two fell swoops

Please share your opinion. Sorry for randomness.

Given: a refrigerator with two temperature control dials.

• Refrigerator Dial: Labeled 0-9, where O is warmest, 9 is coldest.
• Freezer Dial: Labeled A-E, where A is warmest, E is coldest.

Both dials turn left to right, where 0 and A are on the left-most end of the dial.

If you adjust the dial to the temperature colder in the refrigerator, do you say:

 ”I am turning the refrigerator up.”

OR

“I am turning the refrigerator down.”

Does this answer change when talking about the freezer?

Thanks.

Usually the emails from the U-M Dean of Students pass quickly through my email inbox with little to note. But as I skimmed one the other day, just before hitting the ‘delete’ button, a phrase caught my attention:

We are happy to share with you the reports we have had of great [U-M football] fan behavior so far this season, unmarred by rude behavior, offensive language or the tossing of objects.

“The tossing of objects?” Curious to know what kind of past excitements might have elicited the mention in the Dean’s email, I did some research on object tossing at UofM football games. I discovered that the University Board of Regents actually has an ordinance (backed by a fine up to $50 and a misdemeanor charge) prohibiting spectators at University sporting events from throwing stuff. A story about a recent challenge to this ordinance - the tossing of one particular kind of object by senior engineer Jay Trzkinski, aka “Hot Dog Man” - led me to another interesting phrase:

The issue at the tightly packed Big House isn’t as much about a hot dog inflicting pain as it is keeping students from knocking people over, [Athletic Dept facilities manager Rob] Rademacher said.

A hot dog inflicting pain. When I forwarded the Michigan Daily article to Tim, he immediately responded the same way I did. Somewhat miraculously, we both independently performed Google searches for the exact phrase “hot dog inflicting pain.”

Which brings us to the real point of this post. All of this hot-dog-tossing nonsense is just a lead-in to what we both discovered by searching for that phrase: that in Google’s index of billions of websites - which Tim the Linguist reminds me represents a vast corpus of written English - the exact phrase “hot dog inflicting pain” appears once and only once. (That is, until the Google spiders find this website.) In this, we discovered another thing to collect on this blog.

We call it a Googalone. (No Google, I did not mean google.) A phrase that yields only one site match in a Google search.

We’d like to encourage you to help us find Googalones (No Google, I did not mean goggles.) The rules of our scavenger hunt:

1. Googalones must be submitted by email (not as a comment) to protect their innocence until officially recognized here.

2. They can’t be random spam, they must have a discernible author (for us to, um, credit.) I like them better if they have a complete noun phrase and verb phrase.

3. You can’t make your own page with a fake one just to impress us. That’s stupid.

4. Please email submissions to googalones at [name of this blog] dot com.

Stop tossing objects and get searching!

We like to walk around town and take pictures of surfaces that are weathered or aged or decaying or distressed or whatever you want to call it.  And we want to archive some of those pictures here on our blog.  So I thought it would be appropriate for the first post to feature one of Ann Arbor’s most recognizable exterior walls:

Sorry, it’s not the greatest picture.  I was operating under bad light conditions with a preservationist mentality.  We were walking by the other day and I saw the proprietor of the business outside painting the front.  I got scared and asked him, “You’re not painting over the Vernors wall, are you?”

“No way,” he replied.  “My landlord would kill me.”

So apparently this wall - a familiar, welcoming landmark to all southbound, incoming traffic from M-14 to Ann Arbor -is safe, as long as its ownership doesn’t change.  Which brings me to a point…

Yes, we know Ann Arbor is not the greatest place to document the kind of weathering and urban decay we’re calling “patina”. But that’s why we do it. Because it’s rare and disappearing around here - and too beautiful to be dismissed as conceptual/photographic cliche and forgotten.

Even though we cringe just as much as the next person when we hear the term “Treetown”, we still think there’s a place for the recognition of outstanding trees. So, for the first post in what we hope will be a regular series here at TwoFellSwoops, I thought we should feature the tree that Andrea once made me go drive a few blocks out of our way to see. I was glad she did.

location: Crest Street, Eberwhite area suburbs west of downtown
species: American Elm
trunk: 166 inches
wingspan: about 50 steps

About 12 feet up its trunk, this tree splits into 15 enormous branches, each one the size of a typical tree you’d find lining a suburban street. That’s 15 trees in one. The outermost branches stretch halfway across the yards of the houses across the 4-car-wide street.

While we were taking pictures of this tree and stretching string around it to measure, and feeling slightly awkward about doing so, a neighbor pulled up at the curb of the house next door. (No one was home at the house closest.) The neighbor was quite friendly and put us at ease by yelling across to us, “It’s hard to photograph that tree, isn’t it?” We agreed that we needed a wide-angle or fisheye lense to get it all in one shot. He shared a few things with us before he went on his way inside….

