Opinion Section

Editor’s note: Ann Arbor residents Laura Sky Brown and her son Henry attended the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama. This year they returned to the nation’s capital, and filed periodic updates for The Chronicle along the way. This column contains their reflections on those trips, beginning with observations by Laura Sky Brown.

I was never the kind of person who went to mass events. I could not imagine lining up overnight for concert tickets, crowding in to Times Square to watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve, or sitting in the midst of thousands at a music festival.

So it’s a little bit amazing that I have now attended not one but two presidential inaugurations. Both times, I have been motivated almost entirely by the desire to give my middle son Henry a thrill. Henry is the guy among my four children who will sit down and watch “Hardball” and CNN with me, who has incisive commentary on political issues, and who understands how to listen to rhetoric and pull out the essential elements (and root out the crap buried inside). I harbor not-so-secret hopes that he will go into political life, although he is reserved and introverted – so as a strategist, not as a candidate.

At this inauguration – much as at the one in 2009 – the event for me was all about the people. We did get to see the President, we did get to be present at important national events, but what was most valuable was to see and interact with people from all over the country. We had our pictures taken by people from Florida, we stood in line behind people from Minnesota, and we sat across a cafe table from a New Yorker. We walked down the street behind a photographer from the White House press corps.

So many people brought little kids with them. You might say that is a crazy idea, perhaps even dangerous – taking a five-year-old or even a ten-year-old into a huge mass of people. You’d be wrong. Most of them had wide eyes that were taking it all in, and you could picture them in 50 years telling their grandchildren how they were there. What would I give, in retrospect, to have been dragged to the inauguration of Richard Nixon in the 1960s or to have seen the Carters get out of the car and walk in their inaugural parade when I was a teenager? [Full Story]

With the college football season finally behind us, I wanted to write a sweet little story about a very good guy who plays football for Michigan. But every time I tried, some bad news got in the way.

The first obstacle was Lance Armstrong. In case you missed it – perhaps you live on Mars – it turns out the man who came back from cancer to win a record seven Tours de France and write two bestselling books about his inspirational story is a complete fraud. He was taking performance-enhancing drugs during his entire reign, and whenever someone tried to tell the truth about his drug use – even if they had been forced to – he went out of his way to ruin their careers, their finances, and occasionally their lives.

It appears Lance Armstrong is a genuinely bad person. So, that’s all the time I want to give him.

Now, back to college football. On Monday, January 7th – six days after New Year’s, when the college football season always ended in the old days – I stayed up until midnight to watch the national championship game between Alabama and Notre Dame. I don’t know why I stayed up that late. It was over after Alabama ran up an insurmountable 28-0 lead in the first half. But I did learn Alabama head coach Nick Saban, who already makes more than $5 million a year, earned an additional $400,000 that night. His players – who, as you might recall, actually played the game – received $500 of souvenirs. Think anything’s wrong with this?

I was heartened, at least, to see the head coaches at Penn State, Notre Dame and Oregon all turn down bigger salaries from the NFL to stay with their schools. Until, that is, Chip Kelly, the head coach at Nike University – er, the University of Oregon – changed his mind, took the money, and ran. But that’s barely news.

Okay, now can I get to my favorite story, about Michigan’s Taylor Lewan? No? There’s some bizarre story coming out of Notre Dame I’ve got to talk about first? [Full Story]

When the Center for Digital Government’s Digital Cities Survey ranked Ann Arbor as first in its population category for 2012, I considered this to be terrible news.

It deprived me of my favorite way give a poke in the ribs to Dan Rainey, who heads up the city’s IT department: “A top 10 finish, huh? So what went wrong? Why not first place?”

Of course, a top ranking on the Digital Cities Survey is not a terrible thing. And by rights, as part of the Dec. 3, 2012 city council meeting report, Chronicle readers might have reasonably expected to see some mention of that first-place award.

That was the meeting when Rainey announced the award, and invited IT staff to the podium to talk about some projects they’ve been working on. Those included a project involving traffic and signal systems that’s connected to the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute’s smart-vehicle research study. They also talked about a project that will integrate three major software systems at the city: asset management, finance and payroll.

None of that award talk made it into the Dec. 3 meeting report.

Last year, when the merely fifth place Digital Cities ranking was announced, it was also not included in The Chronicle’s council meeting report. As a partial explanation for that omission, I wrote in a subsequent column: “But one reason I don’t mind omitting that kind of award from a meeting report is that it really does not matter to me where Ann Arbor ranks on that survey. What matters to me is the fact that the city’s investments in the realm of digital technology make life in Ann Arbor as a local journalist easier than it would be otherwise.”

