(Launched from the Totter to Traverse City)
Longtime Ann Arbor resident Metta Lansdale was recently hired as director of the Traverse Area District Library in Traverse City. Her first day on the job is Nov. 2. I talked to her on the [...]
(Launched from the Totter to Traverse City)
Longtime Ann Arbor resident Metta Lansdale was recently hired as director of the Traverse Area District Library in Traverse City. Her first day on the job is Nov. 2. I talked to her on the [...]
(Job Creation, Argo Dam, Movies, Fighting Crime)
In recent coverage of the Park Advisory Commission, The Ann Arbor Chronicle reported that Scott Rosencrans had just been elected chair by his colleagues on that body.
So despite the fact that he did not prevail [...]
(Are You Done with That Section?)
Last Thursday, 23 July 2009, The Ann Arbor News published its final edition after nearly 175 years in business. I spent part of that morning talking on the teeter totter with Brian Tolle about what people [...]
(Art of Peace and Nonviolence: A Totter)
During public commentary at a recent city council meeting, Alan Haber (a co-founder of the Students for a Democratic Society) suggested that the city-owned parcel on Ann Arbor's downtown "library lot" be dedicated to a use [...]
(See-Saw Salve)
I care what things are called. Therefore I do not take lightly the headline written for this introduction to the most recent Teeter Talk--with Caryn Simon. I do not prefer the term "see-saw." In fact I rather dislike it.
It's a' [...]
(Tenor Totter)
Of the possible opera singers who could appear on the totter, I figure it's always best to go with the kind that alliterates with the venue: a tenor. But if I ever had occasion to invite a soprano to ride, I' [...]
(A Walk to the River)
There's been an unintended two-month hiatus in tottering. Talking on the totter resumed last week with Brenda Bentley.
I met Brenda around this time of year standing on the Broadway Bridge--the one over the Huron River, not [...]
(Ecology Center Canvasser)
How does someone like Ariane Carr come to be a guest on my backyard teeter totter?
I live in a neighborhood that is frequently targeted by canvassers for various causes. In my youth, I knocked on doors selling subscriptions to [...]
(Annie Get Your Gun Redux)
A couple of weeks ago, I pointed readers to connections of the totter to the recent Burns Park Players production of Annie Get Your Gun. I missed one of those connections that was fairly dramatic. Apparently, if you [...]
(Traffic Totter)
I first met Zak Branigan outside the UPS store at Westgate shopping center, when I was dropping off a load in the course of my bicycle delivery duties. He'd recognized me by the sign on my bicycle trailer for' [...]
(Annie Get Your Totter)
The Burns Park Players production of "Annie Get Your Gun" over the last two weekends provided a couple of connections to the teeter totter, some more direct than others.
First off was Tom Bourque's portrayal of the' [...]
(Taylor on the Totter)
Christopher Taylor, one of two Ann Arbor city council representatives for Ward 3, rode the totter a couple of weeks ago. His conversation is ready to read.
I would highlight the discussion of city-university relations as a topic of broader [...]
(Telephone Totter)
[link to YouTube video] On Tuesday of this week, the totter returned to action after a long period of inactivity. We reprised a theme with some previous history on the totter: real-time parking data. This time around, the live-data [...]
9 December 2008
Since helping Mary Morgan launch The Ann Arbor Chronicle in early September of this year, the ups and downs of the teeter tottering board have slowed their pace. But tottering has continued and the intent is that it [...]
20 November 2008
Many readers of Teeter Talk will have surely seen Yourist Pottery Gallery's sign from the Plymouth Road side as they've headed into or out of Ann Arbor across Broadway Bridge. A smaller number will have seen the signage [...]
16 November 2008
Fresh off organizing a Halloween-themed alley cat bicycle race (Night of the Living Tread III), alum of the Totter, Jimmy Raggett, sent along an announcement of another local alley-cat style race [...]
13 November 2008
Regular readers of this website seem to be exactly that: readers as opposed to visitors looking to do something besides spending some time reading. I figure those readers spend little time watching television, which is a shame, because there's so much [...]
9 November 2008
With the departure of Stephen Kunselman, Joan Lowenstein, and Chris Easthope from Ann Arbor's city council, the ranks of totter alums on that body were halved. Remaining are Leigh Greden, John Hieftje, and [...]
