“Frankly, your continued attempt to cast yourself as the victim, your lack of forthrightness, your lack of contriteness and your lack of humility only serve to affirm that you have not learned your lesson,” Groner told Kilpatrick. “Clearly, rehabilitation has failed. You have not adjusted well under probation. Probation is no longer an option. This court must now sentence you in a manner that assures that justice will be served. The terms of your earlier probation no longer apply. That ship has sailed. That plea deal was negotiated by your attorneys and the prosecutor. I only approved what I thought was a lenient sentence because everyone, not only your lawyers and the prosecutors, but also the City of Detroit, urged this court to accept the deal so the city could move on. The city wants to move on. You want to move on. So today we will move on.”

555 Gallery moved the wall from the abandoned Packard plant to their gallery.

There’s a really wonderful story by Mark Stryker in the Detroit Freep today about a new piece of Banksy graffiti art posted on a wall of the old Packard plant in Detroit. The tag shows a stenciled little boy with a can of paint, surrounded by the decades of debris. “I remember when all this was trees,” he says.

A photo of the wall is posted on Banksy’s web site, and Flickr photog Detroit Derek also recorded a new Banksy rat on a wall in Detroit.

Last week, after members of Detroit’s 555 Gallery became aware of the Banksy tag, they got a Bobcat forklift and MOVED THE ENTIRE WALL seven miles to their facilities near the Ambassador Bridge — to keep it from being ruined, they said. Of course, that was kind of the point, but let it not be said that entrepreneurialism is dead in Detroit.

The video below shows 555 Gallery founder Carl Goines discussing the effort.

Favorite quote from the Freep story: “This may be unprecedented, because in most other cities, you wouldn’t be able to take a wall home,” said Luis Croquer, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, which specializes in cutting-edge art. Well, yes. That is a succint summation of the problem.

Packard plant ruin links: There are many, many photos of the abandoned Packard plant, on Flickr and elsewhere. Here are a few:

• Free Press photo gallery
• Photographer John Penrice photo gallery
• Thousands of Flickr images
• If you look at the “Earth” view on Google maps, you can see fascinating 3D imagery of the ruins. Much detail has been obscured, but you can make out graffiti that says “Epic Decay?” on one wall.

Christopher Barger on the outlook for the Tigers from Laurie Mayers on Vimeo.

The Washington Nationals and the Detroit Tigers start their baseball seasons today, the Nationals at home against the Phillies and the Tigers in Kansas City. I am sorry not to be at either stadium on Opening Day, but will definitely catch Pudge Rodriguez in his current home later this season. The Tigers have upset some fans by trading star and all-around nice guy center fielder Curtis Granderson to the Yankees and by paying $8 million for evil aging Yankee/former Red Sox Johnny Damon. In any case, I saw social media evangelist Christopher Barger in Detroit last week (disclosure: client) and asked him about the coming season. (This is my first video; I’ll do better next time with the edits and the unsteady cam.)

To me. it seems, the difficulty is: how do you shrink the geographic boundaries enough so that the city can provide adequate police, fire and city services to its core neighborhoods? What happens to the owner of the one or two last occupied houses left on the east Detroit blocks shown below? Detroit already has 10,000 homes scheduled for demolition.

I applaud Mayor Bing for trying to right-size city services and expectations. But it will surely be an arduous process that will take decades.

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Former mayors Marion Barry, top, and Kwame Kilpatrick, are under investigation for corruption

The view from Connecticut Avenue and L Sts, NW, early this afternoon

I did make it out of Baltimore, precisely on time, Monday morning, even though BWI had only one runway open. I arrived in Detroit at noon, 24 hours before the first significant snow of the year in southeast Michigan. Metro Detroit received 8 to 10 inches of snow overnight, so lots of schools got their first snow day. Here are some things that happened in the ensuing anarchy:

• Grocery stores remained stocked with foodstuffs ranging from apple juice to zucchini
• Wayne County had 100 snowplows salting and plowing the roads, so that all main highways and roads were dry by midday
• City buses kept running (at least to the extent that they usually run)
• The People Mover light rail system kept running. Well, it didn’t really have far to go, and it doesn’t really move that many people, but nevertheless …

Alas, my Wednesday afternoon flight to Baltimore was canceled, so I had to buy more clothes and toothpaste.