That column put a spotlight on some of the city’s digital tools I use on a regular basis that make my life as a journalist easier. This year, I’d like to highlight three digital projects that I think will make life easier and better for citizens and policymakers, too. None of these three projects were mentioned at the Dec. 3 meeting – which is to say that I stumbled across them in my regular travels.

Those three projects are: (1) the transition to a digital platform for submitting site plans to the planning and development department; (2) the integration of a simple button push that Ann Arbor firefighters can use to record timestamps at key points during their response to calls; and (3) conversion of pen-and-paper police department officer activity reports to a digital format.

It’s the third project I am particularly excited about – because of its potential to provide data that will directly affect policy choices made by the city council. That optimism is based in part on the fact that it was cited specifically at a recent city council planning session. The question it will help answer is this: How much time do Ann Arbor police officers have available for proactive policing?  [Full Story]

The start of a new year is a plenty good excuse to talk about calendars – or event listings.

Ordinarily, I would be inclined to bore you to death by discussing Internet standards, syndication, multiple-data entry problems, connections to authoritative sources, the myriad ways I am smarter than our pet cat, and how all this should cause us to grumble and make very serious faces as we lament the future of journalism.

But I figure I have a whole year to do that.

For now, I’d like you to consider this: The Chronicle’s calendar listings currently include 4,217 events.

That’s because we’ve embraced an approach to event listings based on the idea that: (1) event hosts are in command of the most accurate information about their events; and (2) event hosts should be able to just maintain their own calendars, and expect their event information to show up all over the Internet, without doing one bit of extra data entry for any publication.  [Full Story]

Editor’s note: To our readers who celebrate Christmas, we wish you a merry one.

A conversation with Ann Pearlman, who gave readers around the world “The Christmas Cookie Club,” seemed appropriate for a December books column. But, it turns out her 2009 novel isn’t about Christmas. It’s about commitment.

Which, coming from the Jewish author of a memoir entitled “Infidelity,” makes considerable sense.

The fictional cookie club is hosted by narrator Marnie, whose day begins with preparations for a dozen friends who will be arriving at her Ann Arbor home that evening with food, wine and a story to accompany the ritual exchange of imaginatively presented cookies – with frequent dance breaks. But she’s also anticipating important news that evening from her older daughter and her husband in San Diego and, in a month, a grandchild from her 18-year-old, whose boyfriend is “a black ex-convict and aspiring rap star.”

Pearlman belongs to a real Christmas cookie club here in Ann Arbor, and reading her bestseller had me fantasizing about how lovely it would be put something like that together with friends whose company I treasure all year round and don’t see as often as I’d like. But then I thought again about the generally sluggish crowd I hang with and how the kinder ones would simply laugh at me. Righto. What say we just meet for pink drinks in January, hmm?

Such a lame crew, I suspect, would mystify Pearlman. Among her commitments: She’s a writer (seven published books). She’s an artist. She’s an adventuresome cook (her latest effort extends to homemade liqueurs). By her own account, the boundary between her family and her friendships is often indistinct.  She has maintained a psychotherapy practice in Ann Arbor even as her writing career became firmly established. And the day we spoke, this mother of three and grandmother of four was looking forward to dancing the night away at the Necto’s Townie Party, despite a lingering cough from a bout of illness that put her off the cookies at this year’s meeting of the club. [Full Story]

2012 was a remarkable year in many ways, and the sports world was no exception. Here’s a look back on the sport year’s best and worst – and just plain silly.

Just a few hours into the New Year, Michigan State and Michigan both won January bowl games over ranked teams in overtime, and both finished with 11 wins – Michigan’s best record since 2006. A good start to the new year.

Not all the news was happy, of course. We said goodbye to some legends. Budd Lynch, who lost his right arm in World War II, announced Red Wing games for six decades, right up to his death this fall, at 95.

Another Bud, VanDeWege, ran Moe’s Sports Shops in downtown Ann Arbor for 46 years, turning thousands of Michigan fans into friends. He passed away at 83.

We also lost the great Bob Chappuis, another World War II hero whose plane was shot down over Italy, behind enemy lines. He hid for weeks, then returned to lead Michigan to a national title. Along the way, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and finished second in the Heisman Trophy voting. Try to sing his praises, however, and he’d wave you off. “Everybody says we’re heroes,” he told me, with a twinkle in his eye. “But what kind of idiot wouldn’t jump from a burning plane?”

The most watched funeral was Joe Paterno’s, the longtime football coach at Penn State. His life ended on Jan. 22, but the debate over his legacy is very much alive. [Full Story]

This week, the University of Michigan announced an increase in the cost of “seat licenses” for football season ticket holders.

Before I dive into what all this means, let me explain what a “seat license” is, because, if you’re a normal person, it won’t make much sense.