31 October 2008
There's an Open Totter policy for Teeter Talk, which means that I'll pretty much totter with anyone who's willing. When political candidates totter during an election, I try to make sure that there's equal opportunity for tottering all around.
Having [...]
30 October 2008
Back in the early days of Teeter Talk, I did a "virtual totter ride" with a guy out in California named Scott Schnaars. We conducted the Talk via Yahoo! chat, because that's the company he worked for at the time. Now [...]
17 October 2008
If Dawn Lovejoy's Talk was sponsored by the letter "Y", then the Talk with Neal Kelley and Jameson Tamblyn was sponsored ... also by the letter "Y". Neal and Jameson are both seniors at Huron High School in [...]
14 October 2008
If Elizabeth Parkinson's Talk was sponsored by the letter "Q," then it's fair to say that Dawn Lovejoy's Talk was sponsored by the letter "Y". Read her Talk for more insight into that, plus get a possible answer to the [...]
13 October 2008
As a preview to the next Talk, (which is not being published today) I offer a random connection made in the last month to a previous Talk. This connection was made at the Priority Health cycling race held in [...]
11 October 2008
As reported in the Ann Arbor Chronicle, last week a dozen distinguished alumni from the University of Michigan Department of Economics gathered for a panel discussion to discuss the current financial crisis. What was crucialy missing [...]
8 October 2008
Conan Smith tottered with me the day after Christmas in 2005 and at the time he was the County Board of Commissioners' representative to the Washtenaw Development Council, which was then merging with SPARK, another economic development entity. Because I [...]
18 September 2008
I met Carsten Hohnke for the first time back in the spring when he was walking the street collecting signatures so that he could appear on the ballot for the Ward 5 city council primary election. You don't get to [...]
8 September 2008
Publication of new Talks will resume shortly. I needed a short respite to launch The Ann Arbor Chronicle. That's an ambitious project: local news, not just about teeter totters, brought to you in an online format on a daily basis. [...]
2 September 2008
The teeter totter that I call Totter Classic turns 4 today. Happy Birthday to you, Totter Classic. When you were first born, you thought it was just going to be an occasional ride by Mary and me. But a little [...]
29 August 2008
It's been a quiet week on the teeter totter in my backyard. So a visit from Michelle Obama was just what I needed. But I didn't get a visit from Michelle Obama. Totter alums Nyima and Josh Funk did, though. Holy [...]
25 August 2008
If any Teeter Talk reader is not sick to death of reading about my potatoes, then they haven't been reading close enough, because I've been writing and talking about them almost non-stop. Mercifully, this is [...]
19 August 2008
I'm really tickled with the way this video about Teeter Talk turned out, which was shot and edited by Jo Mathis of the Ann Arbor News. I also really like that still photo shot by Leisa Thompson.
One bit of [...]
18 August 2008
One of the themes of Stewart Nelson's Talk was that 'everything is connected'. How's this for connected: Stew's father worked in the Argus Building making bomb sights during World War II. The following day, I tottered with Charity [...]
17 August 2008
Recruitment of teeter totter riders is an ongoing challenge. It would be even more difficult if I listed out the next 100 people I'd like to ride with and set about coaxing the listees onto [...]
16 August 2008
I planted a little stand of corn in front of my house, more as a symbolic effort than anything else.
But I was still hoping for a couple of nice ears at harvest time.
After her totter ride as she was [...]
13 August 2008
Readers who appreciated the details of the Talk with Alpha Omega Newberry IV will remember that he traveled from Memphis to Ann Arbor with my brother, Kelly, who lives in Memphis. And all the way from Memphis comes this scan from [...]
12 August 2008
Two items to report, unrelated to each other, and vaguely related to the totter. Yesterday I dug up 54 lbs potatoes from my Project Grow plot bringing the season total to 84 lbs. Origins of that enterprise can be traced [...]
8 August 2008
There's thrift stores and then there's thrift stores. What makes the St. Vincent de Paul Store, next to the Broadway Bridge, a little different from many others is that directly helping those in need is a part of [...]
7 August 2008 (later)
Who's Mitch Garner? He was mentioned by Tom Bourque when Tom tottered a couple of years ago. Mitch has made the trip from Ann Arbor to Beijing, and is keeping a blog about his experiences there [...]
