Archive for March, 2009

In our March 15 article about the master class given by Yo-Yo Ma and members of the Silk Road Ensemble, we incorrectly stated that the members of Trio Animando were students at Pioneer High School. Only one – Jacob Joyce – attends Pioneer. Eric Tinkerhess attends Community High School, as does J Bennett, who also is home-schooled. We note the error here, and have corrected it in the original article.

Yo-Yo Ma asks a question of Eric Tinkerhess, a cellist from Community High School, during a master class session at Hill Auditorium on Saturday. On piano is J Bennett, and Jacob Joyce was playing violin. The three teens form the Trio Animando. (Image links to larger version.)

Oftentimes here at The Chronicle we cover wildly different events within the span of a few hours. And equally often, it ends up that seemingly different things – like classical music and a language competition – have all sorts of connections we never imagined.

And so it was on Saturday, when we observed first a master class taught by cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble at Hill Auditorium, followed by a statewide Japanese Quiz Bowl at the University of Michigan Modern Languages Building, just behind Hill. Both events were attended by several hundred people, and both had communication at their core.

But only one of them talked about vomit, and that’s where we’ll begin. [Full Story]

Freep business columnist Tom Walsh writes about a new ad campaign that Domino’s is launching, which will feature CEO David Brandon on Wall Street and in front of the U.S. Capitol. A TV ad for the promotion – called “Domino’s Big Taste Bailout” – will air for the first time during Tuesday’s “American Idol” show. Brandon told Walsh: “We’re just trying to play, in a friendly way, on the sentiment that there’s a lot of money going to bailouts, but the consumer doesn’t feel too bailed out.” [Source]

On The Warp Report, Chuck Warpehoski, director of the Interfaith Council for Peace & Justice in Ann Arbor, proposes celebrating his upcoming birthday by publicly humiliating himself to raise money for ICPJ. He’s asking for additional ideas – some of his own include shaving his head, reciting The Lorax on a soap box on Main Street for Earth Day while wearing a Cat in the Hat hat, and running the Dexter-Ann Arbor run in fairy wings with a tiara and a wand. [Source]

A few months ago we wrote about developing an online citizen survey here at The Chronicle, and wrote confidently: “We’ll launch the survey on Jan. 1, 2009.”

Happy New Year.

With input from several readers on topics and wording, we’ve put together a final draft. Here’s the survey link for readers who’d like to get started right now. For others, here’s a couple of notes about how it’s set up. [Full Story]

Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners administrative briefing (March 11, 2009): During their informal administrative briefing, county commissioners engaged in a spirited debate on Wednesday about the value of joining a regional economic development effort focused on a corridor of airports. The item is on the agenda for the March 18 Ways & Means Committee, which consists of all commissioners and meets immediately prior to the regular board meeting.

The Aerotropolis Development Corp. is an economic development project targeting growth in the corridor between Willow Run Airport on the county’s east side and Detroit Metro Airport. In early November 2008, Wayne County executive Bob Ficano made a presentation at a board working session about the project, but the proposal never was brought up for a vote. At the time, several commissioners expressed concern at the cost of joining – a $150,000 annual fee.

Since then, the fee has been lowered to $50,000 for the county, and two local governments – Ypsilanti city council and the Ypsilanti Township board of trustees – have voted to join the project independently. The cost for those municipalities is $25,000 per year. [Full Story]

Robin Agnew

[Editor's note: Robin Agnew and her husband Jamie own Aunt Agatha's mystery bookstore in Ann Arbor. She also helps run the annual Kerrytown BookFest.]

“Next of Kin,” by John Boyne (Thomas Dunne Books, $15.95)

Every good book has a secret somewhere in the story – in a mystery, the secret of course is usually the identity of the killer. In John Boyne’s historical mystery, the secret is not the killer’s identity, but the killer’s very personality, his motives, and the extent of his moral depravity. This stand-alone novel is set in 1936 Britain, where one of the central issues of the day is the relationship between Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. Of course, we know how that turns out, but Boyne offers a possible behind-the-scenes scenario that’s very interesting. [Full Story]

The Detroit News covered Friday’s official opening of the new building for the UM Ross School of Business. The building was named for Stephen M. Ross, a real estate mogul who donated $100 million to the school five years ago. At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Ross was asked about reports that one of his companies asked for federal bailout money: “He said the rumor began when he walked out of a Wall Street Journal editorial board meeting and the newspaper printed a story that said Ross was seeking federal money. Subsequent media reports name Ross as among a group of commercial real estate developers who have lobbied Congress for public aid. ‘I was not part of it,’ he said.” [Source]