A “seat license” is a fee that teams make their fans pay just to reserve the right to buy the actual tickets. They call it a donation – which is a stretch, since every fan apparently decided to donate exactly the same amount, or lose our tickets. But that allows us to claim it as a gift to a state university, and a tax deduction.

It’s hard to call that honest. Thanks to the latest hike, it’s hard to call it cheap, either.

In fairness, Michigan was the last of the top 20 programs, ranked by attendance, to adopt a seat license program, in 2005 – even though Michigan always finishes first in attendance. And the seat licenses started gradually: $250 for the best seats the first year, then $500 the second. They were nice enough to spare the folks in the endzone.

But this week Michigan pushed the seat license for the top ticket up to $600 each, and even the folks in the endzone will have to pay $150 per ticket, just for the right to buy them. In the past decade, the total cost of my two tickets on the ten-yard line has more than tripled, to over $1,700. But my seats are no better, and the schedule keeps getting worse.

It makes you wonder how we got here. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: Nelson’s “In it for the Money” opinion column appears regularly in The Chronicle, roughly around the third Wednesday of the month. Sometimes, like this month, he’ll deviate from that schedule and write two columns in one month. FYI, Nelson has a story in the latest issue of “Asimov’s” (which hits newsstands this week). It’s your basic crappy-jobs/labor-relations/time-travel tale – possibly of interest to speculative Chronicle readers.

Last week I insisted you write some letters.

This week I’m urging you to once again take to the keyboard but, after that, I promise: You’ll be free of my nagging until 2013 – at which time we’ll all be sailing together over the “fiscal cliff,” which is sort of an economic Doomsday Device that will automatically cut federal spending and bump up taxes on Jan. 1, 2013 unless Congress pulls together a workable budget.

According to the President, if Congress does nothing, then middle class families will see a tax bump of as much as $2,200. He’s encouraging folks to drop him a line explaining what $2,000 means in your household budget.

Many folks have taken to tweeting brief glosses of these letters using the hashtag “#My2K” – which has also become a tag for carping about the fiscal cliff generally.

Below the fold is what I wrote to the President (and forwarded to my congressfolk). [Full Story]

College football’s regular season ended Saturday, with the various conference championship games closing out a 14-week season. The next day, Sunday, the 35 bowl games sent out their invitations to 70 lucky teams. But when you look a little closer at their bowl offers, you have to wonder if those 70 teams were really that lucky at all.

The people who sell bowl games need us to believe a few things: (1) Their games are rewards for teams that had a great season; (2) They offer players and fans a much-wanted vacation; and (3) The bowls are nonprofits, while the schools make a killing.

These claims are nice – and would be even nicer if any of them they were actually true.

Forty years ago, college football got by with just 11 bowl games. The 22 teams the bowls invited were truly elite, and so were the bowls themselves – like the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl and The Granddaddy of Them All, the Rose Bowl. Back then, when your team got into a bowl game, you knew they’d done something special.

But in the past four decades, the number of bowls has more than tripled, to a staggering 35. The “bowl season” now stretches almost a full month, which is how many days you need to fit in such timeless classics as The Meineke Car Care Bowl, the Advocare V100 Independence Bowl, and the legendary Taxslayer.com Bowl. How many Taxslayer.coms fit into a bowl? It’s a question only theologians can answer. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: Nelson’s “In it for the Money” opinion column appears regularly in The Chronicle, roughly around the third Wednesday of the month. Sometimes, like this month, he’ll deviate from that schedule – because he had something super-important to tell you right now. Nelson is sort of a long-winded son-of-a-gun. If you want to read very short things by Nelson, more frequently than once a month, you can follow him on Twitter, where he’s @SquiDaveo

It’s the letter writing season.

I’d like you to add at least one more letter to your list: I need you to drop a line to your state reps, senators, and the governor telling them that you’re opposed to any expansion of Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority during the current lame duck session.

You’ll want to tell these folks to oppose or veto House Bill 6004 and Senate Bill 1358 (which expand the Education Achievement Authority) and House Bill 5923 (allowing for the unlimited formation of new publicly-funded charter and cyber schools).

More than that, though, I want you to activate your whole network – that Facebook thing you do, that Twitter thing and even LinkedIn. Because I bet you have friends, family members and colleagues who live in Kalamazoo, Traverse City, Grand Rapids, Bad Ax or wherever else in Michigan, who you can move to action by nudging them with social media. What we want to do here is activate the entire state.

Below the fold is a template you can crib from – and feel free to omit the link to this column, if you so choose; my self-promotion is, as a policy, utterly shameless. [Full Story]

The well-dressed stranger standing in the driveway certainly had the farmer’s attention. The stranger’s eyes flicked over one of the farmer’s suspenders fastened to faded trousers with a nail as he described his generous proposition. The farmer glanced at the visitor’s handsome buggy – this was a gentleman of means, offering a poor man a shot at paying off the mortgage. After a handshake, the stranger retrieved some papers from his buggy and held out a pen.

