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Last Saturday, the Michigan State Spartans beat the Michigan Wolverines in the most anticipated rivalry game in years. But that was overshadowed just one day later by the Detroit Lions, who pulled off one of the great upsets of the NFL season, when they … beat someone. Anyone. Doesn’t matter. At football!

Hard to believe it was just two years ago the Lions became the first NFL team to lose all 16 games. And now, here they are, standing tall at 1-5.

That’s why their victory was such big news. I hear from my friends who have real jobs that it was bigger talk around the office water cooler than the Michigan-Michigan State game – and that’s saying something.

It just proves my theory that Detroit really isn’t Hockeytown. It’s a football town. Whenever the Lions so much as show a pulse, the locals go loco.

But I’m still not biting. Not just on the Lions, but on pro football itself. [Full Story]

You wouldn’t know it by looking in my closet or my basement or any other part of my house for that matter. But I am a minimalist at heart.

Yes, just give me the simple life.

That’s why I found myself nodding to this list of 21 things Americans are learning to live without by Rick Newman of U.S. News and World.

A good little mantra: Who needs it?

When he was 80, French poet Paul Claudel wrote: “No eyes left, no ears, no teeth, no legs, no wind. And how astonishingly well one does without them.” I’m keeping all the body parts I can, thank you very much. But as for superfluous stuff: Buh-bye.

Purging is suddenly more thrilling than accumulating. In fact, whenever anyone comes to the house now, I feel bad if they don’t leave with a parting gift: A popcorn maker. A box of sweaters. A couch.

A little deprivation can be a good thing. [Full Story]

Players on both sides of the Michigan-Michigan State game will tell you it’s the hardest hitting game of the year. No one can doubt the guys who’ll go at it tomorrow are some of the nation’s toughest men.

But the best athletes I’ve ever seen, and perhaps the toughest, I found on the other side of the world, playing Australian Rules Football – or “footy,” as they call it.

American football is dominated by specialists: huge linemen, speedy receivers and tiny kickers – all with their own, very specific jobs. But in Aussie Rules Football, all 18 players on a team have to be able to catch the ball, run with it, pass it with either hand and kick it with either foot – all on the run. And when an opposing player gets it, they have to chase him down to make the tackle. That’s why footy players all look the same: big and strong, lean and mean. [Full Story]

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In the far corner, wearing synthetic trunks: Steve Heimoff, west coast editor of Wine Enthusiast magazine. I pilfered part of the column title from him; fortunately, Steve’s pretty laid back about such things.

Unlike “natural, schmatural” wine, over which he turns apoplectic: “‘Greenwashing’ is the perfect way to describe a large part of the whole natural, green, sustainable, organic, biodynamic thing. Everybody wants to portray his practices as purer than the other guy’s practices. It’s a holier-than-thou world out there, and IMHO that goes for the whole greenie-natural crowd.”

And here in the near corner, Ann Arborites Stacey and Rob DeAngelis, dressed in the all-natural cloak of DeAngelis Cantina del Vino, whose tasting room opens later this month. It’s the only winery with an Ann Arbor mailing address, though you’ll find it deep in Scio Township.

Not for them, the typical 21st century winemaker’s arsenal of chemicals, sulfites, color enhancers and designer yeasts.

What’s in the wines? “Just the grapes,” says Stacey DeAngelis, whose picture appears on their label.

She’s not kidding. [Full Story]

The Notre Dame football team has lost three straight games to Michigan, Michigan State and Stanford. Normally, nobody would care about a 1-3 team that’s finished in the top 10 just three times in the past two decades. But this is Notre Dame, the nation’s first football team with a national following.

It all started with coach Knute Rockne and his best player, George Gipp – more commonly known as “The Gipper.” Thanks to the famous phrase “Win one for the Gipper,” and a 1940 movie starring Ronald Reagan, who played the Gipper, George Gipp remains famous 90 years after his death. He’s also woefully misunderstood. [Full Story]

Steven Gillis got lucky. Twice.

In the 1980s he was practicing labor law with a big firm in Washington, D.C., and writing in his spare time. The stock market was booming.

“I started making some money and I got people to invest it for me – I’m smart enough to know I didn’t know how to invest it,” Gillis says.

“And I got lucky.”

As his writing started to take off, Gillis decided to practice law part time and devote more time to his fiction. A Detroit native and University of Michigan alum, he decided to move back to Michigan and settled in Ann Arbor. His first novel, “Walter Falls,” published by Brook Street Press in 2003, was well-received by critics and a finalist for a pair of literary awards. (Brook Street would publish his second novel, “The Weight of Nothing,” in 2005.) And he founded 826 Michigan, a nonprofit aimed at encouraging young people to develop their creative writing talents.

