Failed suicide bungler strikes Elsby Building, thereby reaffirming one-way street safety.

Cars race past the Elsby Building on New Albany's outmoded one-way street grid, because that's the way we've done it for 50 years, and we're too provincial to contemplate change.

A radical monster pickup truck advocacy sect member incensed by rumors that Spring Street might some day be restored to two way traffic attempted to destroy the Elsby Building on Monday afternoon. The outcome was foiled when his illegally obtained novelty lighter failed to ignite on impact with his cigarette, causing his cell phone to fall to the floorboard, and his vehicle to strike and break a plate glass window.

Afterward, the city engineer was to have verified the Elsby Building's continued structural viability, except that New Albany doesn't have a city engineer, and all the usual piecework temps were busy with the East Main Street Project's non-bicycle lanes. So they sent the dogcatcher instead.

"Looks good to me."

City Hall later released a statement:

"Citizens wishing to donate to the Elsby broken glass clean-up should make all checks out to the Dixiecratic Democratic Party."

It was the second such attack in a year's time. In 2013, less than two blocks away, a nearsighted driver rammed his vehicle into an architect's window, only to discover that it wasn't the public art project he hated so damned much.

"What a relief that we're an unwalkable city and he was only going 55 mph," commented John Rosenbarger, New Albany's Rasputin of Redevelopment. "If people would have been crowding the sidewalk like in Madrid, someone might have gotten killed. All the more reason to institute a system of one-way arterial streets downtown, leading to roundabouts and some street calming somewhere else in the outskirts of the city. It's what they do in other places we can't ever hope to become, but as long as we accomplish 5% of the work each year, that's 20 years guaranteed employment."

From his hospital bed, the suicide bumbler said, "The streets that God made one way, let no wussy hybrid driver tear asunder -- not to mention those stupid fucking pedestrians too poor to drive."

"Bail, Caesar!"