In the mid-1880s, one fraudulent scheme snookered thousands of Michigan farmers across the lower half of the lower peninsula, including many in Washtenaw County. As the fraud spread like a storm over sixteen Michigan counties, it left farmers crushed by debt, newspapers issuing shrill warnings, and a rising tide of lawsuits that crested not once but several times in the Michigan Supreme Court.

The miracle product responsible for ruination was the fabled “Bohemian oats,” a variety of oat touted as far more valuable than the regular oats then for sale from 35 to 50 cents a bushel in southeastern Michigan. [Full Story]

Exactly one year ago, Brady Hoke was the darling of Michigan football fans.

He’d charmed even the doubters at his first press conference – where he coined his now famous phrase, “This is Michigan, for God’s sake!” – then led a team that had averaged just five wins a season over the previous three years to a 10-2 regular-season record, including thrilling wins over Notre Dame, Nebraska and arch-rival Ohio State. Then he capped it all off with an overtime upset of Virginia Tech in the prestigious Sugar Bowl – Michigan’s first BCS bowl victory since a young man named Tom Brady beat Alabama on Jan. 1, 2000.

The man could do no wrong. When Hoke started referring to injuries as “boo-boos” and Ohio State as “Ohio,” fans did not think he was an ignoramus who knew nothing about the greatest rivalry in sports – as they surely would have if Rich Rodriguez had said the same things – but a motivational genius, who understood exactly what the duel was all about.

When fans noticed Hoke did not wear a headset during games – unlike just about every other coach in the country – they did not conclude he was an out-of-touch, glorified cheerleader, but a master delegator and teacher, trusting the play calling to his assistants while he focused on coaching his players.

When you’re winning, everything’s cool. But when you start losing, the same people who patted you on the back start questioning your quirks. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: HD, a.k.a. Dave Askins, editor of The Ann Arbor Chronicle, is also publisher of an online series of interviews on a teeter totter. Introductions to new Teeter Talks, like this one, also appear on The Chronicle’s website.

In the last few years, I’ve spent more time riding the hard wooden benches in the Ann Arbor city council chambers than I have straddling the teeter totter board. So last month I was glad to have a chance to take a ride with Bill Merrill, a software developer I met for the first time four or five years ago on a Ride Around Town (RAT). That was a monthly event that the Washtenaw Bicycling and Walking Coalition used to sponsor.

If Merrill had ever addressed the Ann Arbor city council during public commentary, then he could have reasonably begun by saying something like, “I came to Ann Arbor to attend school, but I stayed. And I’ve owned my house across from Allmendinger Park for almost a decade.”

This would, of course, be a standard gambit for public commentary – not just in Ann Arbor but probably in most every community – establishing your bona fides by appealing to longevity and rootedness in the community.

Home ownership is not just a way of saying to Ann Arbor city councilmembers that you’ve been here long enough to count. It’s also a way of saying, “I’m one of you.” All 11 members of the council are homeowners, even though less than half of Ann Arbor residents own the place they live.

In my time covering the city council for The Chronicle, Merrill has never addressed that body during the time allowed for public commentary. In that way he is like most other Ann Arbor homeowners – or for that matter, renters. Most of them, like Merrill, do not ever in their lifetime head down to city hall on the first or third Monday of the month to tell the city council what they think.

But the fact that he’s now sold his house and left Ann Arbor – even though he’s not leaving to take a job somewhere else or to follow a spouse, or for any other specific reason – makes Merrill different. It makes him different in a way that is likely not what the Pure Michigan campaign had in mind with its Ann Arbor slogan: “Ann Arbor does it up different.” That advertisement is supposed to make the “talent” want to come live here, not pick up and leave for no particular reason. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: Nelson’s “In it for the Money” opinion column appears regularly in The Chronicle, roughly around the third Wednesday of the month. Nelson is sort of a long-winded son-of-a-gun. If you want to read very short things by Nelson, more frequently than once a month, you can follow him on Twitter, where he’s @SquiDaveo

I voted to re-elect Barack Obama. I doubt that’s a terrible shocker, but I want to explain why I did so – and why, regardless of how the economy looks on Jan. 1, or next summer, or in four years, I will still be proud of that decision.

In the run-up to Nov. 6 we kept hearing – and by extension kept telling each other – that this election was “about the economy, stupid!” I beef with that claim, but don’t reject it entirely – certainly not so long as I’m writing under the banner of being “In It for the Money.”

A lot of Americans frame the American Dream as one of economic security. While economic security is obviously a vital component of the Dream, to see that as the whole Dream is – as I’ve sorta harped on in the past – more than a little sad. When Jefferson cribbed Locke for the Declaration of Independence, he revised those original unalienable rights from “life, liberty, and estate” to the often ironically snarked “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” I doubt that was a typo.