In the meantime, this just in from a desperate shopper in the mean streets of the District: “It’s grim here. Safeway is shut down. Sign on door says no milk. Police tape around entrance. Roads impassable. Garbage piling up along street…”

The Ypsilanti water tower

The famous Ypsilanti water tower embodies the spirit of the city: stand-up citizenship, hard work, and circumscribed living. But, you might wonder, how does it compare to the Washington Monument?

Deacon Tim Sullivan writes, “You cannot imagine until you see with your own eyes the creative footwear the homeless fashion in an attempt to keep frostbite from taking their toes. Detroit has the highest incidence of gangrene due to frostbite in the United States, and some of our guests downtown have actually lost their toes.” If you have decent boots that will help, please consider dropping them off at the Gathering Space in the church. (Go in the main door and turn right. The Gathering Space is the seating area behind the sanctuary.) The boots are being collected in the lefthand corner of the Gathering Space. If you’d like more information, email me [laurie (at) thedistrictandthed (dot) com] and I can give you Tim’s phone number. In the meantime, here’s a map to the church:

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Please don't ask her if she comes with the car

The public days of the Detroit auto show extravaganza (formally named the North American International Auto Show) are well underway. More than a million people are expected to pour through the doors of Detroit’s Cobo Hall and ogle and touch the cars and trucks that are still the lifeblood of the city and the state.

Last week’s crush of press preview days are over, the executives have gone back into hibernation in their corner offices, and countless cases of California sparkling wine have been poured into plastic cups and consumed by the tuxedoed masses at the Charity Preview on Friday.

I love the auto show. Yes, the outdoor temperature is frigid and the indoor temperature is saunalike. Yes, by the time you see the whole show, your feet ache and you desperately need a drink, for which you have to brave the afore-mentioned freezing weather and walk several blocks. Yes, you are paying a lot at the Charity Preview for cheap wine and no food. Yes, the spouse is very likely grumpy about the tuxedo and the lack of food.

But it’s our CES, our SXSW. It’s where you can see all the cars you might personally be involved in designing, engineering, building, advertising or promoting, along with all the other cars you would otherwise not get to see without a salesman shadowing you. You can examine the interiors and the wheels and see what the competition is up to. You can think about your next vehicle purchase. At the Charity Preview, you can compile your own worst-dressed list.

This is the first time in a decade I haven’t cruised the press preview days and run into old journalist friends and old flacks. I missed it. Some of my favorite memories from auto shows past are watching Jason Vines do his standup PR shtick, talking to Bob Lutz when he was selling the Cunningham car and not surrounded by an entourage, and enjoying several of Hyundai’s Detroit Rocks parties, where the hacks and flacks of the Exhaust Tones show what they do when they’re not writing about cars.

Anyway, it’s fun. If you live in metro Detroit and still have a job, take a day off and go.

Recent posts and columns about NAIAS I enjoyed reading:

• WSJ Joe White’s review (full disclosure: he’s my spouse) Can You Imagine Driving These? Also, vote on six concept cars: build it or bag it?
• Jalopnik: An auto show model lets you know what she really thinks. She also has her own blog, Do You Come with the Car?, quite entertaining.
• Mitch Albom, the hardest-working man in Detroit with an ego to match, writes that the auto show demonstrates the pluckiness and grit that is Detroit.
• Detroit Fashion Pages’ Worst Dressed List from the Charity Preview. This could have been a much longer list, in my opinion.
• More of my NAIAS photos on Flickr

Fountain at the McNamara Terminal at DTW

Chances are you’ve seen Fuller’s work, in fountains where jets of water appear solid and ropelike. The secret is creating zero-turbulence water streams, called laminars. Some of their most popular fountains are at the Bellagio casino (see YouTube videos) in Las Vegas, which dance to music, and the leaping streams at EPCOT (one of Fuller’s early works, as a Disney Imagineer).

In Michigan, you can see work by WET at the McNamara Terminal at Detroit Metro Airport (see Youtube videos), at Campus Martius and the Compuware headquarters in downtown Detroit, and at the Somerset Collection (don’t call it a mall!) in Troy. I can attest that the fountain at DTW is a calming presence conveniently located near a Starbucks stand, a nice place to stop for a few moments and watch the travelers rushing by. In Washington, WET Design created the fountain at the International Monetary Fund Headquarters, installed in 2005.

WET Design has a highly experiential web site, with photos and videos of their creations. Click on Creations, then navigate either through the map or the timeline. Take a look at the huge Dubai fountains, completed in April 2009, and the Revson Fountain at the Lincoln Center, subject of the New Yorker piece.