Slow day for post titles, although I wanted to acknowledge that the funniest thing Bill Murray's ever done was that "Il Retorno di Hercules" sketch when he came back to host Saturday Night Live in the 80s.

 Sometimes I really, really can't stand this town. I'm pretty sure I always had a good time at Leopold Brothers (with a couple of niggling exceptions), and its departure will be a gaping loss for Ann Arbor. Along with the decent beer, excellent food, and awesome jukebox, owner Todd Leopold, with his stalwart defense of sustainable development and genuine environmentalism --that went beyond a purely cosmetic version for well-to-do "bourgeois bohemians," i.e. "The Ann Arbor Greenway"--was an excellent example of the small-businessman/public citizen, the kind of person of which this town and country need a lot more. His frequent and incisive criticisms of city and state policies on Ann Arbor Is Overrated and Arbor Update demonstrated how hollow notions of progressivism really are in Ann Arbor, as some of the town's more comfortable and complacent commenters seemed to have taken one lesson away from their semi-legendary pasts in "The Sixties" (TM): Never, ever, criticize anything. He was also a Go!Team fan, which is awesome.

Eric Alterman has a great take on an old foolishness. For the record, I'm proud to be one myself.

In related news, Charlie Pierce really needs his own blog. It's rare you can get that kind of polemicism mixed with dead-on analysis, and now's a better time for it than ever.