Entertainment Section

On Tuesday night, Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith flew back from New York, where he had been running the NCAA basketball selection committee, to conduct a press conference. He announced he was suspending his head football coach, Jim Tressel, for the first two games of the 2011 season.

It looks like Tressel has gotten himself into a bit of hot water. That’s why Smith, his boss, flew back to make sure everybody said they were “taking responsibility” – a phrase which changed some time in the last decade, and now means the exact opposite.

It was fine theater. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: It’s Fat Tuesday, when thoughts turn to paczki – those dense but irresistible Polish pastries that mark the last hurrah before Lent. This year, for the first time in their 18-year history, Zingerman’s Bakehouse staff got up well before dawn to make their own version, and local photographer Anne Savage was there to catch the action. She’s sharing some of her work with Chronicle readers – you can find many more photos on her new food blog, The Savage Feast. Enjoy!

[Full Story]

Every Sunday in March, the Workantile Exchange – a coworking space at 118 S. Main St. in Ann Arbor – is hosting a series of workshops for FoolMoon, a new event that’s happening in conjunction with this year’s FestiFools street parade. While FestiFools will feature oversized puppets parading down Main Street on Sunday, April 3 from 4-5 p.m., FoolMoon will take place on the evening of Friday, April 1. Starting at 8:30 p.m., processions of paraders carrying hand-made illuminated sculptures will emerge from four different locations in Ann Arbor and converge downtown at Washington & Main for musical and shadow puppet shows – and who knows what else?

The WorkEx workshops run from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. – they are free, and are open to all. If you’d like some help in creating your lantern, here’s a video that gives some guidance. Alternatively, FoolMoon Luminary Sculpture Kits are being sold at several local stores. The kits cost $20, contain all the materials needed to make a koi-shaped lantern, and are available at these Ann Arbor businesses: Downtown Home and Garden, Peaceable Kingdom, Acme Mercantile, Ace Barnes Hardware, B-Green, Yourist Studio Gallery, Found, and Trillium Realty.

On Sunday, March 6, local photographer Myra Klarman captured the action at the WorkEx. See anyone you know? [Full Story]

In the late ’90s, Eastern Michigan University assembled some its best basketball teams. The Eagles were so good they stunned the Duke Blue Devils in the first round of the 1996 NCAA tournament, 75-60. They were led by the nation’s second-leading scorer in 1998 – a guy named Earl Boykins – who the program said stood just 5-foot-8-inches tall. This, I had to see.

I watched Boykins torch Western, Central and Ball State. He could handle the ball, shoot it and pass it better than anyone on the court – even though he was shorter than everyone on the court. Yep, this was a story.

When I interviewed him, the story just got better. He told me he was so small growing up that he learned to dribble by using a tennis ball. When he was three, his dad could sneak him into games by stuffing him in a gym bag – but, Boykins told me, “Man, that’s back when I was small.”

Then he stood up, and I quickly realized the program listing was very generous. 5-foot-8? I’m 5-foot-8 – and I towered over him. I said, “Duuuuuude! You ain’t 5-8!” [Full Story]

A chief function of the book review “industry” is to give new books a sales push – the “latest” is the point. But today, let’s hear it for the backlist – otherwise known as those books you took note of months (or years) ago and intended to read, or brought home, placed on the shelf and have noted with good intentions ever since.

Two works of fiction by University of Michigan creative writing teacher Peter Ho Davies spent way too much time on my “gotta get to” list. And “The Welsh Girl” (2007) and “The Ugliest House in the World” (1997) were fine company when I finally claimed for them a couple of snowy weeks in February.

“The Ugliest House in the World” (Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin) is a collection of deftly composed short stories that are tragic, comic and often a dead-on blend of the two. They take us from colonial southern Africa to anti-colonial Kuala Lumpur, from Wales to – hilariously – Welsh-speaking Patagonia. (“Butch should have known it would come to this when the Kid started shooting ostriches again.”) And while we know things won’t end well for the British in Natal, the officers’ dining-table tales of heroism in the face of Zulu savagery are a ripping good time. [Full Story]

Last week my beloved television went Poof! It’s seven years old – or, 14 in sports writer years.

So, what great sports events have I missed? Well, I can’t be sure, of course, but I’m willing to bet: Not many.

