y p s i ~ d i x i t
Motto: "You must realize that until you have thrown off your bourgeois shackles and enjoyed a leisurely smoke while letting a Giant African Snail determine your cadence, you have not begun to demonstrate what has been lost to expertization." --L.F.

Who: Laura
Where: Ypsilanti, MI
What: Ypsi, Iraq, windfarm dumping
When: Aug. 7, 1967
Whence: Mt. Clemens, MI
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2004-11-16-12:17 a.m.: URBEX: ANN ARBOR'S ONLY (?) BAUHAUS HOUSE: Ypsidixit and her adventurous friend gingerly revisited this enigmatic poured-concrete house on Runway Blvd. off Concourse Dr. off State opposite the AA airport, just south of Ellsworth. We'd been here before, and explored the whole place with no problem. This time, for no apparent reason, we felt we weren't alone, and curtailed our exploration to the first floor. As previously noted, Y.'s friend is the down-to-earth type, not given to flights of fancy. Yet both of us agreed that there was an unfriendly air to the place, and felt discretion the better part of whatever. Photo gallery in "comments."

6 comments--add a comment

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2004-11-14-11:07 p.m.: YPSI PSYCH HOSPITAL: Acting on a tip from a kind reader that the psych hospital will soon be torn down by new owners Toyota, Ypsidixit and her adventurous friend crept onto the property today to investigate it. It is a monumental and amazing place. We saw quite a bit of it before being nabbed by a security guy who politely enough told us to scram. We scrammed. Photo gallery in "comments."

10 comments--add a comment

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2004-11-13-6:17 p.m.: ART OF THE LEGA: Today I checked out the big U-M Museum of Art exhibit on Art of the Lega, a Congolese people. It was well-done. The art was curious. It was created solely for use in initiation ceremonies in the intricate social hierarchy of the Lega. There are 5 social levels one may attain, and the artworks are brought out only during a ceremony marking a person's passage from one level to the next. Only the top 2 levels were allowed to possess anthropomorphic art. The final test for passage into the highest level is this: the applicant is given a huge array of artworks to contemplate and look at. That's it. He looks at all the pieces. The last part of the exhibit was themed to this final test and offered 13 free-standing cases, dramatically lit in a darkened room, containing beautiful sculptures, the whole resembling a labyrinth of art. I sat on a nearby bench and watched people wend through the labyrinth and contemplate the pieces.

Afterwards I stopped off at White Raven and then decided to find out if Michigan Ave down to Value World is bikeable. It is. There's a southside sidewalk all the way down to Ecorse, where a somewhat hazardous crossing must be made. The sidewalk resumes on the north side and goes over the bridge, then peters out. Here I crossed over to the car dealership and just biked in the gutter down to Value World. Not ideal, but doable.

At Value World, I found a nice green polar parka--just what I had hoped to find--with which to tough out the winter by emulating my heroes in my polar exploration books. Also like-new black jeans, a warm zip-up black polar fleece vest, and a green polar fleece hat. All for a meagre $14.

On the way home in my new parka I reflected how all the northern ice that so bedeviled Cook, Peary, Greely, et al, all the ice heaving and crashing in the pages of the books on my shelf, the ice that crushed 19th-century wooden ships like peanuts, is gone. According to the recent Arctic Ice report, global warming has melted much of it and rendered the bygone heroic voyages, sea-ice sledging, and ice-floe dodging simply a quaint figment of the past, never to be reproduced.

3 comments--add a comment

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2004-11-12-10:35 p.m.: IN 1919, YPSILANTI LED THE NATION IN AIRBORNE COWS. Well, almost.

"AIRPLANE WRECKED IN ATTEMPTED FLIGHT WITH SUPPOSED CALF. "Monday the Holstein-Fresian association of this county held their first annual picnic at Recreation Park....a Curtis plane was on the field...The start was made and the crowd hollered "There goes the calf..."

Period newspaper clipping with entire story in "comments."

6 comments--add a comment

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2004-11-12-6:57 p.m.: SPYING ON THE INTERNET: YahooBuzzgives a detailed breakdown of what people are searching for on Yahoo and what's gaining and losing, stock-market-wise. Metaspy lets you see current searches for; it refreshes every 15 seconds. Dogpile's SearchSpy does the same, in realtime. "Word bursts" are lists [scroll down] of words that bloggers are using more frequently than usual, indicating topics bloggers are discussing. "News Bursts" are lists of words that are currently most commonly used on news sites. And a list of the world's top 500 most-browsed sites: turns out they're mostly American, Chinese, and Japanese.

0 comments--add a comment

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2004-11-12-10:55 a.m.: WANT TO KNOW THE ZEITGEIST? Want to know the mind of the world? Want to know the questions?

Here is a beautiful and fascinating page: it shows the search terms people are searching for at this moment. The size of the search term shows you how many people area looking for it. Best part: each illustrated term is a link. This is a magical and thought-provoking page; enjoy.

1 comments--add a comment

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2004-11-12-8:30 a.m.: VISTEON IN TROUBLE: Bad news for Ypsi if its local plant closes, as threatened.