Call me a sucker, but like Honest Abe, I believe in the Declaration of Independence as the fundamental expression of what our Unfinished Work [1] is all about – now in its 236th year. And, while you may need to bank some Estate in order to pursue that Happiness, it’s a bit shallow to argue that acquiring the Estate is the same thing as acquiring Happiness.

When I stood at the flimsy little voting station – a plastic tray with telescoping metal legs, set up in Allen Elementary School – I wasn’t there to vote for a smaller national debt or expanded social programs or lower taxes or higher unemployment. I was there to vote to advance our Unfinished Work.

And that meant filling in the bubble next to Obama/Biden. Let me explain. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: Thanksgiving is all about leftovers. This cartoon originally appeared in The Chronicle on Thanksgiving in 2009. We kept it in the freezer and defrosted  it for 2011. This year, we felt like there was still enough left on the bones to make a meal. Enjoy!
 
[Full Story]

On Veterans Day, we generally honor our Veterans. It’s a good idea, for lots of reasons: they served our country, often in unpleasant places, and in great danger, to keep the worst of the world away from our homeland.

My grandfather was a New York dentist who volunteered at age 39 to hop on a ship in the Pacific during World War II. My dad graduated from medical school, then enlisted in the U.S. Army, which sent him and his new bride to Fulda, Germany, to guard the border. It was an unconventional decision, but he’s always said it was one of his best.

“I earned more money than I ever had,” he often jokes, though that wasn’t hard to do for a recent medical school graduate. “People had to do what I said. And I never got shot at.” My parents also made lifelong friends, and still travel every year to see them at reunions.

I grew up hearing Dad say things like, “Smart to be seen in Army green!” And “Three meals a day, and –” well, I’m stopping there. (If you know that one, you know why.)

On Veterans Day, I’ve gotten into the habit of calling my old man to thank him for his service. But this year, the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League spent Veterans Day telling its 183 member high school teams to stop performing the national anthem before their games.

The league commissioner, Ed Sam, was quick to explain, “It’s not that we’re not patriotic. That’s the furthest from the truth.”

I actually believe him. They’re not unpatriotic. They’re amazingly stupid. [Full Story]

With the 2012 general elections well behind us, it’s time for politicians to put on their very serious faces and make very serious pronouncements like, “The voters have spoken.”

I prefer to make a funny face and ask: How is a judicial candidate like the city park system? Or for a question that sounds less like the set-up to a punch line: What’s the deal with downtown Ann Arbor and its connection to the art millage and the library bond proposal?

Of course, politicians are at least partly right when they say that the voters have spoken. But what did the voters actually say? It’s easy to make true statements about voter sentiment – if you stick to the text of the ballot.

For example, in the non-incumbent race for judge of the 22nd Circuit Court, more voters preferred to have Carol Kuhnke decide future Washtenaw County court cases than to have Jim Fink decide them. You can tell that just from the ballot and from the results. But it’s possible to make a stronger claim: More voters preferred the kind of person Kuhnke is – a candidate endorsed by the city of Ann Arbor Democratic Party. And to support that claim, we’d need to look at other results, like those from the presidential election.

Or by way of another example, the election results indicate that a majority of Ann Arbor voters said they do not want the city to levy an 0.1 mill tax to pay for art in public places. That’s all you can tell from the ballot question and the results. To make stronger claims – related, for example, to what (if anything) voters were trying to say about the existing Percent for Art program – you’d need to find some other way to explore the content of voters’ minds.

The same goes for the Ann Arbor District Library bond proposal and the parks maintenance and capital improvements millage renewal. “Do not tax us to make the bond payments for a new downtown library building, but please continue to tax us to pay for city park needs.” That’s all voters said. They didn’t say anything about their favorite books, or which city park is the best. (By the way, it’s West Park, located in Ward 5, which is indisputably the highest-numbered ward in the city.)

Yet we’d like to divine something more from the results than just the results.

This column, which is heavy on impressionistic conclusions based on maps, and light on rigorous statistical analysis, begins with mapped illustrations of some basics. For example, mostly Democrats live in the eastern portion of Washtenaw County. And in Ann Arbor, Wards 2 and 4 are the strongest city wards for Republicans – even though those wards also lean Democratic. That’s still true 20 years after Ann Arbor’s ward boundaries were drawn to achieve that effect.

The column concludes by illustrating a possible geographic connection between the failed public art millage and the failed downtown library bond proposal – namely, downtown Ann Arbor.  [Full Story]

The public address announcer at University of Michigan football games always reminds the fans that they are part of the largest crowd watching a college game anywhere in America. What he could also brag about these days is that those same 112,000 or so people sitting in Michigan Stadium are making the game the most photographed event anywhere in America that day.