And then, in early 2005, he met up with Dan Wickett, who, like Gillis, was a regular at Shaman Drum Bookshop and at other local readings. And Gillis got lucky again. [Full Story]

Just a few hours after Michigan State beat Notre Dame with a gutsy fake field goal in overtime, Spartan head coach Mark Dantonio suffered a heart attack.

Granted, Dantonio is probably wired a little tighter than most. If you see a picture of him laughing, the photo was probably taken with a quick-reflex camera. But the fact is, every college coach is wired tight – simply because they have to be.

Anyone who’s coached their kids’ soccer team knows how nerve-wracking even that can be. But for my money nothing beats college football for pure, mind-frying stress. [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 appear on The Chronicle.]

Seattle has claimed another one of Ann Arbor’s “young professionals.” Departing Ann Arbor, headed west in late July was Brian Kerr. This time it’s Devon Persing who’s leaving Tree Town for The Emerald City – no kidding, apparently some residents of the two cities actually call them that.

Why? Maybe because precious stones are as plentiful in Seattle as Ann Arbor’s leaves are in the autumn – that is, really plentiful. Or maybe it’s because trees are as plentiful in Ann Arbor as precious stones are in Seattle. To figure out which city nickname came first would require some kind of research into historical information – you know, the kind of thing only a librarian or information scientist might be able to pull off.

And what do you know, Kerr and Persing are both graduates of the University of Michigan’s School of Information. But they are, of course, very different people. Most strikingly different – to me, anyway – is that while Kerr favors a headgear-less look, even in freezing weather, Persing will put on a hat, even when it’s not that cold, just to make a favorable impression. [To those who read every word I write, I'm known to be a huge supporter of hats in cold weather.] [Full Story]

The Heisman Trophy had humble beginnings. In 1935, the Downtown Athletic Club of New York City – a private organization with no ties to the NCAA or any major football conference or team – decided to give an award to the best player in college football. The next year, when the Club’s most famous member, John Heisman, died of pneumonia, the members named the award after him.

They made a fine choice. Heisman went to Brown University as an undergrad, and the University of Pennsylvania for his law degree before becoming a coach in 1892. He coached at six colleges, including Georgia Tech, where he led his team to a 33-game winning streak. Many historians consider him the father of the forward pass. And, on the side, Heisman was a skilled Shakespearean actor.

But his best line was his own. To start the season each fall, he would hold a football in his hand and tell his players, “Men, it is better to die as a young boy than to drop this ball.”

It did not take long for Heisman’s trophy to gain prestige. Today it’s probably the best-known trophy awarded to an American athlete. But, there is a catch: The winner has to be an eligible amateur athlete. [Full Story]

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The University of Michigan’s athletic department just completed its $226 million renovation, on time and on budget. To celebrate, last Saturday Michigan rededicated its iconic stadium in grand style, including fancy receptions, programs, pins and not one but two flyovers, all followed by a big win over Connecticut.

But the show-stopper wasn’t a world-class pilot or an All-American athlete – just some guy who walked out to mid-field.

In 2007, on Christmas Eve, 23-year-old Brock Mealer was riding home from their cousin’s house with his family and his brother’s girlfriend. It was a wonderful evening, full of appreciation and promise.

Brock’s brother Elliott had just accepted a scholarship to play football at Michigan, and Elliot and his girlfriend seemed headed for the altar.

But on the way home, a 90-year-old driver named H. Edward Johnson ran a stop sign and struck the Mealers’ SUV. Elliott’s girlfriend Hollis Richer and the Mealers’ father, Dave, were killed instantly. Brock was paralyzed from the waist down. [Full Story]

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Imagine a restaurant that thrives and grows based on its friendly service, consistent products, strong marketing and support for and from its community.

But peek in the kitchen and you discover packaged mixes, pre-sliced produce, shortcut recipes and commercially-prepared dishes, straight from a central commissary or food-service supplier.

Its primarily pre-packed ingredients never spoil, but neither do they ever taste truly fresh. Menu items don’t vary from one visit to the next, thanks to consistent sourcing and preparation – but neither do they ever excite, or rise above the overall uniformity and mediocrity of their processed flavors.

Now imagine that this restaurant is, instead, a winery. And let’s consider the curious case of downtown Saline’s Spotted Dog, which just announced a capacity-tripling expansion accompanied by positive nods from some local media.

