In "Confessions of an Obsessive Bird Lister," this month's Observer goes directly inside the world of high-stakes bird listing. It's cutthroat - when bird lister Sandy Komito challenges another bird lister's bird list, the latter dubs him "Iago Komito." Concedes the writer, "In Shakespeare's Othello, Iago's poisonous slanders end in murder. The stakes in birding aren't quite so high." He goes on to speculate that his hobby may be "a guy thing, a manifestation of too much testosterone." Boy, you really have to watch out when that Ann Arbor testosterone gets out of hand. You don't want to be hanging around the bar when two of these guys can't agree on whether they saw a Townsend's warbler or a western tanager, is all we have to say.

AAIO meetup: let's try this again. How does Thursday the 9th or Tuesday the 14th sound?

Got some tomatoes, Cheese-Its and sour cream sitting around? You've got the makings of "Tomato Casserole With Crackers." The dish is to be topped with "bread crumbs or more cheese-flavored cracker crumbs."

The Ann Arbor rental housing market finally begins to tank.

We've long been aware that National Review's Jay Nordlinger is not exactly filled with warm feelings for his hometown. After reading yet another A2-themed item of his, discussing an Observer piece on campus conservatives (among other things, he found the Observer's fairly standard use of "chair" instead of "chairman" to be unbearably PC,) we became curious just how deep his Tree Town antipathy went, and we were not disappointed. A list of his A2 mentions rivals this site in documented, obsessive Ann Arbor hate. Among the highlights:

• Mayor Hieftje wrote Nordlinger to correct what he said was an inaccuracy, that Hieftje had hugged a woman who called the U.S. a terrorist state. Hieftje went on to clarify that "he hails from 'Main Street Ann Arbor,'" not what he implies is the more leftist “campus Ann Arbor.” All that campus leftism really gives a bad rap to the anti-Patriot-Act-resolution-passing, "European" Ann Arbor that National Review would just love if they gave it a chance.
• Apart from New York, A2 is the city with the highest rate of New York Times subscribers.
• There is or was a "leftist grocery store" in Ann Arbor called the Village Corner, or VC, whose politics extended to "enjoying the different connotations of 'VC.'"
• Nordlinger's stint working at The Little Professor bookstore, which he claimed refused to stock conservative magazines, was a painful but decisive point in his political development, a watershed moment he references often.

Naming your band "Ann Arbor" just not enough to pay tribute to the diversity and people of our fine city? How about your kid? "Madison" is getting overused, anyway.

The AP has a story on thwarted college-student voters. "Local politicians are very unsure about students," a professor at Salisbury University in Maryland says. "They enjoy having students pay (sales) taxes and contribute to the economy. But they are wary of how students could influence politics at a local level." Indeed.

The story also cites a study about how students who must vote absentee are less likely to vote at all, confirming our theory that the nice liberals who live in a lot of these college towns could have an effect that they might come to regret on a very close national election.

Jonah Goldberg, who was rather enthusiastic a while back about efforts in college towns to keep students from voting, strikes again, this time arguing that only "the mentally challenged" are less informed voters than 18-24-year-olds. Young voters are unqualified, he claims, because they have "less education, less experience, less money, less property, and many fewer responsibilities than older people."

We'll start with "less education." Like Goldberg, we don't have any conclusive national statistics, but a Detroit News article reports that, in Michigan, 80 percent of 18-24-year-olds hold a high school degree, compared with 69 percent of those 65 and older. And a college education is more accessible and at the same time more necessary today than it was in previous generations.

"Less experience" is accurate, of course, but we wonder how much Goldberg would like the results of an election decided entirely by Medicare-benefit-receving, AARP-belonging seniors.

"Less money, less property" - we won't argue there. If you're a supporter of a white-male-landowner voting system, this is a compelling line of reasoning indeed.

"Many fewer responsibilities" - if the draft comes back, he'll have to refine this part of the argument a little.

Goldberg is against young people voting mainly because he thinks they will vote Democratic. He pooh-poohs the notion that "youth issues" are anything other than standard Democratic rhetoric, as he did in his remarks about college-town voting. But college towns tend to be pretty solidly liberal. Here in A2, it's two Republican council members, Marcia Higgins and Mike Reid, who have been among the most skeptical about the couch ban. If anything, an energized student vote could become a powerful check on local NIMBY liberalism. As for the national elections, we wonder if these college-town officials have ever considered the effect of suppressing a large population of voters in towns that are often Democratic oases in swing states.

Leighton observes A2 law in action - a complaint about someone who put their trash out a couple days before trash day. Also on the trash front, Ann Arborites are none too happy about the new city-mandated garbage cans, for which users of more than one 62-gallon container will be charged an extra fee. We've been unable to find much on the specifics of the plan, which will be implemented in non-student areas first, but we wonder if a household of, say, five adults, which probably generates less waste than five households of one adult each, will be charged extra.