This tree is one of few remaining American Elm trees in the city. (Dutch Elm Disease first arrived in Detroit in 1950 and a couple decades later had wiped out 80% of Michigan’s elms.) Two more of the remaining few stand right next to this one:

These three elms are on the property between the sidewalk and road owned by the City. (What’s that area called again?) Apparently, the City knows about these trees and has sent someone out to do some sort of antibiotic treatment and pruning.

The places where the branches have been pruned tend to “weep” and cause the grass underneath to yellow and die, as seen in the picture to the left.

Maybe the trees have their own sort of phantom limb syndrome. Or maybe they remember what it was like when whole streets were lined with elm:

Or maybe trees can’t remember shit.

Anyway, we want to know where your favorite Ann Arbor trees are, so we can take pictures of them before the weather turns and write posts about them. Please enter your tips in the comments of this post or email trees@twofellswooops.com.

It’s old news now that Ann Arbor legend Shaky Jake has died. Even older and less newsworthy - and perhaps just as sad - is the familiar chorus about the “death of Ann Arbor” that follows such a passing from our town. Witness the comments on the just-linked Ann Arbor News story:

The Del Rio is gone……..Mr. Flood’s Party is gone……..Discount Records is gone…………….and now Jake is gone. The time of the hippies is truly passed. All that remains is AppleBee’s and Buffalo Wild Wings. Time to leave….

No naked mile, no hash bash and now no Shakey Jake. What’s left in Ann Arbor?

Ann Arbor has lost its soul.

Ann Arbor certainly has lost something with the death of Shakey Jake. But what these people are talking about is something that was lost a long time ago, as soon as the “difference” that Shakey Jake represents became rare enough for us to have to celebrate it with such a cartoonish glorification of one singular person. But enough about that. What really interests me is the “time of the hippies” comment…

The shadow of the 60s looms large over younger generations everywhere in this country. Since then, every decade’s self-image has been shaped largely in relation to those heady days. As boomers continue to age and movements started in the 60s continue to play out, the definitive quality of that past time - its capacity to define the present - continues to be a journalistic cliche with some real truth behind it. And nowhere is it truer than here in Ann Arbor, where so many people and projects that came into their own in the 60s were born or have come to die.

The thing that bothers me most about people who were active in the 60s is the same thing that bothers me about people my own age: their nostalgic surrender to the inevitable decline of Ann Arbor. It’s something both groups - hippies and hipsters - might not want to admit they have in common. They love to remind you about the cool things they did here in the past, while one could still do those kinds of things.

I’ve done a few things that might be considered cool. But I’m looking forward to the cool things I might do in the future. Because of my mild social anxiety and hermetic recreational habits, it takes me a long time to get to know the place and the people around me. To make it feel like home. To feel invested in it and comfortable enough to try to influence it - and knowledgeable enough to feel like I have a right to do so. Just when I started to feel this way about Ann Arbor, I reached that age when all of my friends started leaving. To New York, Chicago, Portland. All of them displayed greater or lesser degrees of that universal malaise I’d like now to christen - with a nod to the pernicious local variety I know best - as “AnnArboredom”: a lack of enthusiasm for one’s current city of residence combined with a belief in the exceptional rate of that place’s current cultural decline.

AnnArboredom can lead to a sense of urgency bordering on real panic about getting out of town while one can still do so fashionably (or before other less fashionable people do the same thing and thereby make it less fashionable). The afflicted can start to get an almost apocalyptical feeling of entitlement in relation to their town’s cultural offerings, wanting to take as much as they can - and give nothing back - before it all goes up in flames.

So what is it about hipsters that links them in this way to hippies? My thesis is simple: Nostalgia for some better past stems from an inability or an unwillingness to affect the present. What we can’t or won’t change we imagine to be on some inevitable trajectory of decline.

But the more examples you hear each new generation of townies and students cite in support of Ann Arbor’s decline, the more you start to doubt the possibility of ever locating Ann Arbor’s Golden Age. And the more entrenched that sense of decline seems as the default attitude of anyone with hippie/hipster-ish leanings toward the place where they live.

To all the AnnArbored out there, I say resist that attitude. There is nothing exceptional about your town’s current cultural trajectory. People were whining about the same things before you were even born. And hey old person! Remember how when you were young there were things going on that old people didn’t know about or just couldn’t understand? Guess what? That’s still happening. There are still things like that going on. Only you’re the old person now. Upset with the direction Ann Arbor is going? Don’t leave or give up. Stay and fight. Work with what you have, with this town as it is and not how you remember it to be.

Let’s start with an experiment. I can think of lots of things that I loved about this town that are gone, and lots that are still here. But I want to hear from everyone else. So I’m asking any readers out there to please populate the comments of this post with two lists:

1. Loved things from Ann Arbor’s ‘better’ past that are gone.
2. Loved things from Ann Arbor’s embattled present that are still here.

And maybe from there, as we start this blog we hope will make us more invested in the place where we live, we can start to get a sense of what we have here to work with.