Sports writers complain about the dog days of summer, when all we have to write about is tennis and Tiger and the Tigers – and, well, that’s about it.

But there’s a lesser-known slow season for sports scribes, and it’s called February. College football picked its champion more than a month ago, the super-hyped Super Bowl has finally blown over, and baseball is still a solid six weeks away from opening day. And that leaves basketball and hockey. [Full Story]

[Full Story]

Forty-five years ago, the Super Bowl … wasn’t even the Super Bowl. They called it the NFL-AFL Championship Game, until one of the founders renamed it after watching his grandson play with a “High Bouncing Ball” – a super ball. Super ball – Super Bowl. Get it? And thus, an artificial event was born.

Tickets were just fifteen bucks for that first game – and they barely sold half of those, leaving some 40,000 empty seats in the Los Angeles Coliseum.

A 30-second ad cost only $42,000 – and they weren’t any different than the ads they showed the previous weekend. The half-time show featured three college marching bands – including one you might have seen from the University of Michigan.

Over the next couple decades, of course, the event became a veritable national holiday. Tickets now sell for thousands of dollars, and ads for millions. The game attracts more than 100 million viewers in the U.S. alone. [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 also appear on The Chronicle's website.]

Last week, Robb Johnston rode the AATA bus from Ypsilanti into Ann Arbor and walked from downtown to my front porch take his turn on the teeter totter. [Robb Johnston's Talk]

Johnston has written and illustrated a self-published children’s book called “The Woodcutter and The Most Beautiful Tree.” And whenever anyone pitches me Chronicle coverage of a project they’re proud of, my first thought is: “Can I get a teeter totter ride out of this?”

Before Johnston’s ride, I test-read his children’s book the best way I could think of, given that my wife Mary and I do not have children: I read the book aloud to her, and did my best to pretend that she was four years old. It was my own first read through the book, so I was satisfied when I did not stumble too badly over the part of the woodcutter’s refrain that goes, “Thwickety THWAK, Thwickety THWAK.”

Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” notwithstanding, I think it’s fair to expect that a children’s book with a title like “The Woodcutter and The Most Beautiful Tree” will end well and leave everyone with smiles all around. And it does. So it’s not like I was truly surprised when I turned that one page near the end that reveals exactly how the final encounter between The Most Beautiful Tree and the Woodcutter ends.

But the book’s text and its illustrations pull the reader along to that point, and suggest so unmistakably a dark and dreadful ending, that when I did turn that page, I gulped a genuine breath of relief that she did not wind up getting milled into lumber at the end. [The tree in Johnston's book is female.] Well, yes, you might conclude that I am just that dopey. Or more generously, you might try sometime reading aloud a book you’ve never seen before.

But speaking of things we’ve seen before, some Chronicle readers might be thinking: Haven’t we seen this guy Robb Johnston before? Why yes, you have. [Full Story]

[Full Story]

Editor’s note: Chronicle sports columnist John U. Bacon is on hiatus writing a book about University of Michigan football coach Rich Rodriguez’s three seasons coaching the Wolverines. As Super Bowl Sunday approaches – a game between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers – we are pleased to offer a guest column from Ann Arbor resident Zach London. This piece appeared originally in the February edition of London’s monthly newsletter The Hard Taco Digest. Each month, the digest includes a link to an original song composed and recorded by London, and he has committed to this monthly musical project until he is dead.

Nicholas Dodman is an animal psychologist who wrote a book entitled, “The Dog Who Loved Too Much.” I haven’t read it, but the first chapter was described to me as follows: The author has a patient, a dog, who loves her owner too much. When the owner leaves the house each morning, she becomes so worried that he won’t return that she loses control of her bladder.

She paces around the house peeing on everything. When he finally comes home at 5 p.m., she is so overjoyed to see him that she throws up. The joy is so pervasive that she vomits constantly until he leaves again the next morning, at which point the bladder problem kicks in again.

That is how I feel about the Green Bay Packers.

It is a special kind of staggering love that only emotionally disturbed dogs and true sports devotees can experience. We soar, we suffer, and we soar again, and all of it is unhealthy. [Full Story]

Where’s a medieval village when you need one?

