The bright lights of Tulsa might blind you

Is everyone surviving the loss of the Shock?

VOLT

Chevy Volt let out into the cruel world, kind of.

Overwhelming change

I don’t understand this article too well: “Bing’s team finds savings, but change is a challenge.”

For one, the savings he’s describing seems so minimal. And it’s never really explained why the change is so challenging.

“The biggest problem that we’re going to have, with all the good intentions and the good recommendations that we got from the turnaround team, is that it’s a very hard spin to get city workers and people who live in the city to accept change,” Bing told the Free Press in an exclusive interview this week. “But if we don’t, we die, and I don’t want to be here if, in fact, that is the direction that we’re going in.

What’s the offensive change being offered? Do most Detroiters really care about changes like closing down the local power plant?

Ouch

The Onion does Detroit.

Time has come

Via my brother, Time is going to launch an ambitious plan to cover the demise of Detroit:

So to that end, says Huey, they’re going to “flood the D-zone” (urk) with a phalanx of journos, photogs, bloggers and videographers from Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Money and their various dot-coms. They’ve got a blog. They’ve got a Twitter. CNN Money is running a series of videos. Hopefully for the D-zone all that will lead to a flood of money back into the city — or at least generate some interest and outrage on its behalf outside its midwestern environs.

We farm for capital

On the food shortage:

About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores, liquor stores, and gas stations in the city. There is such a dire shortage of protein in the city that Glemie Dean Beasley, a seventy-year-old retired truck driver, is able to augment his Social Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve dollars a piece, serves a family of four) from animals he has treed and shot at undisclosed hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are ten dollars each. Pheasants are also abundant in the city and are occasionally harvested for dinner.

Can we get a citation on this? Some footage? Something?

Reasonably hip, has functioning hips

Pretty good piece on why the Big Three have terrible marketing and why GM named a 77 year old as its new marketing chief.

Also, via Meghan, artwork based on captchas shows a path towards Detroit’s recovery:

No rain please

Realization: the biggest loser in the decision to move Conan to 11:30 is the television viewer in the post-Kimmel 1:00 to 1:35 range. All the funny people in the world and we have to watch Fallon v. Ferguson?

I’m going to the midwest this afternoon, posting will be exceedingly light for the next week.

Speaking of Detroit, Finale’s Heat:

(“Underground like I’m speaking through a manhole/with muscle big enough to start a Barry Bonds scandal.”)

If it’s Sunday it’s Detroit

Anybody watch the pilot episode of Hung on HBO tonight? It’s about a well-endowed metro Detroit teacher who attempts to supplement his income and turn his life around by selling himself.

Speaking of Detroit, the cover of the NYT magazine promised to unveil “G.M., Detroit and the Fall of the Black Middle Class.” But the eleven webpages of content was basically the story of one autoworker who’s leaning on his faith and hoping for the best.

The whole thing is conceptually muddy, starting with this:

When we talk about what the end of the U.S. auto industry will mean to thousands of autoworkers, we tend to have a specific image of that worker in mind: He’s a conservative white Democrat who lives in suburban Detroit, hangs out in his local union hall, belongs to a bowling league and owns a hunting cabin in the Upper Peninsula. This is the iconic American autoworker. In fact, as much as a fifth of the industry’s work force is African-American.

That’s the icon we all talk about?

No one is left

Michael Moore and I are now part owners of GM. He has some ideas.