At the Nov. 10 University of Michigan game against Northwestern, local journalist Lynn Monson documented that no matter where you look on Game Day, someone has a camera raised. Here’s a small selection of the people who decided to freeze moments in time before, during and after the game won by UM in overtime, 38-31.

[Full Story]

Whether your candidates won or lost this week, we can all rejoice that it’s finally over. Or, we think it is. We can’t be sure anymore, can we?

Watching the political contests and the sporting contests this week, I got to thinking: Which is sillier: playing politics, or playing sports?

As silly as sports are – and I seem to devote half my commentaries to that very subject – after watching the 2012 campaigns, I can tell you, it’s not even close: Playing politics is sillier, in a landslide.

In the sporting world, you’re not supposed to badmouth your opponent, or even talk about them very much. Coaches always say, “I’m just focusing on my team.” And then – amazingly – that’s what they actually do.

In politics, badmouthing the other guy is just about all they do. And if there is any expectation of clean play anymore, I must’ve missed it – along with just about every single candidate. [Full Story]

Early in October, Barracuda Networks invited a bunch of University of Michigan students to a “hackathon” at the computer science and engineering building, where they programmed computers to play games against each other.

And 24 hours later, the winning team of programmers was handed one of those goofy Publishers-Clearinghouse-style giant checks – for $3,141.59. Second place was $1,414.21. And third place was $602.21.

Those dollar amounts might strike you as funny – because you think they make no sense, or because you think they make perfect sense. But a regular Chronicle reader might look at those numbers without laughing, and calculate as follows: The sum of the prize money is $5,158.01 – which divides perfectly (12 times) into the estimated 61,896.12 total value of a five-year tax abatement recently granted by the city of Ann Arbor to Barracuda. Uncanny, no?

It’s the tax abatement that has resulted in relatively frequent mentions of Barracuda in The Chronicle over the last few months. The process for granting such an abatement includes four separate actions by the city council. So it was the council’s action that The Chronicle was covering, more than anything Barracuda itself was doing.

Now, I confess that I fudged the estimated value of the tax abatement, to get the math to work out. The numbers provided by the city of Ann Arbor’s financial staff pegged the value of the tax abatement at around $61,000 – nothing so precise as $61,896.12. Still, there is an actual connection between the tax abatement and the roomful of UM students who were participating in Barracuda’s 24-hour competition.

That connection relates to a condition of the tax abatement. To receive the tax advantage, Barracuda must add another 144 employees (a perfect square? seriously?) to its Ann Arbor operation. And to make room for all those additional employees, Barracuda’s operation is moving from its current Depot Street location to the old Borders corporate headquarters in downtown Ann Arbor – off Maynard Street, under the parking structure.

The hackathon event was part of the company’s strategy to recruit new employees. [Full Story]

In my wallet I have a transit pass. By sliding this pass through the farebox card reader aboard any Ann Arbor Transportation Authority bus, I get access to a public transportation system that served our community with 6.3 million rides this past fiscal year.

If I rode the AATA buses to and from work every day and paid the full $1.50 fare each way, the cash value of that card would be about $750 per year. Of course if I were actually riding the bus that frequently, I’d be somewhat better off purchasing a 30-day pass for $58 a month, which would come out to just a bit under $700 annually.

What I actually paid for that card this year was $10 – just a bit over 1% of its potential cash value.

So what sort of dark magic subsidizes my potential rides on AATA buses? And why do I have access to this magical go!pass card, when you, dear Chronicle reader, likely do not?

Along the road to answering these questions, I’d also like to make a proposal. It’s a vision for broadening the program, getting more transit passes into the hands of Ann Arbor residents, and expanding the possible uses for the go!pass – including (shudder) the ability to use a transit pass to pay for parking. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: Nelson’s “In it for the Money” opinion column appears regularly in The Chronicle, roughly around the third Wednesday of the month. Nelson is sort of a long-winded son-of-a-gun. If you want to read very short things by Nelson, more frequently than once a month, you can follow him on Twitter, where he’s @SquiDaveo

I didn’t initially intend to write an overtly political column this month. I actually had something nice all framed out, about how to talk politics civilly with friends and family. Then Matty Moroun took to hammering me daily with his pro-Prop 6/Prop 5 craziness, and I just went totally bat-shit insane.

Here’s the skinny, in case you’re bailing on me here: A billionaire is hijacking our state constitution in order to lock-in his near monopoly on commercial access to the nation of Canada. This is a for-real super-villain-style power play. Odds are you are on the verge of inadvertently helping this one-tenth-of-1-percenter screw us all for generations to come.

Your action on Nov. 6: Vote NO on Proposals 5 and 6.