7 August 2008
In a departure from the usual practice of not tottering-and-telling until a Talk has been published, I'd like to report that Totter 2.0 was on location out in front of the St. Vincent de Paul
Store on Broadway St. yesterday.
[...]
4 August 2008
A fact that I hope is not lost to history is that Bruce Springsteen is one of our leading advocates of mass transit. Indeed, if Tennessee Williams' streetcar named Desire were less famous, then surely Springsteen's tram, Sly Gus, would not [...]
31 July 2008
Here's a shot I took on the way to this week's on-location teeter totter ride. Easy Street has
been discussed before on the totter--in connection with its proposed sidewalks, which are visible here [...]
30 July 2008
Symptoms included gnats in our house and a vaguely unpleasant odor that I eventually determined came from my oversized Chrome courier bag, which I use mostly to stow and haul gear for on-location totter [...]
29 July 2008
In August's Ann Arbor Observer, there's an analysis of why movie production companies are choosing Michigan as a location to shoot their films. This analysis leaned heavily on the speculative theory that it is connected to [...]
28 July 2008
For readers who have ever given this website a searching glance, I apologize. Up to now, the site-internal search tool had been restricted to just the Talks--that is, the conversations on the teeter totter. [...]
25 July 2008
Out at my Project Grow gardening plot, I set out potato plants of different kinds at different times this spring. Over the last week or so, the first of the plants had begun to wilt [...]
24 July 2008
When strangers knock on my door (soliciting donations, collecting signatures, selling something, etc.) I almost always return their pitch with a pitch of my own: Would you like to go on a [...]
23 July 2008
A couple of new ways to get an overview of who's talked on the totter:
1. complete set of tottering portraits
2. a special subset of tottering portraits
22 July 2008
Jeff Gaynor is an ambassador of bikes, buses, good will and good humor. An excerpt from his Talk:
And my girlfriend said, Jeff, do what he says, he's got a gun.
Read Jeff Gaynor's Talk in its entirety.
[...]
21 July 2008
Ann Arbor's City Council is considering an ordinance tonight that would make it illegal for retailers grossing more than $1,000,000 in sales to provide plastic bags to their customers at the point of sale.
Among [...]
16 July 2008
On Tuesday morning I was loading Totter 2.0 onto the bicycle trailer. There was not adequate clearance between the trailer and our car, so I attempted the following maneuver: whilst holding the main span of Totter 2.0, I reached [...]
15 July 2008
One thing I've tried to do over the course of what are now over 150 teeter totter rides is allow the people I ride with to have an impact on my own life. So readers who enjoyed Linda Diane Feldt's Talk might [...]
14 July 2008
Across the road from the Dexter A&W (coney dogs, yum) and from Mill Creek Sporting Goods (night-crawers, yum) there was--until a couple of weeks ago--an unpleasant body of water filled in with silt and overgrown with cattails, which served as Samuel Dexter's [...]
8 July 2008
There's a house for sale on my street. So when Colleen Zimmerman visited my backyard, and revealed right there on the totter that she and her husband were in the market for a house to buy in Ann [...]
4 July 2008
Recently when I tottered with Gary Salton, we talked a bit about the web cam he has trained on the U of M Diag at the intersection of North University Ave. and State St. Gary [...]
1 July 2008
The 4th of July parade in downtown Ann Arbor will include Totter 2.0 hauled by bicycle trailer. I've reviewed the Flag Code for proper flag protocol, but teeter totters are not explicitly mentioned. So I will rely mostly [...]
26 June 2008
Soon after her totter ride, Kate Bosher followed up by sending along a description of teeter tottering depicted on an ancient Greek vase from a 1938 issue of the American Journal of Archaeology. She's now managed to track [...]
25 June 2008
The chicken ordinance passed by Ann Arbor City Council requires a 40-foot setback from dwellings and a 10-foot setback from property lines, as well as written permission from adjoining property owners. Based on the eyeball standard, I'd been working from [...]
23 June 2008
Totter 2.0 was made available to the participants of Ann Arbor Startup Weekend. Most people had a good time on the totter. Some people had too good a time on the totter. I didn't spend any [...]
19 June 2008
When Linda Diane Feldt agreed to come over to the backyard and help identify useful weeds, I was thrilled to have an excuse to leave the backyard in its then unkempt condition. It's not like I [...]
