Our forefathers would be bursting with pride, or into tears, or whatever

Hey now, just in time for Independence Day, here comes "Are You There Dave Bing, It's Me, Detroit" out from behind the curtain, to give DPD Chief James Barren the ol' KTHXBAI, on grounds that...well, heck, what grounds -- who knows! Does it matter? Just enjoy the fireworks!

Things you can also enjoy today include but are not limited to our newly updated 2009 Detroit Murda (and other major incidents where firearms were involved) Map. Because, hey, The More You Know and etcetera.

So, here we go.

Ding, dong, etc.

Separatism enthusiast and aging supermodel Monica Conyers? Done. Over. Sayonara. Bye now. Finito. Tee hee. Kenneth Junior says this is probably her last day on council. Oh, Ken -- if only. Stick to being huggable. The charter says you only get booted if you are convicted. Seems it doesn't say anything about pleading guilty to a felony, probably because the nice people who wrote it assumed that anyone pleading guilty to a felony would probably just leave without having to be asked. Clearly, the charter was written in a different time, in a different Detroit.

Never mind all that, for now. What one really wants to see is the national press getting on this. It may be time for Mr. C to finally stop pretending his wife doesn't exist, time to be subjected to a bit of public humiliation. It doesn't matter what he's done in the past; we all eventually reach our sell-by date and have to be smart enough to retire or try our hand at something new. We hear Dallas is lovely at this time of year?

Meanwhile, the Freep reports that Martha Reeves is AWOL, giving interviews to the British press about how awesome Downtown is and not attending council meetings. What is she, crazy, missing all this excitement? (Oh, wait.) It's said Reeves is on tour in the UK, but that sounds an awful lot like "hiking the Appalachian Trail" to us. Maybe she's taken a lover! Free Press, will you be at the airport to ask her the hard questions when she finally comes home?

Detroit's sloppy murder math

Recognizing that a sunshine policy is the best policy, the Baltimore police make homicide statistics readily available. Charm City's popular weekly newspaper and even its ailing daily chart homicides for public view, on easy to access murder maps. This is all smart stuff for a city that for years has struggled with serious violence. Knowing your problem, and where your problem is, can be an important first step to getting things fixed.

Detroit knows it has a problem, but prefers to pretend otherwise. The stressed-out police force has no similar policy, the local media do not keep faithful records. Heck, we can't even get the numbers right. When the FBI's latest report on crime in the nation was released, Detroit fessed up: Our numbers were too low. Oops. Our bad. We're actually #1 in per capita killings.

Kym Worthy is pissed. How, she asks, can we begin to solve a problem, if we can't even keep proper records? Of course, record keeping was never Detroit's strong suit; among other reasons why, perhaps it's easier to cope when you aren't constantly having your face shoved in depressing statistics.

It's time for the police department to assign someone to be in charge of the body count; it's time for, say, Metro Times to make itself useful and follow the Baltimore weekly's lead. It seems like a project the News might enjoy - show the people just how violent Detroit actually is, and where exactly the violence is taking place.

There are two reasons this sort of grim tallying of the bodies is useful. One, it will quickly show outsiders how safe much of the city actually is. As you learn quickly in Detroit, not all blighted areas are dangerous. Some of them are just empty.

An informal (and incomplete, thanks to impossible standards of record keeping) survey of homicides in the city over the past year shows the lion's share of murders taking place out on the West Side, past Livernois, where more than half of Detroit's population currently lives.

You could count the number of reported killings Downtown, in Midtown and the East Side below I-94 on two hands, tops. (Reported being the operative word here.) North of I-94, the East Side remains as lawless as ever, but with the population dwindling there so dramatically, even large sections of that area show less violence than many expect. Southwest Detroit performs reasonably well, also.

To get the ball rolling, I pulled together this map in 2008, followed by this one for 2009, which reports through early May.

Any reporter interested in taking the reins should feel free to do so. It's a little time consuming.

Michigan hits Broadway

Sutton Foster, Brian D'Arcy James...even Jeff Daniels is up for a Tony this year, for his performance in "God of Carnage". (You've come a long way from "Escanaba in da Moonlight" at the Gem, baby.)

That's not the only way Michigan is representing on Broadway right now - this ad was spotted on a tour bus moving through Times Square this evening. Okay, so it makes me a sucker, but I love this campaign. Then again, so do others - tourism's up, you know.

Speaking of, this quote from a News story about the "fight" to "save" "Tiger Stadium" qualifies for our Laugh of the Day, which is a thing we have just invented right now.

"This is absolutely stupid," said Tim McKay, executive director of the Greater Corktown Development Corporation. "This is becoming a tourist destination. We don't need another Wal-Mart or a strip mall."

Thought: Corktown may want someone slightly more in touch with reality to helm its economic development corporation.

Best seat in the house

Movement..it's back and bad. Intended to stay an hour or so, ended up leaving more than four hours later. The $5 drinks in the VIP section are bewilderingly bad but the seats sure aren't.

An afternoon at Buddy's

Can we talk? Buddy's. Six Mile and Conant. One of the many mysteries of Detroit is that its own home grown version of a Sicilian pie, also known as Detroit-style pizza, never hit the big time. People crowd into Chicago to cram leaden slices of deep dish pie down their gullets because Chicago is famous for it, even if they really should be eating instead the wonderful thin crust pies you can get all over town.

I happen to think that Buddy's pies are marvelous. Light crust, no sugar in the dough and little to none in the fragrant tomato-basil sauce; the cheese isn't exactly fresh mozzarella but it is not the plastic mess that New Yorkers have begrudgingly become accustomed to. In a word, this pizza is interesting. If you're not from around here, well, it isn't like lots of other pizzas you have had.

The original Buddy's, a former speakeasy, is in one of the more desolate parts of the East Side, and yet inside it's all smiles...

...outside, too -- this guy was out in the parking lot waiting for his order to come up and told us we had made the right decision to drive all the way over here. He wanted to pose with my friend Justin in front of his Land Rover. "You may forget everything you saw in Detroit today," our new pal said, "But you won't forget Buddy's."