If you can’t stomach another political jeremiad this ballot season, I respect where you’re coming from. But please give me 12 minutes to convince you that no sane Michigander who doesn’t already own a bridge to Canada would ever want Prop 6 to pass.  [Full Story]

Last week, the Ann Arbor Pioneer High School football team went across town to play long-time rival Ann Arbor Huron. It wasn’t the players’ performance during the game that made news, however, but the coaches’ behavior afterward. And the news wasn’t good.

Pioneer came into the annual rivalry with Huron sporting a solid 4-3 record and a good chance to make the playoffs. Huron hadn’t won a game all year, and was simply playing out the season. The only stakes were bragging rights – and even those weren’t much in question.

With a minute left, Pioneer enjoyed an impressive 35-6 lead. At that point, it’s customary for the winning coach to tell his team to run out the clock by taking a knee, instead of trying to score again. But Pioneer threw a pass, and then another, and then another – one of them to the endzone – in a clear display of poor sportsmanship. That was the night’s first mistake. [Full Story]

His parents named him Frank Joseph James Lynch – but everybody knew him as Budd.

He passed away this week, at the age of 95. No, you can’t call that a tragedy, but you can call it a loss – one that thousands are feeling.

In a week that included no Big Ten teams being ranked in the top 25 for the first time, the amazingly idiotic NHL lockout and, far worse, Jerry Sandusky’s sentencing, I’d rather spend my few minutes with you today honoring a man who lived as long as he lived well.

Lynch was born in Windsor, Ontario, during World War I. He got his start in radio in Hamilton, Ontario, but World War II interrupted his young career in 1939, when he volunteered for Canada’s Essex Scottish Regiment. Five years later, on D-Day, he stormed the beaches at Normandy, and survived unscathed. But a few weeks after that, a German rocket took his right arm.

When Lynch returned, he worked for the Red Wings, back at the old Olympia Arena – which was still pretty new at the time. Over the next six decades, he held a variety of jobs, but they all involved a microphone, the Red Wings, and his smooth, redolent voice. He saw his job as “simply relaying information to the crowd, not to act as a cheerleader.” He was a pro’s pro. [Full Story]

The only constant is change.

Yeah, yeah. We know that – and in case we didn’t, there’s always some office blowhard too eager to say it, as if it’s the most profound truth of the universe.

But that’s why, the more things change, the more we appreciate things that don’t. When Carole King sang, “Doesn’t anybody stay in one place any more?” she probably wasn’t talking about NFL franchises, but she could’ve been. From 1982 to 1995, seven NFL teams moved – about a quarter of the league – which is just one more reason I’ve always preferred college football: universities don’t move.

During that same stretch, Michigan played Notre Dame in the first or second weekend of the season every year, and the games were so good Sports Illustrated gave the game four of ten cover stories, and four features – eclipsing the NFL’s opening weekend, and tennis’s U.S. Open.

The rivalry had almost everything going for it, including history. In 1887, the men from Michigan were traveling to play a game against Northwestern. When they found out, en route, that Northwestern had canceled, they got off in South Bend – and literally taught those boys how to play the game. It remains the oldest rivalry among major college powers. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: Nelson’s “In it for the Money” column appears regularly in The Chronicle, roughly around the third Wednesday of the month. Sometimes it’s later, like this month.

Over the last couple years school busing has been drastically altered in most Michigan districts. As a consequence most schools – including my son’s school, Bryant Elementary, which is only K-2nd grade – expanded their “walking zone” (kids that get no busing) to 1.5 miles. Do you know how long it takes a five-year-old to walk 1.5 miles? [1]

If you live at the far edge of the “walking zone,” you aren’t going to be walking – especially once our autumn rains arrive – you’ll be driving your kid to school.

Spoiler alert: Bryant Elementary was built in 1972 and renovated in 1983. So it’s not designed to have dozens of cars drop off individual children each morning – it’s designed for all of the kids to arrive at once in four big buses. An efficient set of buses has been converted to a frustrating, time-gobbling traffic jam. [Full Story]

Last week, the University of Michigan football team beat up University of Massachusetts, 63-13. Okay, U-Mass was pretty bad. Even the lowly Indiana Hoosiers crushed them the week before. But the Wolverines did exactly what they were supposed to do, and they did it very well.

Many Michigan fans complained anyway. This is not uncommon, or even unexpected. A few years ago, Michigan blew out 15th-ranked Notre Dame team 38-0, the first time Michigan shut out over the Irish in over a century. The next day, I challenged listeners on a sports talk show to find something to complain about. I thought I was joking. They did not, and had no trouble filling two hours with a steady stream of original complaints.

Michigan backers are intensely loyal, and they do not believe in winning at all costs, but some act more like opera critics than fans, less interested in cheering the team on than pointing out where the coaches and players could have done better. They are not happy unless they are not happy.