Julie Ellison – a UM professor and founding director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a national consortium of 90 colleges and universities – has written a letter entitled “Saving Shaman Drum: A Call for a Campus-Community Alliance.” The letter is signed by more than 40 people, including former U.S. poet laureates Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky. Ellison writes: “One block from the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities, Ann Arbor’s premier community humanities center is dying. Can we protect our local cultural landscape so that our civic ecology flourishes? Can we re-imagine Shaman Drum as a thriving independent bookstore, a sustainable center of learning, pleasure, and commerce?” [Source] See also two open letters written by Karl Pohrt, owner … [Full Story]

Dawn Gabay, interim executive director of the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority, followed up with a phone call this afternoon to The Chronicle [see previous Chronicle coverage] providing names of the two finalists for the permanent position of executive director. [Full Story]

Left to right: AATA board members Sue McCormick, Jesse Bernstein (speaker phone), Paul Ajegba, Rich Robben. They met Friday morning as the search committee for AATA's executive director.

“Good morning, everybody!” came the voice over the speakerphone. Executive assistant Karen Wheeler, of the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority, had just dialed up board member Jesse Bernstein so that he could participate in the executive director search committee meeting Friday morning at AATA headquarters on South Industrial.

Bernstein, along with other committee members Sue McCormick, Paul Ajegba and Rich Robben, met to formally vote on forwarding to the full board the names of two final candidates for the executive directorship of the AATA. The Chronicle previously reported that the number of candidates has been winnowed down to five. That position has been open since Greg Cook’s resignation in early 2007. [Full Story]

A Detroit News article notes that state Rep. Rebekah Warren of Ann Arbor is one of the main sponsors of a bipartisan plan “to add a voluntary $10 charge to annual motor vehicle registration fees and dedicate the added revenue from that to maintenance and improvements at state and local parks, boat launches and recreation areas.” [Source]

A post on the Google Grants blog describes two projects of AdWords in the Curriculum, a program “driven from Google Ann Arbor.” In one of the projects, Eastern Michigan University students are working with the nonprofit Heritage Works to set up an AdWords campaign. The post notes that at EMU, “roughly 60% of non-profits have invited AdWords in the Curriculum students to join as interns since the end of the semester.” [Source]

Barb Hernandez, posting on Screencast.com, writes about the recent “Design Jam” by UM School of Information students: “Each month they get together for a Design Jam where they work on a design problem for a local company or organization. At our jam session, students looked at the concepts we have for sharing content on Screencast.com: Media Roll, Playlists and Folders, but focused on the idea of the ‘Playlist’ as a mechanism for sharing content when that content is organized in more than one folder on Screencast.com. They also tackled the differences between sharing and viewing shared content.” [Source]

Receptacle for sample collection affixed to air pump.

On Tuesday night, heading to the planning commission working session, we headed into the Larcom Building through the newly constructed side entrance off Ann Street. That’s the door that will be used for the next couple of years as construction activities on the new municipal building take place.

We noticed a guy standing at the table in the lobby next to the table with all the full-sized planning drawings for projects under current review. But it wasn’t the guy so much as his very science-guy gadgets that we noticed: microscope, slides, vials … and a black box with a thin plunger-like mechanism sticking out of it.

What was he up to? [Full Story]

Lucy Ann Lance, center, talks with Scott Huckestein of Schakolad Chocolate Factory and Linda Brewer of the Bank of Ann Arbor at Wednesday's Power of the Purse fundraising event. Lucy Ann Lance was honored with the first Power of the Purse Woman of the Year award.

Wednesday night brought an odd convergence of the phrase “Power of the Purse” to Ann Arbor. The author of a book by that name, Fara Warner, gave a speech that evening at the University of Michigan, where she’s a visiting professor of journalism. Her topic? The future of journalism.

Despite our deep interest in that issue, we chose to drop by a different “Power of the Purse” – an event hosted by the United Way of Washtenaw County Women’s Initiative, part of a broader campaign to deal with domestic violence, gender discrimination, access to affordable child care and other barriers to women’s economic self-sufficiency. [Full Story]

Writing on VoIP Tech Chat, telephone geek (and teeter-tottering enthusiast) Fred Posner describes frustration moving forward with a parking-space-availability information telephone number, because of blocked access to its data by Ann Arbor’s Downtown Development Authority.  Addressing Susan Pollay, executive director of the DDA, Fred writes: “Susan, the DDA is funded by tax dollars and parking fees. Perhaps you have forgotten that public money is used to fund the DDA’s mission to serve the public?”   [Source]