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!"

It's one option, but ...

... I hope Cappuccino didn't use a novelty lighter. That's illegal.

Here's why it's funny ... or pathetic.

(backposting)

Before relaxing our grip on Dan Coffey’s New Year’s coronation, otherwise known as Monday’s city council meeting, a respectful but nuanced nod is due at-large councilman John Gonder, who took time during the PUB-OFF-COMM of the conclave to share a newspaper story about deaths in a tragic fire in Anderson, Indiana.

Apparently the fire was set by children playing with a cigarette lighter, and although the precise make and model of the lighter could not be gleaned from the media coverage, CM Gonder was moved to ruminate on the council’s much maligned “novelty lighter” ordinance of 2008.

He defended the council’s good intentions in approving the ordinance, observed that there had yet to be any discernable sign of enforcement stemming from it, and noted that if the ordinance was fated to be ignored, it would be better to remove it from the code book entirely.

Before I proceed, allow me to offer clarification. I continue to regard John Gonder and Jack Messer as my de facto council representatives, given the absence of diplomatic (or undiplomatic) recognition – or, for that matter, a pulse – from those representing the 3rd and 6th districts, these being my home and work areas, respectively.

Accordingly, I appreciate Gonder’s remarks on Monday, and remarkably, Gonder’s sincerity prompted a brief discussion of how the council might better monitor enforcement of the laws it passes, and perhaps more importantly, it led to another in a series of confessions from the city attorney to the effect that in the absence of time and money, such violations will have to be reported to his office, and will be investigated accordingly.

Somewhere, Jim "Gomer Pyle" Nabors’ ears are burning, but we’ll take what we can get, while hoping that indications of conscience are harbingers of better things to come. Later in the meeting, preliminary ordinance enforcement plans were previewed. Later in the week, a rumor went around to the effect that the city attorney would become full time. All well and good, assuming anything actually happens.

Now for the promised nuance.

Obviously, some members of the council remain in abject denial when it comes to the power of the symbolism attached to what they do … and don’t do, and in this context, CM Coffey’s Monday semantics about the importance of what doesn’t happen when it isn’t seen deserves placement in the dumpster, and fast.

In itself, a novelty lighter ordinance is perfectly rational and incontestably well-meaning, and yet it is unmistakably inconsequential in the larger legislative scheme of things. After all, kids were setting houses on fire with matches long before lighters were invented.

A novelty lighter ordinance becomes symbolic fodder for satire, and worthy of at least a slight measure of regular derision, when it can be clearly contrasted with an accompanying absence of sustained, quantifiable action in far more important areas.

Presenting the Gahan Gambit: Look, ma – following in the footsteps of our conniving council predecessors, we’ve once again refused our Constitutional duty to maintain fair legislative districts, but check it out: We’re protecting children from the evil Chinese!

I know, I know … when you have to explain the joke, it isn’t nearly as funny. The problem remains that more of “us” than “them” get it the message … if not the joke.

Sound "like a waste of time?" Welcome to New Albany, circa 2008.

It’s hard to argue with the year’s top five local stories, as selected today by the Tribune’s editorial team and recorded by Daniel Suddeath.

YMCA comes to New Albany

Battleground state

Mayor vetoes smoking ban

Wacky weather

Secret committee considers closing schools

Although we didn’t reach any firm conclusions at the time, NAC covered this ground a few weeks back: Open thread: What are the local stories of the year?

After deep thought and the helpful convergence of my usual holiday alcoholic binge, which is just the sort of cerebral scrambling necessary to make sense of New Albany, I’ve concluded that the top-ranking story of the year -- lost amid council president Jeff Gahan’s continuing urinary tract vendetta against the Constitution (redistricting) and his divisive and diversionary anti-smoking chimera -- was the city council’s decision to “ban” novelty lighters.

Nothing that occurred in New Albany last year touches so many rich veins of dysfunctional symbolism than G-08-04, as previewed in an April NAC posting: Wouldn't want one of those things going off near a meth lab, would you?

More recently, my colleague Bluegill provided a transcript that brutally summarizes why the novelty lighter ban was so significant. It deserves a marquee slot.

A recent hardware store conversation while standing in the checkout line:

Mrs. Bluegill: Hey, look, lighters made like fishing poles. Aren't those supposed to be illegal?

Cashier: I think they banned them in Kentucky or something.

Me: They banned them here, too. It has something to do with how they're displayed...

Mrs. B:...so that kids can't reach them until they get home.

Cashier: Really? No one told us anything.

Me: I don't remember the details. It seems like the law's oddly worded, so that selling them a certain way is illegal but that it's OK to buy them.

Guy behind us: I wouldn't worry about it. It's completely unenforceable. It's not like they enforce anything anyway.

Cashier: That sounds like a waste of time.

Guy: Yeah, they do that a lot. Kind of like the smoking ban.

Cashier: We have a smoking ban?

Guy: No, the Mayor vetoed it. It was unenforceable, too.

Cashier: Jeez.

Wouldn't want one of those things going off near a meth lab, would you?

From the perspectives of rational civic governance, a semblance of hope, and some remote modicum of human dignity, the disintegration of the city council’s Gang of Four after last fall’s municipal election was a long overdue development, but when it comes to sheer entertainment value, the dawning new era in the council chamber offers little more than the same cold and machinating Coffey and Stevie Priceless’s incoherent, lonely and clueless jihad against all of modernity.

And that’s a good thing.

We had grown too fond of watching the spectacle, gauging the performance and forgetting the manifest travesties of Kochertization when applied to the political process.

With this in view, we dip a hesitant toe in the tepid water and resolve to attend tonight’s first April council session, mindful that unfortunate conflicts in work and life have been standing in the way of what once was a must-see in the Confidential household. For fans of the surreal, topping the list of tonight’s agenda items is this one:

G-08-04 Benedetti 1
An Ordinance Amending the New Albany Municipal Code by Adding New Section 94.30; providing for Restrictions on Novelty Lighters

The cited precedent for this ordinance is a similar one enacted by Jeffersonville, and a cynic (surely not I) might point to numerous other areas of the human experience ripe for regulation in this manner, some of which Jeffersonville also has undertaken, and that have to do with fire in an indirect manner.

The Tribune’s council meeting preview is here,