The affable John Olsen, a refugee from the world of corporate tech support, looks up from behind the tasting counter as you enter the Spotted Dog, a brick-walled, 1,600-square-foot storefront just off the corner of Michigan Avenue and Ann Arbor Street.

Olsen, who co-owns the winery with his wife, Jill, is tediously affixing labels to a batch of newly-filled bottles. Such is life at a micro-winery, where hand labor often stands in for expensive and space-consuming machines. [Full Story]

Ten years ago, ESPN viewers voted the Michigan-Ohio State football game the best rivalry in the nation. Not just in college football, or football in general, but in all sports. Since 1935, it’s held a privileged spot as the last game of the Big Ten season. More college football fans have seen this rivalry, in person and on TV, than any other.

HBO has produced dozens of sports documentaries, but only one on college football: the Michigan-Ohio State game. They titled it simply, “The Rivalry.” They did not feel they had to explain it.

But when the Big Ten added Nebraska, everything seemed up in the air, including the Michigan-Ohio State game. Next fall the Big Ten will have 12 teams, playing in two divisions, culminating in a title game – all new.

So that raised a few possibilities – not to mention plenty of rumors and fears. [Full Story]

Sometime between counting the days before she left for her freshman year of college and predicting she’d not return til Thanksgiving, my daughter apparently decided she just might miss me a little bit. Or maybe she feared my reaction to the empty nest after 28 years of full-time motherhood.

In any case, Tori installed a webcam and Skype on my computer so that we can have regular video chats.

This wouldn’t have occurred to me. Though Skype has been around for seven years, my experience with it was mostly spotty audio conference calls that were more irritating than anything.

“Trust me,” Tori said as she clipped the webcam to my monitor. “You’ll love this.” [Full Story]

My book group reconstituted itself a few months ago after a hiatus prompted by serious illness, family problems, the acute burdens of employment and unemployment and a number of other upheavals among us. When we reunited it was with some new members, and our first meeting was largely spent getting to know one another and catching up. Essential to that, of course, was what each of us had been reading lately.

“Olive Kitteridge,” Anne mentioned. “It was just wonderful.” Eilisha’s eyes lit up: “Oh, yes!” Linda had adored it, too. And they were off – celebrating a shared delight at Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of connected short stories and at the gratifications of shared delight, newly discovered.

One of the purposes of this column, which is approaching its first anniversary, is to re-create some of that pleasure – with the emphasis on sharing. NPR has a feature called “You Must Read This,” which these days has sounded a bit too pushy to my neurotic ear: No, I mustn’t. And get off my case. Lately I’ve tended to get a little uptight even when the most dear and trusted friend insists on lending me a book she’s just finished because she just knows I’ll just love it. Chances are I will. But I’m already in the middle of two other books and that’s yet another one joining the mountain of reading I don’t have time to get to and you wouldn’t believe all the crap I have to do today let alone this week and this month and for how many years can I keep this unread book before you start to hate me?

So, no pressure! But I’d like to share some of the reading that kept The Chronicle’s Book Fare columnist sane and fundamentally optimistic during a tough stretch. [Full Story]

Dear Loyal Readers,

Although I was officially on vacation this week, because I spent a few days retracing Ernest Hemingway’s haunts in northern Michigan, I decided to take a couple hours – more than I intended! – to combine two of my previous columns: one that ran in the Detroit News in 1998, and one that Time commissioned in 1999 but didn’t run, due to JFK Jr.’s tragic plane crash the same week.

I was inspired by meeting again with Ernest H. Mainland, Hemingway’s nephew, whom I first met 12 years ago pursuing these pieces. He has become a good friend. Then, after a round of golf, I coaxed another old friend, Jeff Johnson, into joining me for an impromptu tour of nearby Horton Bay. While telling Jeff about some of the stories Hemingway based there, a man named Robert walked down the road and joined us, then invited us for a drink with his girlfriend at his rental cabin just up the road – which turned out to be Shangri-La, where the Hemingways honeymooned in 1922. [Full Story]

If you’re sick of the big leagues, but not baseball, check out your backyard.

Here in Michigan you can watch the Beach Bums in Traverse City, the Lugnuts in Lansing, the West Michigan Whitecaps near Grand Rapids, the Great Lake Loons in Midland, and the Kings in Kalamazoo. Michigan fans can see six minor league teams if you count the Toledo Mud Hens – and seven if the Tigers start slumping again. Michigan baseball fans haven’t had it this good in decades.

