reading A Canadian's first American high school football game - Pioneer vs. Huron...

The BrawlStars’ MVP of the bout, jammer Hermione Gank-Ya, breaks through two Flint City Derby Girl blockers.

photo courtesy of Farzin Montazersadgh (FarzinPhoto.com)

Tattoos, tank tops, short shorts, lycra, mouth guards armored padding and colors as bright as a bag of mixed jelly beans.

Saturday was about more than college football with the A2D2 Brawlstars facing the Flint City Derby Girls at Buhr Park in the Brawlstars’ first home bout. Elbows, jamming and insubordination: It was the perfect night for derby.

Continue reading Roller Derby packs Buhr Park in the A2D2 Brawlstars home debut...

But… it’s there. And while you don’t have to spend your life cowering in the basement, it’s a good idea to have one.

Continue reading Living with an anxiety disorder: The signs were there all along...

When you're unemployed you eat a lot of soup with giant spoons.

Continue reading The brief life and tragic death of one man's summer of funemployment...

This is the age of sterile progress and efficiency. Computers and smartphones have replaced television sets and radios. When push comes to shove, the pinched pennies of overdrawn school budgets are cast in the lot of upgrading software instead of maintaining teacher jobs.

This physical shift has been paralleled by a change in thinking.

It seems as if the DNA of our society has developed a steely membrane that is impregnable against the seemingly antiquated traditions of human contact.

So what do ordinary people count for these days? Do we depreciate in value just like machines? Are we trapped in some sort of inverse relationship with technological progress? Or, should the value of human-to-human interactions increase as it is turning into a fleeting commodity?

With the still-poignant memory of a student’s suicide challenging our consciences and the jaws of recent budget cuts whisking away some of the schools’ most talented educators, it’s difficult not to underscore the importance of a teacher over a machine.

For this piece, I interviewed two professionals who have established themselves not only as experts in their respective areas, but have transcended the line of duty to broaden the role of the educator.

Continue reading The value of the educator: a discussion with two Ann Arbor teachers about why they do what they do...

On Thursday, the afternoon before my final day on Earth. I find myself sitting with two friends at Old Town talking about the end of days. My article is due at 8 a.m. Friday morning, but here I sit, throwing on an afternoon drunk and talking about lakes of fire.

What is AnnArbor.com going to do, fire me? I’ve got plenty of money to tide me over until Saturday.

I should hedge my bets. Camping was wrong once before. He prophesized that 1994 would be the end of the world, but when the world kept on spinning, he claimed the prediction was preliminary. In the 15 years since, Camping been able to check his work and nail down the real date — tomorrow. Am I ready for judgment day? Are you? 

What do I wear?

Continue reading Judgment Day, The Rapture and the last day on Earth - what do I wear?...

Photo by Flickr user doortoriver

Standing right beside me the waitress yells “CUSTOMER!” and, before I can take another step, “CUSTOMER!” again. I’m next to the soda fountains and glassware, standing on the webbed rubber mats found behind saloon bartops — the ones the prevent mixologists from slipping and spraining a wrist making your Gin Fizzy.

“It’s straight out of a bad John Woo movie,” my friend Ryan says. “You walk through stairs that might turn to dust at any moment, open a wood plank barely hanging on and turn on a single light bulb that flutters above the scariest toilet in town. At least that’s how I remember it in my nightmares.”

Don’t forget the huge boiling pot filled to the top with hunks of red meat still on the bone. Welcome to one the worst bathrooms in Ann Arbor. Yes, it’s a tie. Oh, and if you’re squeamish about poop and pee, you might want to skip over to the Pets or Faith sections. I won’t hold it against you.

Continue reading The worst bathroom in Ann Arbor...

Continue reading Detroit rapper FowL builds mix-tape momentum, collaborates with hip-hop legend...

Kina Grannis at downtown Borders bookstore.

Jing Chai | Contributor

By the time I got to the second floor of the downtown Borders bookstore, every single plastic chair had already been occupied. College students sporting North Face jackets sat side-by-side with grandparents and middle-aged mothers, toying with their iPhones.

I stationed myself along the edge of the chairs as the crowd sifted with anticipation. We were all waiting for one person.

A petite brunette with hair pulled loosely in a fishtail braid stepped out of the elevator, led by a Borders employee. She was dressed casually in a jersey top and workman’s boots. As she circled to the front of the crowd, whistles of approval and excited claps reverberated across the room.

Kina Grannis unclasped a black guitar case and faced the audience, her face framed by the afternoon sunshine. She strummed an intro chord and remarked on the strange un-springlike weather outside. The crowd laughed in response.

Continue reading Interview with YouTube songstress Kina Grannis ...

How do we assign value? It’s easy to associate products with numbers. The pricing system is founded on a dry estimate of the availability of resources and the cost to manufacture these goods. Applying value to human beings gets more complicated.

The way we denote value in society is driven by economics and politics. Today, professional athletes like Michael Vick and celebrities like Britney Spears get higher wages than high school teachers and sanitary engineers. In a similar vein, Snooki from Jersey Shore was paid $2,000 more than Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison to speak at Rutgers University.

This value system conflicts with common sense.

In my economics textbook, Glenn Hubbard explains this logical fallacy by pointing out that there is a more expansive pool of laborers who can fulfill teaching and cleaning positions, while a much more limited collection of people can act in the capacity of an entertainer.

In addition, the initial net profit made by one sold-out show at Comerica Park can draw in a sum eons greater than any amount a scientist working one day in a laboratory can make.

This makes sense.

(But does it really?)

Continue reading Reassessing the merit system in high school: an introspective look...