Our town

We have an intriguing guest column on tonight's editorial page by Allen County Republican Chairman Steve Shine. I suspect he's mostly just yanking the city's chain -- if you read between the lines, he's more or less urging the county to call the city's bluff on its announced intentions to move out of the City-County Building. But if the city does follow through on that terrible plan, Shine's idea for making use of the resulting empty space is a good one.

Michael Martone -- professor of creative writing, award-winning short-story writer and son of retired  Fort Wayne Community Schools Asst. Superintendent Patty Martone -- has a piece in the August Harper's magazine ("Contributor's Note," Page 28), reprinted from the Autumn/Winter 2004 issue of The Journal. In it, he chronicles his encounters over the years with next-door neighbor Ed Mensing, an assitant fire chief in Fort Wayne whose job was fire prevention.

Well, we knew this was coming, but it's still a sad day. If you like the idea of Fort Wayne having an L.S. Ayres, an Indiana mainstay forever, too bad; start getting used to the absence of the name. In fall of 2006, Federated Department Stores is dropping the L.S. Ayres brand and renaming all those stores Macy's. We're luckier than Indianapolis, at least.

Nope, nope, nope. County Assessor Pat Love says it's no big deal that, because math isn't her strong suit, she has flunked the state-required test for assessors three times. She's good at managing people, and that's what really matters. Where have we heard this before?

Did it seem to you that the weather forecasts were wrong far more often than they were right last week? If you were trying to plan your activities around when the rain was or was not going to be here, too bad. The dirty little secret of meteorology is that 48 hours is about the limit of any kind of accuracy; beyond that, they're just making it up as they go along. And I thought editorial writing was the only profession in which we got paid to express outrageous opinions without even having to be right.

Saw a bumper sticker on the car in front of me Friday, "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war," attributed to Albert Einstein. Guess he wasn't the smartest man in the world about everything.

There's a downtown Block Party on The Landing next week (Wednesday the 27th from 5-7:30 p.m.) with free food and live music.

We had one of those awful encounters this morning that began with a man threatening suicide and ended with police shooting and killing him. In the coming days, there is sure to be much discussion about what the police did and what they could/should have done. That is proper. Police are supposed to protect us, and they have enormous power over us, so their actions warrant as much scrutiny as we can muster. But we ought not be in too big a hurry to second-guess them.

A tip for all you citizen journalists out on the Internet. It's easy to add reporting to your blog if the news drops on your doorstep. This mishap happened right outside the Fort Wayne Newspapers building early this afternoon, and I snapped it on the way to lunch about 12:30.

Here's one of those famous USA Today factoid snapshots, on favorite food pairs, with spaghetti and meatballs winning (use the left and right arrows to find the right one). Unfortunately, coffee and donuts, the breakfast of the gods, did not make the list.