January 2006. [Photo] Free Stuff [more] This last weekend was perfect for messing around with bikes and cameras. After what feels like months of overcast skies the sun appeared and brought on total snap-happyness, racing around taking dumb shots of everything from litter bins to street lamps. But heck - I wasn't the only one :-) Belle Isle Shelter ps. the town's wrecking ball chasers might want to check the concrete silos by Chene Park. Coming down today.         January 2006. [Photo/News] Second & Amsterdam          The blast of mild weather through the Christmas-New Year period has made this one long biking expedition. Along the Ann Arbor Trail, down to Trenton, up past the Shores and lots of time around the downtown/eastside area. It's striking how much condo development is hitting downtown and midtown and how much this contrasts with the immediately abutting areas. However not all the development is going at the same pace. The elegance of the exposed stairwell and floor of the building at the corner of 2nd & Amsterdam is striking. Stripped of weatherproofing and window boards a few months ago, hopefully the interior is now awaiting the rebuild stage. Second & Amsterdam                  January 2006. [Photo] Something old Something New Fair's fair. By no means all of Detroit's interesting buildings are venerable ruins. I've started taking a slightly different route into work trying to get a few more miles of road time. Everyday I now pass the Coleman A Young community center. A pretty darned cool place! color Coleman A Young Community Center Eastside, between Mac and Jefferson around about Chene. And to give credit I did start to look more cloesely after reading the metro times' review of Sharoff & Zbaren's book.         February 2006. [News] Wealth Graffiti in a back alley near Eastern Market Graffiti has been used as the excuse to remove some fine structures in downtown deemed eye-sores in the run-up to SB-XL. I'm wondering whether a wholsale damning of it is an injustice though. Graffiti and tagging seem to go back beyond written history into a period where they shared an origin with the maker's mark. Early cuneiform glyphs developed from pictograms impressed in clay representing the writer and/or their trade. For millennia before this in unwritten pre-history individuals were leaving their marks (tag) on caves, trees, anywhere they could post the message "I was here". I was here almost certainly originated before "We are Brooks Bros, Purveyors of Sports Coats & Blazers". But by Roman times the now socially more acceptable vendor's signage and back alley graffiti had long-since diverged. And yet in the ruins of Pompeii the real words we hear from the streets are those satirical, sexual or simple "I was here" messages scrawled on walls [read some]. The content of graffiti seems to have changed remarkably little over millennia. I have a picture taken in the high prudery of Victorian England. It shows a misty glen. But carved onto a rock in the foreground can be clearly seen "Neville G was here 1872". And so it continues today. There is probably good graffiti and bad graffiti, as in any art or writing. Equally there is harmful and mostly harmless graffiti. I can't really agree with daubing unwelcome tag in high visibility places or with the vandalization of private property, but neither can I completely ignore the continuation of a long history, particularly when it is done well. The last time I was in London I found places under the bridges by the river that had been set aside for skateboarding and actively encouraged Graffiti. It may seem insultingly tame but it was well received and is similar to some of what we have in MexicanTown. So whilst I'm not going to turn this blog into a graffiti gallery I'll post the occasional shot. [Feedback on this topic welcome

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More shots here

We almost lost another building this morning (thankfully there were no injuries). DetroitYes will probably have more background. The building was one of the currently vacant blocks in the Cass Park area (I make that 5 fires around CP in the last few weeks). The Detroit Fire Department were on the scene in force with 11 units including 4 ladders and managed to save the building, although with its roof gone it may be only a matter of time before the wreckers working the corner of Woodward & Henry move over here.

We now return you to your scheduled hugs and puppies blog.

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The tents are going up, the roads are closing down and there are even shops downtown where you can buy stuff you don't need, now that's civilization. Yup, the Superbowl show is hitting town big time. With two weeks to go there is only one slight hitch. Last year's winter blast aka the Superbowl practice was themed around snow, snow and, hey, snow. This year it's barely hitting freezing overnight. The river, normally a frozen white corridor between Windsor & Detroit in January, has hardly even shards of floating ice. Cylcing around this morning I passed more cyclists than I've seen since the summer, ancient one gear beaters on the eastside, a couple passed twice going up and down Mt Elliot and the real proof that it's warm out - a big bunch of the lycra wearing crowd cycling up Jefferson. All of which means. Well, probably not a whole lot. But I hope the plans are flexible because with sunshine and a warm breeze, it'll be tough finding last minute ice cream vendors in Michigan at this time of year.

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One of the region's notable bloggers has pointed out that I need to fix the feedback system so people [possibly those wearing lycra] can yell back. This week, honest!

                Hey ... Spring is here already!

I once had a job at a great little university research center. A really neat place full of toys and gadgets. One day we met some guys from a really large software firm, let's call them Micro$oftware. This firm dug our technologies and decided to invest big. This was a huge coup. We organized a launch and invited all the local, national and specialist press. This was all handled by press officers of Micro$oftware and the university. The Secretary of State for Education attended the launch and gave a high profile policy speech video-conference’d to more press in London. Did a single word make any of the local press? Take a guess. In this city that largely supported the University no one heard anything. A few months later I was on an early commuter train. This train dropped a bunch of passengers off at a station that it turned out no-one had opened. We were all stuck inside until a few of us climbed a spiked fence to get out. I sent a short note and some photos to the local press. They ran both photos and made this into a two column story with interviews. Jeez, there has to be a lesson in this!

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Cass Park, Robert Burns, late 2005