Your Couch: Soft, Comfortable, A Fiery Inferno Waiting To Happen!

I got a sore throat today. I really hate it when I get one of those, it feels like someone's shoven a scrapper down your throat and ripped everything to bloody hell!

I got an e-mail yesterday from the people processing my work VISA. The form I need from the Department of State to cross the border is somewhere in Quebec now; package tracking software is pretty cool.

Also, I read an article in the Ann Arbor News this morning that proves that there ARE administrative officials outside UNB that equal or surpass them in idiocy. Essentially, the University of Michigan and the City of Ann Arbor are trying to ban couches from the porches of houses, citing them as a "fire hazard".

I'll give you one good guess as to why this rationale is monumentally stupid...

Done thinking? Ok, let's review a couple of facts about the environments in which these couches are located:

(1) The outdoors is often much wetter, and for much of the school season, cooler than the indoors.

(2) The indoors is drier, warmer and couches located there are within range of many more sources of ignition than ones located outdoors.

Now if they wish to use this reasoning, it then follows that couches of all kinds should be banned from houses everywhere in the city. It really baffles me how nobody calls the bluff of these officials in the newspaper article. Their real reason for wanting couches gone? Probably because the bloody things are as ugly as sin, and that the few people left that are not students in these campus neighbourhoods are grasping at straws trying to salvage the values of their properties.

While I feel for them, it doesn't justify using a faux arguement to mask their true intentions. A little honesty by the non-student residents would truely be refreshing, and it might expedite a compromise to resolve this dispute in Ann Arbor. The students are now the majority in these areas, and their voices must not be silenced in matters of public discourse.