17 June 2008
A few Teeter Talk readers felt some clarification was warranted of a conversational thread in a recent Talk . During her Talk, Julia Lipman and I wondered how exactly a University of Michigan faculty housing database worked, which [...]
13 June 2008
Next weekend (20-22 June) a bunch of people with no preset agenda, many of whom don't even know each other, will gather in some temporary space provided by McKinley, where they'll practically LIVE for the better part [...]
12 June 2008
GoogleMaps has rolled out Street View functionality for the Ann Arbor area. My house, the home of the totter is not hard to identify, even though the addresses given for Mulholland are inaccurate. Addresses for Mulholland Ave. [...]
11 June 2008
The photograph from yesterday with the giant pink arrow drawn in was actually saved from a web cam owned by Professional Communications, Inc. They have some sweet space in the second story of Nickels Arcade overlooking [...]
10 June 2008
Think of this image as a preview of the next Talk in the transcription queue. Ann Arborites who know their city should be able to identify this general location without too much mental strain.
Apologies, though, [...]
9 June 2008
Back when Russ Collins, Director of the Michigan Theater, took his turn on the totter last year, he mentioned having seen a film at the Sundance Film Festival that he especially like called Son of Rambow.
Feel like you've read this [...]
6 June 2008
Dave Hall, Race Coordinator for the Huron River Canoe Challenge, reports that alum of the teeter totter, Mark Bialek, will be one of the racers at this event. So mark your calendar:
Huron River Canoe Challenge
Sat, June [...]
4 June 2008
Back when Russ Collins, Director of the Michigan Theater, took his turn on the totter last year, he mentioned having seen a film at the Sundance Film Festival that he especially like called Son of Rambow. There's today and [...]
2 June 2008
Last week was a real tottering treat for me, because I got a chance to go up onto a downtown Ann Arbor rooftop and teeter with
Dan Jacobs of A3C Collaborative Architecture.
The photo included here was taken from [...]
31 May 2008
The other day I was in the downtown location of the Ann Arbor District Library chatting with Tim Grimes, and he mentioned a circulating collection I was previously unaware of: framed art prints. That's right, you can check [...]
30 May 2008
In a bit of disappointing news, Midwest Rabbit Rescue and Re-home did not win the million-dollar makeover from Zootoo, which Debbie T. talked about on the totter. So the bunnies could use a little extra boost [...]
28 May 2008
The next Talk in the transcription queue offered this view from my end of the totter.
This is the just the corner of the image, but when I first opened up the picture on my computer, at full resolution, just this [...]
26 May 2008
Next weekend, Ann Arbor's own Jeremy Lopatin, is heading to the World Tea Expo in Las Vegas as an invited speaker on a panel addressing social responsibility in the tea industry. He'll be talking about how he and his wife, Aubrey, founders [...]
23 May 2008
To begin, apologies are in order to Chris Easthope, whose support of Ann Arbor's chicken ordinances I previously mis-characterized as contingent on the neighbor-approval ammendment. I was able to clarify for myself what his views [...]
22 May 2008
[YouTube Video]
The video embedded here lasts less than two minutes. The good part starts about 1:20 into the montage. If you're puzzled about what the good part is, think about what website you're reading right now. It [...]
20 May 2008
When I meet new people, sometimes their response to the revelation that I publish something remotely blog-like is roughly: "You're not one of those Ann Arbor is Overrated people, are you?" And of [...]
19 May 2008
Andrew Sell is an artist. I invited him to the totter to talk about his art and the Warehaüse show that he helped organize. For that show, he and a group of 15 other artists built [...]
16 May 2008
Last Saturday at the University of Michigan Union ballroom a group of Northwestern University students under Kate Bosher's co-direction performed Aristophones' The Assemblywomen. The performance was presented as part of the Classics and Feminism conference.
Although the [...]
15 May 2008
Trevor Staples knocked on my door a couple of nights ago to give me some Ann Arbor Skatepark stickers. So I scanned one in and stuck it right here on Teeter Talk.
The occasion for [...]
14 May 2008
When a teeter tottering enthusiast heads off to a juggling festival with a teeter totter, it's natural to expect the talk on the totter to be dominated by juggling themes. I was pleasantly surprised to find that other timely topics [...]