EXCERPT: "...Visteon operations that produce chassis components are losing money. As a result, at least seven plants - five in Michigan, two in Indiana - could be sold, The Detroit News reported last month. The Michigan plants, which employ 9,200 workers, are in Sterling Heights, Ypsilanti, Ypsilanti Township, Milan and Monroe."

4 comments--add a comment

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2004-11-11-11:20 p.m.: VETERAN'S DAY: Every day on the Huron River #3 bus ride to work, the bus stops at the VA to onload two or three vets. During the stop, Ypsidixit observes vets in wheelchairs enjoying a smoke on the hospital's front porch, or clustered in pairs or groups, hanging out and talking. The vets that get on get on at 8:30. I glance up to try and guess the war: a grizzled senior: Vietnam? A guy my age: Gulf War I? An old, bent man with a cane: WWII? The vets get on too late to get to a job at 9. So where are they headed? What's their day like? Are they headed to a loving wife, or an empty apartment? What vital objects are in the little plastic bag they carry?

Veteran's Day today was a day like any other, full of bustle and work and noise. Yet Ypsidixit was somewhat sad and quiet, thinking of her dad, a WW II vet who drove a Jeep through the hills of Italy, helped dump canisters of poison gas into the Mediterranean, and fell in love with an Italian lady years before he met my mom.

As an average nondescript person Ypsidixit has no sweeping revelations concerning Veteran's Day. She just thinks back to a Jeep careening through Italian mountains, years before she was born, and wonders without much hope if since then we've learned anything,

6 comments--add a comment

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2004-11-11-12:30 p.m.: MAJOR POLLUTION NEWS STORY reduced to tiny tidbit [scroll down] by the Ann Arbor News: the DEQ has decided not to enforce a stricter cleanup standard for 1, 4 dioxane, the probably carcinogenic contaminant that's been seeping under Ann Arbor from westside Pall Life Sciences for many years now. Why not? The DEQ says it received lots of comments against toughening the standard to 35 parts per billion instead of the current 85 ppb. Um...so what? Doesn't the DEQ know best what to clean up?

You can be sure it wasn't AA residents who protested the stricter cleanup of the pollution plume under their westside homes. So who did? And were you even aware there was, apparently, a public comments period? I don't recall reading that in the News.

0 comments--add a comment

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2004-11-11-12:22 p.m.: BAGHDAD ZOO'S BENGAL TIGER SHOT BY AMERICAN SOLDIER: In my occasional readings of Pravda, I'm struck by how freewheeling their style is. Writers inject personal opinions into news stories, especially those concerning Iraq. Here's the latest example.

EXCERPT: "The "insurgent" in this case was a defenseless Bengal Tiger, locked up in its cage, shot dead by a drunken American soldier. What fun. What a brave soldier.

"In an event similar to that made famous by the great American heroine, Lynndie England, a group of drunken American soldiers entered Baghdad zoo..." Phew.

13 comments--add a comment

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2004-11-11-1:12 a.m.: HISTORY UNDER THE WRECKING BALL: A kind reader sends the alarming news that the Ypsi Psychiatric Hospital is being destroyed:

"My friend just told me that he's been out in the area the last couple weeks doing pre-demolition work on the hospital.� Toyota got the bid and they are tearing it down.

"Did you know about this?� I was under the impression that the old building would be incorporated into the new devolopment.� Was it even announced that Toyota got the deal?�

"...Incidentally, the engineering firm hired to do the work is the same that was in charge of the project in Toledo, where the bridge/crane collapsed."

It was announced that Toyota got the deal--their $9 million bid was overshadowed by a $25 million bid from a housing developer, but Granholm pressured the MI legislature to make them pick Toyota, since it would provide more longterm economic benefit. As a result, the developer filed suit against the state.

Ypsidixit is sad to hear the building's coming down. It was a regular fixture on her southbound rural-route trip to her parents' house. She's pored over urbex photos of the site [the same ones I've previously posted] with fascination

4 comments--add a comment

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2004-11-10-12:59 p.m.: NOW THAT JOHN ASHCROFT HAS RESIGNED, one wonders what his next career move will be. Children's TV show host? Spokesman for "Just for Men" grooming products? Maybe he'll start his own line of clothing.

7 comments--add a comment

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2004-11-10-12:58 p.m.: THE CONTROVERSIAL UNIVERSITY HOUSE will be on this year's Meals on Wheels Home Tour, Sunday, Dec. 5, 12:30-5, in case anyone's interested in seeing where all that cash went. More info: 487-9669.

4 comments--add a comment

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2004-11-10-12:55 p.m.: FREIGHTHOUSE REPRIEVE: The Friends of the Freighthouse and the city have worked out a 2-year plan to repair it.

Ypsidixit hopes the Friends get a better PR person. Many's the time I've gone down to the Farmer's Market and there was a pork roast/chicken broil/other fundraiser going on that I never knew about. They need louder PR if they hope to succeed.

1 comments--add a comment

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