Welcome Back
What do you need to know?
> The Weather Underground, a documentary about the violent Students for a Democratic Society splinter group of the same name, is showing at the Michigan Theater this week: 9:00 PM on Monday and at 7:00 and 9:00 PM on Tuesday.
> The opening of this year’s exhibition put on by the Prison Creative Arts Project will be held this Tuesday at 5:30 PM in the Media Union (Soon to be officially the James and Ann Duderstadt Center) on North Campus. The exhibit will show though March 16.
> Anti-War Action! will be holding the one-year anniversary of their “Books Not Bombs” student strike this Thursday, with bomb-pinata smashing on the diag all day and a “progressive discussion” at 8:00 PM in Angell Hall.
> The laser beam coming from the all-seeing eye that is “free market dogma” has passed over Ann Arbor in an Op-ed titled “Privitize U-M” published in the Ann Arbor News. Hopefully it will pass quickly. (See the Ann Arbor is Overrated discussion thread on this.)
> So you’ve heard that there “aren’t any” Wolverines left in Michigan? Think again: they found one. And it “had moves like Barry Sanders.”
> Author if “Georgraphy and Nowhere” and “Home from Nowhere” James Howard Kunstler is speaking at the Architecture school Friday.
> The Ann Arbor Urban Outfitters will not be carrying the “Voting is for Old People” T-shirts that generated some controversy earlier this year. The folks at the Ann Arbor store received them but decided to “send them back.” (Via LB)
> Finally, it sounds like my ranting about how city hall is ignoring pedestrians isn’t coming out of nowhere:
“To the Daily:
This letter is a response to the article entitled Jaywalking causes greater concern since student deaths (02/17/04). The Ann Arbor police are not doing their jobs as far as protecting pedestrians is concerned. I have first-hand experience. I was struck by a car while walking to work in Ann Arbor in January of 2003. This occurred in front of the Michigan Union, as I was crossing South University Avenue in the crosswalk. I was hospitalized with a broken hip, head wound and internal bleeding. I was in the hospital for a month and in a wheelchair for three months after that. The point I’d like to make is that even if you are legally crossing the street in Ann Arbor, you are not necessarily safe, so the issue of pedestrian safety is much broader than Lt. Michael Logghe attempted to convey with his statements in the article.
Not only did the police never contact me for their report, but they failed to return my phone calls after repeated attempts. The person who hit me was issued a ticket at the scene for failure to yield. The result? The police officer, Officer Martin, never showed up to court that day, and the charge was dismissed. So part of the problem, as I see it, is in the failure of the Ann Arbor Police Department to enforce the law.
That is the kind of “civil service” you can expect from The AAPD when you are a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen of Ann Arbor. Thanks for nothing, Ann Arbor.
Kenneth A. Longo
Research fellow, Department of Physiology” (a letter in today’s Daily)
Food for though: half of the black men in New York were jobless, compared to 25% of whites of the same age group.
And while this sounds good, “[metro Detroit] Regionalism doesn’t mean higher taxes. It means delivering better services for less money,” too bad he’s talking about cops and jails. God for forbid we develop regional transit, or revenue-sharing.