In 1949, the U.S. boasted almost 500 minor league teams, supported by 42 million fans. But their ranks shriveled when major league baseball expanded, TV blossomed and air conditioning made staying at home much cooler. In just three years, attendance dropped almost 80%.

But when major league baseball turned its back on its fans with strikes and lockouts, the minor leagues aggressively courted them. Almost every fan-friendly custom you see at major league stadiums today they stole from the minors, including fancy food, daily promotions, pop music and endless stunts to keep the fans coming back, win or lose. As a result, the minors have grown back to a robust 176 teams nationwide.

Visit one, and you understand why. [Full Story]

When I read that the Spanish province of Catalonia voted to outlaw bullfighting, I was not surprised. A few years ago I traveled through Spain to write about bullfighting. Along the way, I met Barcelona’s director of tourism, and asked her why bullfighting was much less popular in Barcelona than the rest of Spain. She replied, “It is because we are civilized.”

Bullfighting’s biggest opponents, in fact, have always been Spaniards. Even bullfighting’s fans don’t brag about the 13,000 bulls killed every year in the ring, or claim they deserve to be killed.

But I’m not sure we’re in a position to judge bullfighting too harshly. We kill more than 35 million cows every year, and 100 million pigs and eight billion chickens. Not even Birkenstocks grow on trees. [Full Story]

These days, lots of Ann Arbor restaurants – and even some brewpubs – are offering wine lists of reasonable quality. So why would anyone want to BYO when they eat out?

How about:

• You’re itching to try a tiny, locally-owned place – call it Jamaican Jerk Pit – whose owners can’t afford multi-thousand dollars to secure a liquor license. But you fantasize how great a cold bottle of Red Stripe might taste alongside that jerk chicken or curried goat.
• You’re feeling the economic pinch, and the wine markup at many restaurants presents a budget-busting deterrent to going out. So you eat at home, and pour a glass or two of wine. Cost: one-third of its restaurant price.
• You enjoy a restaurant’s cooking, but its wine list is particularly short and dismal. With a better beverage selection, you’d probably eat there more often.
• You squirreled away a special bottle of high-end Cabernet for a landmark birthday or anniversary. Now’s the time – and you’d like to celebrate with a meal at your favorite “special occasion” eatery, accompanied by your special occasion wine.

If any of these scenarios hits home, ponder this: though laws vary, most larger states across the country – California, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and even Texas – allow you to legally tote along a bottle of wine when you go out to eat at a restaurant.

Here in Michigan, not so much. Except for a couple of small, largely unknown loopholes – which we’ll get to in a minute – beverage law in the GSOM (that’s Great State of Michigan) prohibits restaurant BYO. [Full Story]

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The gears of justice grind slowly, but they do grind, and sometimes they actually get their man – or woman, as the case may be.

The sports world saw its share of slow-moving justice this week, from the global to the local.

New York Yankees’ third basemen Alex Rodriguez has already admitted he used steroids, but only after his tests were leaked to the press. He’s still playing, and is now one just home run away from hitting 600. Twenty years ago this would have been big news – but since suspected steroid users Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds crossed that threshold, the luster is lost. About half of those polled said they simply don’t care – and they polled New Yorkers. If they don’t care, why should we?

Rodriguez cheated himself out of his own celebration. Seems about right to me. [Full Story]

[Editor's note: Jo Mathis was a columnist and reporter for The Ann Arbor News until it closed in July 2009.]

Many factors led to the shutdown of The Ann Arbor News one year ago, and most begin with a capital I.

Because of the Internet, Google became a verb that allowed instant, round-the-clock information, much of which was provided free of charge by newspapers that nonetheless expected people to continue paying for the print version.

Because of the Internet, there are endless ways to fill free time, which meant the daily newspaper became less and less a necessary part of people’s routine.

Because of the Internet, advertisers – by far our main source of income – could reach more targeted audiences at a much lower cost. (A snippy subscriber once said the only reason she got the paper was for the Meijer ads. I wanted to ask, “Haven’t you heard of meijer.com?”)

And because of the Internet, a nerd named Craig Newmark was able to start a little thing called Craigslist, which put a deadly dagger into classified sections everywhere. [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 appear on The Chronicle.]

Nine months have now passed between views of the world from the end of a teeter totter. This most recent view down the board was of Brian Kerr. One way I know Brian is as a downtown pedestrian who strolls hatless down the sidewalk, even in bitterly cold weather, and who must be admonished as you bicycle past: “Put on a hat, it’s cold out here!”