You know – that place where everyone knows where everyone else lives and everybody knows everybody else’s business and, no matter how insipid or irrelevant, has an idiotic opinion on it all, one generally borne of grinding frustration, depthless boredom and a general, yawning poverty of the spirit …

No. I do not need to get on Facebook.

But maybe somebody out there who is plugged into this dynamic global engine of online communal solidarity-ishness can take a break from investigating what your fifth-grade gym teacher had for breakfast and help us out here.

The mystery opens a few days after Christmas, when my husband and brother-in-law drop me at the Borders in Peoria, Ill., on the way to relive their childhood at a matinee screening of “Tron: Legacy.” Browsing the history section, I come across a paperback edition of “Life in a Medieval Village,” by Frances and Joseph Gies, and settle into an armchair.

And there I learn, from the back cover, that the Gieses “live on a lake near Ann Arbor, Michigan.” And there’s this dear photo of an elderly pair who appear to be Grandma and Grandpa circa 1948, but they’re also two scholars who’ve spent their lives together researching and writing almost two dozen books about life in the Middle Ages. How cool is that? [Full Story]

Editor’s note: A version of this column appeared in the Jan. 6, 2011 Wall Street Journal.

For the past three years I have been granted unfettered access to the Michigan football program, from the film room to the locker room, to write a book about what I’ve seen. Titled “Third and Long: Three Years with Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines,” it will come out this fall.

Before I walked into my first staff meeting, I thought I knew college football, and particularly Michigan football, as well as anyone out there. But after three years of seeing everything up close, I can tell you this unequivocally: I had no idea.

College football is based on a central conflict: It’s a billion-dollar business that can generate enough revenue to fund whole athletic departments and enough passion to fuel endowment drives for entire universities, but it’s all built on the backs of stressed-out coaches and amateur athletes. [Full Story]

[Full Story]

This spring the Big Ten Conference added Nebraska, giving the league 12 teams.

So, what do you do – change the name to the Big 12? No, because that name’s already taken by another conference – which, naturally, now has 10 teams. So the Big Ten decided to keep its name – and change everything else, starting with the logo.

Now, to handle all this, they could ask some corn-fed rubes like you and your cronies, but you would probably do something silly like draw on the Big Ten’s unparalleled 115-year history and come up with something simple, honest, and authentic. Or you might just pay some art student a hundred bucks to make a new logo, like Nike did years ago, to create some swoosh-looking thing. It was so embarrassingly bad they got rid of it as soon as they could, which is why you’ve probably never seen it.

And that just won’t do, you mouth-breathing Midwesterner. Why, you probably don’t even use “networking” as a verb. You disgust me.

No, what you’ve got to do is lay yourself at the mercy of high-priced international image consultants – the kind of “branding experts” who cover the euro currency with geometrically perfect structures that never existed and name the streets of our finer subdivisions after purely abstract concepts, which are as suitable for your municipality as they are for Mars – and let them tell you what you’re supposed to like.

And, thank God, that is exactly what the Big Ten did! [Full Story]

On Saturday, more than 100,000 frozen fans will watch Michigan play Michigan State at the Big House. Not in football, which happens every other year. But in hockey, thus setting the record for the biggest crowd ever to watch a hockey game – anywhere.

To build a hockey rink on a football field, a six-man crew works for three weeks. First, they install the floor out of big plastic tiles called Terratrak, which were originally designed to create portable runways for fighter jets in the desert. If they can handle F-15s, they can handle Bauer Supremes. Then they put up the boards, the glass, and start flooding the rink with some 40,000 gallons of water.

Don’t worry – these guys have built rinks in San Diego and Mexico City. For them, Michigan’s a skate in the park.

The game will be televised by the Big Ten Network, and will receive worldwide attention. Lawrence Kasdan, the Michigan alum who wrote and directed the classic movie “The Big Chill,” will drop the opening puck. And every time Michigan scores, fireworks will fly.

But that’s not the most impressive part. [Full Story]

When I moved from Illinois to Michigan as a newlywed 30 years ago, I had no job, no friends, and no real reason to get out of bed except to finish the thank-you notes.

I would lie there, waiting for a reason to start the day.

And then I’d think: Dinner!

It might have been 8 in the morning, but by gosh my nice new husband would have a spectacular meal waiting for him by the time he got home from work.