So, the day after Michigan slaughtered U-Mass, I was not surprised to hear fans complain about quarterback Denard Robinson’s performance. Mind you, Denard ran for over 100 yards and a touchdown, and passed for almost 300 yards, and three touchdowns.

And that, to one caller, was the problem: “I’m tired of living and dying with Denard.” In other words, Robinson was too good for that fan’s taste. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: This is an occasional column that presents simple math puzzles stumbled over by The Chronicle “in the wild,” while covering local government. The puzzles are meant to be accessible to kids in high school, junior high, or elementary school.

On Aug. 7, 2012, ballots were cast in primary elections – to finalize the ballot choices for voters in the Nov. 6 general election.

And  last week, on Sept. 4, 2012, the Washtenaw County board of canvassers conducted a recount of some of those ballots. Several different races were recounted, including some from Augusta Township, Sylvan Township, the city of Ypsilanti, and the city of Ann Arbor.

In the city of Ann Arbor, it was the Ward 4 city council contest that was recounted. That race had offered a choice for voters between incumbent Margie Teall and Jack Eaton.

The initial count of ballots across Ward 4 showed Teall with a total of 866 votes, compared to 848 votes for Eaton. That’s a difference of 18 votes. Another way of putting that: There was an average difference of exactly two votes per precinct in Ward 4. [Warm-up puzzle: How many precincts are in Ward 4?]

In the recounted totals, each candidate lost a vote in Precinct 9. In Precinct 6, Teall picked up one vote and Eaton lost one. That left Eaton and Teall with 846 and 866 votes, respectively. So the hand-counting of the paper ballots essentially confirmed the result of the optical scanners used on election day.

I’ve now covered four recounts for The Chronicle in the last five election cycles. At a recount event, as many as four separate tables might be set up in the room. Of course, the candidates in the races being recounted and their supporters are interested in watching the recounting of the ballots – to make sure everything is done properly. So it’s typical that four or five people stand around each of the tables watching the recounting as it takes place.

The actual recounting of the ballots for a given precinct is done by three people seated at the table. One person examines each paper ballot and calls out the name of the candidate who received a vote. The two other people each record a tally mark on a grid. At the end of the recounting, the hand-recorded totals on the two grids must match each other. If they don’t, everything must be re-recounted.

So the recounting procedure depends on the ability of the talliers to hear the person who is calling out the candidate name for each ballot. Because of that, everyone in the room always observes strict silence, without even being told by members of the board of canvassers that they must be quiet.

I’m kidding. It’s always necessary for a member of the board to shush everyone – more than once. That’s because we all fall prey to the belief that we can have our own side conversations that are quiet enough not to disrupt the counting – unlike those other loudmouths.

One reason those side conversations take place is that people need a way to pass the time. That’s because watching a recount is just plain boring. (That’s how you know it’s important.) So as you’re standing there watching, you start to wonder: How long is this going to take?

And as you look at the number of people assembled in the room, some of whom are being paid $12 an hour to do the recounting, you also wonder: How much is this going to cost? [Full Story]

The Kerrytown BookFest’s Community Book Award, which honors local contributions to publishing and book arts, will go to Tom and Cindy Hollander when the festival returns for its 10th year on Sunday at the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market.

Chief among those contributions is Hollander’s School of Book & Paper Arts, which for almost 20 years has offered workshops, classes and studio space for book artists (my husband among them) and drawn students and teachers from around the country to Ann Arbor. So there is more than a touch of irony in the timing of Sunday’s award: When the 11th annual BookFest rolls around, the school will be no more.

I talked to Tom and Cindy earlier this week about their decision to close the school at the end of the spring 2013 term. In response to what they describe as diminishing enrollment, they say they are stepping away from one branch of a business that has expanded dramatically from the tiny shop on the second floor of Kerrytown Market & Shops in 1991. Today, the main floor of Hollander’s offers a lavish collection of fine papers and stationery, desk sets, decorative boxes and gifts along with bookbinding supplies; Hollander’s Kitchen Store is upstairs.

“When we opened our store,” Cindy said, “I can say I never heard the word ‘book art.’” But by 1994, she and Tom were teaching workshops and by 2002, they were using the lower level of their Kerrytown space for the Hollander’s School of Book & Paper Arts. Tom gives some credit for that expansion to local book artist Barbara Brown, who in the mid-1990s was leading occasional workshops at Hollander’s while also attending summer sessions at the American Academy of Bookbinding in Telluride, Colo.

“She’d come back after taking these classes,” Tom said, “and she really talked it up” – eventually persuading him to check things out for himself. “I’d been around the next level [of book arts] for long enough that I got interested in more than just business – I was ready for something different,” he said. “I wanted to go to the next level myself.” [Full Story]