The chosen venue of our teeter totter ride was the middle of the intersection of Main and Liberty streets last Saturday morning, the last day of the Ann Arbor art fairs. We compromised on our chosen venue somewhat by moving to the edge of the intersection, to accommodate concerns of art fair staff.

It was a small concession to make – we’d already dealt with the disappointment of being denied access to the bottom of the pit being dug for the underground parking garage along Fifth Avenue, just to the northeast. Construction sites can’t reasonably be expected to be made accessible to random members of the general public – patrons of the arts, teeter totter riders, wheelchair users, the blind. That makes construction sites somewhat different from websites.

Under the Section 508 amendment of the federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973, federal agencies are required to make their websites accessible to people with disabilities. It’s a different piece of legislation from the Americans with Disabilities Act, which just recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. But Section 508 is to websites what the ADA is to buildings – the idea is to make things accessible to disabled people.

Kerr works for a company called Deque, which specializes in helping to make websites work well for hearing- and visually-impaired people.

Here’s a simple example. Visually impaired people sometimes use a screen-reader to get information from a website – it’s a software program that tries to interpret the page using text-to-speech technology. If there’s a picture on a page, say of a guy sitting on teeter totter, then what the screen reader interprets – and what the visually-impaired person hears – is just an indication that there’s an image. If the author of the page supplies some description in the “behind the scenes” coding, the visually-impaired person might hear: “Brian Kerr, who is sitting on the end of a teeter totter. The view is down the board.”

Like librarian Metta Landsdale, Kerr has a professional interest in making information accessible to people. And like Lou Rosenfeld, Kerr is a product of the master’s degree program at the University of Michigan School of Information. And like Brandon Zwagerman, Kerr was one of a group of co-founders of ArborUpdate, a now-defunct local news and discussion website.

But there’s something else that Kerr has in common with Landsdale, Rosenfeld and Zwagerman. [Full Story]

Today, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly enjoys a position as one of the country’s most influential movie critics, his opinions read and respected (and sometimes reviled) by millions. Forty years ago he was a precocious middle-schooler who carried a transcript of the Chicago Seven trial in his pocket as he roamed downtown Ann Arbor, exploring the head shops and hanging with the hippies.

Soon after enrolling at the University of Michigan in 1976, Gleiberman was bit by the movie bug and began reviewing films for the Michigan Daily. He struck up a long-distance friendship with Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who encouraged him in his writing and helped him to land his first job after graduation as a critic for the Boston Phoenix.

Though he now lives in Greenwich Village, Gleiberman makes regular return trips to Ann Arbor to visit family and friends. Over tea at Café Felix on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, he related what it was like to grow up in the countercultural milieu of Ann Arbor in the late ’60s and early ’70s, how that experience influenced his career as a film critic, and his thoughts and hopes on the future of journalism. [Full Story]

With the weak economy, and high school coaches urging their players to attend “voluntary” workouts, enrollment for summer camps is down nationwide about 10%. But if the choice is between team workouts and summer camp, I say, summer camp wins hands-down.

Let me explain.

I didn’t want to go to summer camp.

I spent my summers growing up at our family cottage near Traverse City. The idea of going to Camp Hayo-Went-Ha – a YMCA camp on the lake – didn’t interest me. I liked playing baseball, riding bikes and going to hockey school with my best friend. I figured the kids who went to Hayo-Went-Ha either couldn’t play baseball or didn’t have many friends. [Full Story]

Whenever I drive up US-23, I can’t resist gazing at two structures on my right: The Whitmore Lake High School stadium press box, where my writing career started, and the big red ski jump on Whitmore Lake, where it almost ended.

I once volunteered to visit the Whitmore Lake Water Ski Club, the oldest in the state, to try water ski jumping. The problem is, this is not something you can gradually work up to. It’s your basic all-or-nothing proposition.

Take our coach, Hal Baker. On several occasions he had cleared a hundred feet, the sport’s main milestone, but one time he hit the side of the jump so hard, he embedded white paint in his skin. A few times, he leaned back too far, causing him to fall backward into the water – at 50 miles per hour.

“I’ve been pulled out unconscious a few times,” Baker said, with a reassuring maniacal cackle. This was a man who knew the thrill of victory, and the unconsciousness of defeat. [Full Story]

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Hope everyone enjoyed the Fourth of July Parade in downtown Ann Arbor on Sunday morning. More Chronicle photos on Flickr: [link]

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