Cooking was a new challenge for a girl who’d gone through college eating catsup-drenched spaghetti and buttered rice straight from the pot.

I’d happily plan the menu from my new Betty Crocker’s Cookbook (now tattered and splattered and too precious to pitch). I’d go to the grocery store a mile away and carefully select the ingredients for that night’s feast. With plenty of time to indulge my inner Suzy Homemaker, I created color-coordinated, well balanced dinners – complete with salad, bread, dessert, and garnishes (!) – which I served cheerfully in that tiny candlelit kitchen.

Oh, how I loved to cook.

Then I got a job. And then I got pregnant and had a baby –  every three years. And somewhere along the way, I lost the joy of cooking. Special events, sure. Thanksgiving dinner, lasagna for company, spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread on a cold Sunday night? Fine. But the daily dinner became something I did because it had to be done.

Luckily, as I lost interest in cooking, my husband discovered he loves it and is far better at it. So we’ve been eating well all these years, even as I’ve harbored a tinge of envy at his passion and talent for cooking, as well as some guilt for being a slacker at the stove. [Full Story]

[Full Story]

Ricky (walks in the front door): Lucy, I’m home!

Lucy (runs up and plants a smooch): Ooh, hi honey!

Ricky: Tonight we celebrate the band’s big record deal! Did you remember to buy the Cristal Champagne?

Lucy: Oh, Ricky, you’re going to be so proud of me!

Ricky: And why is that?

Lucy: Remember you told me that Cristal costs $250?

Ricky (suspiciously): Yes?

Lucy (pulls bottle from behind back): Look! I found a bottle for just $8!

Ricky (visibly upset): Lucy, that’s not Cristal. It’s not Champagne, it’s cheap Cava from Spain. See, it says “Cristalino”! That means “little crystal.”

Lucy: Oh, that’s OK. I’m just going to drink one glass.

Funny? Maybe not so much. Especially if you’re the maker of the sparkling wine formerly known as Cristalino, a Vinous Posse top value pick in the last two December budget bubbly shoot-outs.

Howcum? Back in 2006, Louis Roederer, producer of Champagne-to-the-rap-stars Cristal, found fault with the similarity in name and foil labels of the decidedly down-market Spanish Cava.

Next step: Federal court, for a lawsuit against Cristalino’s owners for trademark infringement. [Full Story]

By beating Penn State on Saturday, Michigan State secured a share of its first Big Ten title in 20 years. It was a big game, but it was far from Michigan State’s biggest.

The biggest game in the Spartans’ long history wasn’t one of their 30 victories over Michigan, their six national title-clinching contests or their three Rose Bowl triumphs.

No, the biggest game in Michigan State history was against Notre Dame in 1966 – and it wasn’t a victory. [Full Story]

[Full Story]

Since the Michigan and Wisconsin football teams first played each other in 1892, Michigan has won a decisive 80% of those games.

The difference was one man: Bo Schembechler, who beat the Badgers 18 of 19 times. If Schembechler had coached Wisconsin, instead of Michigan, the record would be almost even.

That actually almost happened. And it all came down to a 40-minute meeting, 43 years ago.

Schembechler became the head coach of his alma mater, Miami of Ohio, in 1963, at the ripe old age of 33. After Miami won its league title in 1965 and ’66, Wisconsin came calling for the head coach. [Full Story]

At the sobering close of the Michigan-Michigan State game, I turned to walk out of the stadium.

“I’m sorry I was cheering so loud,” said the friendly Michigan State fan behind me.

“No problem,” I said. “I found some earplugs in my pocket.”

I then pulled back my hair and revealed the Jujyfruits candy I’d brought with me to nibble on, but decided instead to use as noise-blockers. They were pliable and non-sticky – much better than real ear plugs. In fact, I spent much of the fourth quarter wondering why the good folks at Jujyfruits don’t promote this idea.

“Quirky,” said me husband, using the word my family frequently dubs my common sense solutions to life’s little challenges.

We all think we know best, and that our way is the best way. But I insist there is always more than one right way to do anything. [Full Story]

[Full Story]

Although local restaurant wine markups vary widely, you might figure that wine prices in the cutthroat-competitive supermarket world would be more consistent, one to the next.

You’d figure wrong.