13 May 2008
I tottered with multiple people at the 2008 Ann Arbor Juggling Arts Festival. The second of these was Dave Lewis. If you watched every frame of the embedded video in the 4 May 2008 entry below, he's [...]
12 May 2008
[Video of HD plus Bruce Fields passing clubs.]
Saturday before last at the Ann Arbor Juggling Festival, Bruce Fields introduced me to the proper way to pass clubs--something I had never learned before.
The video embedded here was [...]
10 May 2008
In a review of the movie Speed Racer for the Newhouse News Service, Stephen Whitty writes:
That doesn't mean the movie has to give Speed a speed problem, or make Trixie turn tricks. But it has to--as the [...]
9 May 2008
The two 'house ads', which appeared recently in the left sidebar of Teeter Talk, mark the start of a local advertising program for Teeter Talk. I think it's an interesting approach to advertising online. It blends traditional display ads with [...]
5 May 2008
The image depicting shennanigans atop Barton Dam was inadvertently omitted from the feed. I thought it was worth including ... because there was a lot of effort involved. My hands are full of splinters, for heaven's sake.
4 May 2008
Here's footage from Ann Arbor Juggling Arts Festival on 3 May 2008 at Wide World Sport Center, where Totter 2.0 made an appearance: [link to YouTube vid]
Steve Glauberman brought up [...]
2 May 2008
Last Tuesday, I met Debra Power out at Barton Dam for a teeter totter ride. We decided to lug the teeter totter to the top of the dam, with the idea that we could create a [...]
23 April 2008
Some regular readers may have been led to believe by the 21 April posting that they would eventually be treated to an image of ArborUpdate commenter Parking Structure Dude! wearing a bunny suit for Teeter Talk. My intent was, uhh, to mislead, [...]
21 April 2008
A few months back, Parking Structure Dude! provided a public service in a comment left on ArborUpdate, which alerted the readership of that blog to the possibility of free bunny poop in Plymouth.
While most people just quietly added 'bunny [...]
17 April 2008
Last weeks's totter ride with Stephen Smith reprised the sidewalk tottering theme first introduced during
John Roos's ride.
Common to both sidewalk rides was that totter alum,
Jimmy Raggett, happened to be riding past on his bicycle. For this most [...]
15 April 2008
A couple of weeks ago there was an opening at the Washington Street Gallery, which recently moved from one Ed Shaffran property (on Liberty Street) to another Shaffran property (on Main Street). At that opening, I ran into an alum [...]
14 April 2008
In late September 2007 the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority (DDA) mounted parking counter signs on its parking structures, which indicate the number of open spaces. On 1 April 2008, the DDA augmented the [...]
10 April 2008
There are (at least) two areas in which Ypsilanti can claim bragging rights over Ann Arbor. One is snow removal. Another is the 4th of July Parade. A lot of Ann Arborites head out of town [...]
8 April 2008
At last night's Ann Arbor City Council meeting, the City's Transportation Program Manager, Eli Cooper, gave a quick presentation on a national 2010 Active Transportation Campaign. Rails to Trails has challenged 40 different communities to advocate at the federal [...]
7 April 2008
The teeter totter is only 12 feet long. That's shorter than the telephone pole in the image below. But the informational reach of Teeter Talk is longer than that telephone pole. One way it's made longer is through [...]
6 April 2008
Nancy Shore was working with SOS Community Services back when she rode the totter. Now she's directing the getDowntown program, and she's helping to spread desktop teeter totters to the masses ... [...]
5 April 2008
I attended the meeting on the Skatepark at Abbot Elementary last week, jointly hosted by the City of Ann Arbor (Jeff Dehring) and the Skatepark Action Committee (Trevor Staples and Dug Song). The aerial photo used as a visual [...]
3 April 2008
Conditions surrounding West Park Bandshell last week were swamp-like--probably due to the onset of the spring melt after a record-setting year for snowfall in Ann Arbor. The surrounding muck did not prevent Kate Bosher from taking [...]
1 April 2008
Last Monday, on the occasion of his formal induction into the selective set of Distinguished University Professors at the University of Michigan, Geoff Eley delivered a lecture.
Professor Eley organized his lecture around two questions:
1. [...]
