Yeah, I know they’re fuzzy. These guys love to boogie.

I had an odd little six degrees of separation kind of moment last night. That faaaarrrr that hampered my drive home? Well, I follow a certain young turk Planet Ann Arbor blogger on twitter. I am not stalking some young whippersnapper. He’s one of the better reporters (in my opinion) for the on-line Ann Arbor Snooze, most of his tweets are links to news articles, and he is also a wonderful photographer. But he posts just enough other stuff that I know he has a beloved dog (Stan) and lives in a cool apartment downtown. When I got home last night and checked Twitter, he had tweeted something like, “My house may be on fire but they saved my dog.” His apartment was in that house. His DOG was in that house. His DOG was in that house. … … … I don’t know this kid face-to-face (and he doesn’t follow me) but I felt both alarmed and relieved for him.

I dunno why but it seems like we have had a lot of rather spectacular fires around here lately, although no fatalities, thank you god or whoever. This is in an era when our wondrous mayor and a bunch of particularly vapid council folks (in my not-so-humble opinion) have been engaged in trying to cut basic city services to the bone while spending what I think is ridiculous amounts of time discussing public art and hobnobbing with real-estate developers who seem to want to fill our beautiful little city with huge 14-story apartment towers for young professionals wealthy college students. One recent fire proposal was to reduce the number of fire stations from five to three. What? I admit that I do not understand all of the issues here but I would rather have more than enough fully (or even a bit overly) staffed fire stations than a bunch of committee-chosen “art projects”. Fortunately, our relatively new city manager has somehow managed to squelch that whole fire station proposal. [I am a fan of this guy and not only because he’s a former Yooper.]

I am not against art, even tax-payer funded art. Art is very important! I just think that the mayor and city council exist to make sure that basic city services are provided: fire, police, garbage / recycle, SNOW REMOVAL!!!,

Rant deleted and apologies all around. Let’s just blame my inner 5-year-old, shall we? First world problems, 21st century ones at that!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2013 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.