One fine example: Italy’s ubiquitous Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio. Fuhgedabout its modest crowd-sourced ratings; the wine’s a staple on most grocery store shelves, including seven of the eight Ann Arbor supermarkets I visited in late October.

If you’re a west-sider who shops at Plum Market, you’ll pay $17 to take home the current 2009 vintage.

Wanna spend more? No problem. On the south side, Meijer sells the same bottle for $19. Joe’s will Trade one in exchange for $21. And if buying the wine at Whole Foods makes you no healthier, its $24 price tag is likely to perk up the chain’s bottom line.

But if you really have money to burn, head east toward Hiller’s for the daily double: you’ll settle for the prior year’s vintage and they’ll soak you for $26 – a whopping $9 (53%) more than Plum’s price.

This may be an outlying example, but it’s far from atypical. The survey found prices on individual bottles can vary as much as 80% among the eight local markets, and your total tab for the identical assortment of wines will be 30% higher or lower, depending on where you shop. [Full Story]

Whenever you see a TV spot promoting college football, you can be sure they’ll include a shot of the Wolverines running out of the Michigan Stadium tunnel to jump up and touch the “M Go Blue” banner. It’s one of the sport’s truly iconic images.

But like most traditions – most of the good ones, anyway – this one started organically and quietly before becoming a public pillar of Michigan football.

Fifty years ago, Michigan’s head coach was a guy named Chalmers Elliott – which might explain why his friends called him “Bump.” As a player, he’d been an All-American and national champion, but coaching was tougher.

In 1962, the Wolverines lost five of their first six games, including four straight Big Ten losses – three of them, shutouts.

The head hockey coach, Al Renfrew, had been a classmate of Elliott’s, and the two had remained good friends. So Renfrew and his wife Marjorie decided to do something to help boost the football team’s morale. Marjorie went to work in her sewing room, stitching a yellow block “M” on a blue sheet, about six feet across. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: This is the third year that Myra Klarman, a professional photographer based in Ann Arbor, has graced The Chronicle with her charming photographs of the annual Main Street Halloween Treat Parade, when merchants pass out goodies to pint-sized princesses and puppies, ghouls and goblins. [Take a look at her images from 2009 and 2008 Halloween parades as well.] After seeing Myra’s photographs last year, one of our readers commented: “This makes me like our town.” We agree. Happy Halloween!

[Full Story]

“Walking Papers,” a collection of poetry by Thomas Lynch, arrived in the mail a few weeks ago.

Lucky me. Lucky us.

Lynch is a writer who chooses to call things by their proper names. Death is death. An ass is an ass. Love is bliss, except when it is something else entirely.

And when he puts his intelligence and honesty and lurking wit to observations of human-scale profundities, he finds solace in even the harshest truths.

“Oh Say Grim Death” muses on the most inexplicable of blows: A child is killed. We learn of it – he died in a fire, on a Thursday morning – from what is cut into a 18th-century headstone, and follow the search in that New Hampshire town as certain as it would be anywhere, for a reason to have “faith / In God’s vast purposes. As if the boy / Long buried here was killed to show how God / Makes all things work together toward some good.” [Full Story]

Michigan towns invest a lot in their high schools – and they should, because those schools represent them. That’s why you see those signs at the city limits boasting about their Class B state baseball champs or Class D volleyball team – from 1994. I’ve always thought that’s pretty cool – and even cooler for the state champs who get to see it every time they come home.

A town’s pride often carries over to the team’s mascots, like the Midland Chemics, the Calumet Copper Kings, or the Bad Axe Hatchets – great names, every one of them. When you pull those jerseys over your head, you know you’re wearing a piece of your home, your history, your very identity.

But if you play for the Panthers or the Wildcats or – heaven forbid – the Eagles, you’re one of a hundred. Actually, you’re one of 103. That’s how many high schools have those names in Michigan alone.

Ann Arbor’s newest high school is among the unfortunate. [Full Story]

The vibrant sounds of the 360-member University of Michigan Marching Band were bolstered Saturday at Michigan Stadium by the Alumni Marching Band, which drew 350 former marchers from around the country to the homecoming game against the University of Iowa. Enjoying the bands is more than just a musical sensation – it’s also a visual feast. Here are some of the moments, patterns and colors of the day from the camera of local freelance journalist Lynn Monson.

[Full Story]