While we're on the topic, can someone explain to me why, outside of Vegas, casinos are not permitted to have sports books? What exactly is the reasoning behind this? Is there a great moral distinction between losing money on blackjack or slots and losing it on the point spread? At least with sports betting you are not mathematically predestined to lose yet it is not permitted, but playing keno or the lottery is. Makes no sense.

Everything in downtown Detroit is now geared for people who come in for an event of some sort. There is very little day-to-day life going on downtown, there are just people coming in for a game or dinner in Greektown or to hit the casinos, then they leave and go finish up the night back in the suburbs where they came from — that is, if they bother to go into Detroit at all.

This is not surprising, because that's exactly what the folks who keep trying to rebuild Detroit have in mind. They build huge, shiny monoliths like Ford Field and promote sporting events, restaurants, casinos, and festivals and so forth, but they don't do anything to attract the poor slobs who might want to live in Detroit or work in one of the more unglamorous industries. The crime rate is still outrageous, the infrastructure is atrocious, city services are slovenly, and public schools can only aspire to be abysmal. If there is a single word to describe Detroit, it is 'inhospitable.'

But the city fathers reaction to the rot of the city has never been to make it a good place to live; it's always been to attract high profile projects that generate headlines — essentially, to treat the problems of the city as if they were merely a matter of perception and public relations. The end result is that the Mayor and the City Council get a great press release and some campaign stump material on a regular basis, but they don't stem the steady, decades-long desertion of the citizenry. Since its peak in the 1950s, Detroit has lost about half of its population. And of the population that is left, nearly half are functionally illiterate (according to a 1998 study quoted on Wikipedia).

Note that neither the Steelers nor the Seahawks are actually staying in Detroit. The Seahawks are in Dearborn (just west of the city) and the Steelers are in Auburn Hills (about an hour north of Detroit) probably hoping to steal some mojo from the Pistons. Most of the good things you hear about Detroit will be from folks staying out in the suburbs. Pet peeve: This is actually the first Super Bowl ever in Detroit. The last Super Bowl in Detroit was actually in Pontiac, close to an hour north of the city.