Here’s a small thing you can do to help the homeless if you live in metro Detroit. Take your gently used or new boots for men or women and give them to the Detroit homeless. The PBJ Outreach team from Our Lady of Good Counsel Church in Plymouth is collecting them and distributing them frequently directly to the homeless they see every Saturday morning.

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.

The wine and beer offerings are impressive.

So here’s a happy sequel to the Detroit ruin porn post a few weeks ago: The restored Westin Book Cadillac is a beautiful, beautiful place, a $200-million restoration of the hotel that first opened in 1924 and closed in 1984. The Ferchill Group in Cleveland and the city worked together on its restoration, and it’s been open for just over a year now. Its ROAST restaurant (why all caps?) by celebrity Iron Chef Michael Symon is wonderful on its own, with a lovely interior, tasty menu and extensive wine and beer list. The Detroit Free Press named it 2009 Restaurant of the Year.
Many of the principal plates were less than $25, including the $17 pan-roasted chicken I had, and the salmon Sam had.

For me, though, the best surprise was the beer menu, which had several bottles of Belgian beer from the Drie Fonteinen small family restaurant in tiny Beersel that we loved to visit when we lived in Brussels in the ’90s. I ordered a 750ml bottle of Kriek, which is a cherry lambic. The lambic means it’s naturally fermented with wild yeast that populates the Brussels area. It makes a tangy, tasty brew. Roast also had several Belgian Geuze beers from Drie Fonteinen and the more famous Cantillon brewery, which are even tangier, verging on sour. The young sommelier stopped by and asked if I was enjoying the Kriek. I raved to him and thanked him for putting it on the menu.

Tomorrow's roast beast: Goat? pig?

“Roast beast of the day” was roast suckling pig, about 10 ounces of it. “It’s not very fat,” the waiter told us. “Because, you know, it’s a baby.” I couldn’t help but think of the adorable piglets we saw at the Fieldstone Farm outside of Straford, Ontario, this summer. We did not choose the suckling pig, but saw tomorrow’s roast beast in the next room on the rotisserie spit. Let us not be coy about where our meat comes from, people! We started with the charcuterie plate, then got the pan-roasted chicken with root vegetables and the salmon with capers, both very good. We didn’t have room for dessert, but the Guinness ice cream with chocolate pretzels and caramel sounded great. Next time.

If you get a chance, go visit Roast, and be sure to take a look around at the rest of the hotel. It looks like a rare happy ending for Detroit.

I’m not a professional football fan, but even I can’t miss the speculation about whether Redskins Coach Jim Zorn will have a job next year. And so I asked my colleague and former star kicker Aaron to answer the seemingly simple question: Who has the worst team in the NFL? Here’s his answer:

In a race to the bottom there can be only one winner. A quick glance at the stats reveals some key points. First, the Lions and the Redskins have already played each other this year, and the Lions won. You could say this is easy, the Redskins are the worst, but it’s not that simple.

As a reminder, a win escaped the Lions for all of 2008. Not winning a single game last season could arguably make the Lions one of the worst teams in NFL history. They got a number 1 draft pick and are at the midway point in the season and are hardly any better than last year. (Yes, I know Stafford was hurt for a while, but come on, it’s football, suck it up already.)

Now consider this, the Redskins managed to beat the Rams, Tampa Bay and just this past weekend, the Broncos. The Rams and Tampa Bay are terrible, but the Broncos are a legitimate team in first place in the AFC west. Also consider this: the Redskins have a points ratio of only -31, while the Lions are -121, which puts them as almost the worst in the entire league.

So you might ask yourself, what happened on Sept. 27? I am going to go with the blind squirrel theory. The Lions found a well-needed nut in a 1 score victory. If you watched the game it was clear that neither team was good. If you have watched any of the Lions games since then, your opinion has not been swayed.

So, unfortunately for the Lions, the battle for “the biggest loser” must stay in the D. At least for now. Newly converted Lions fans (if there are any) might say, Detroit is younger and there is some real promise in those young players. But veteran Lions fans should just be left alone to wallow in misery.

-Aaron

Bambi's mom

Rifle hunting season for deer began in Michigan Sunday. It was a warm day, good for hunters, bad for deer. Here are some fun facts, most from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources web site:

• The offices of Detroit automakers were officially closed Monday for the UAW-negotiated holiday euphemistically called Veterans Day.
• There are 2 million deer in Michigan, about 300,000 of them in the Upper Peninsula.
• There are 60,000 car-deer crashes each year in Michigan.
• Bucks shed their antlers every year and grow new ones. Older bucks tend to have bigger racks, but beyond that, it’s all about good nutrition.
• The state of Michigan has been regulating deer hunting since 1859.
• The 520 wolves in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan are estimated to eat 15,000 deer each year. Hunters took about 52,000 deer from the U.P. in 2008. During a moderately severe winter, about 70,000 deer will die.

More:

• Conversation around the buck pole in The Detroit News.
• Flickr member Hard-Rain has wonderful photos of white-tailed bucks.

Raise your hand if you're tired of seeing this picture. Photo by senor miller

The WSJ had a story last weekend about some Detroit urban explorers who pushed a  dump truck from the fourth floor of the 50-year-old ruins of the Detroit Packard plant and made a video out of it. Then the Free Press followed the story, pairing it with an earlier column by Mark W. Smith, that asked: “Are we obsessed with ruin porn?”

NPR’s On the Media had covered the issue last month, quoting Thomas Morton from Vice magazine, who noted that media stories often use photos of Michigan Central Station (6,900 photos on Flickr), which closed in the 1980s, and the Packard plant, which closed in the ’50s (4,300 photos on Flickr), to illustrate Detroit’s current economic troubles:

“It’s disingenuous, it’s like going to the base of Roosevelt Island and taking pictures of the old mental hospital from the ’50s to underscore some point about Obamacare.”

In fact, the folks at Dyspathy and their readers made a drinking game out of Assignment Detroit, Time Magazine’s yearlong project chronicling — what else? — the Detroit Depression. (Rule #2: “For every mention of landmarks demolished or soon to be demolished, drink. If the landmark is the Michigan Central Station, drink a boxcar.”)

Here are some greatest hits in the ruin porn genre:

• Time Magazine: Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline
• Flickr set by DetroitDerek and photographers using the tag detroitdecay
• The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit photo site
• Slate: Exploring Detroit’s Beautiful Ruins
• Jalopnik: The feral factories of Detroit

Please, send your own favorites.