Pardon my Rant, Please.

I went downtown this morning to pick up some work from a boutique for which I do "overflow" tailoring, and when I came back home the pictures below are what greeted me at the entrance to my neighborhood.  Our neighborhood, while not as historically 'pretty' as some others in my town, is a really nice place to live, relatively quiet (unless you live on the hill below me; then you have to deal with college students' loud raucous parties at intervals throughout each semester) and has some nice old - as in over 100 years old - homes.  I know about the 100+-year-old homes because I live in one of them.

Anyway, about a year and a half ago our neighborhood association decided to commission two signs at the most-used entrances to our part of town, this sign is the larger of the two and is two blocks from my house.  the other sign is very similar but is about 1/3 the size.  The original sign was designed by Jamie Lester, who used to live about 3 blocks from me and who designed the scene found on the West Virginia state quarter.  The sign was installed, a nice flower bed was designed and planted, and we Woodburnites were quite happy with it until about a month after it went in, it was stolen.  Someone dismounted it from the brackets that hold it to the posts and just carried the whole thing away.  If you look at the pictures you can see that this would not exactly be a 5-minute job; it was held in place by a whole bunch of lag bolts and the posts are 4x4 lumber.  No trace of it was ever found, so the NA had a replacement made and installed around the beginning of last summer.  Now this.  I am just disgusted that someone thought this was a fun thing to do.  It's one thing for college students (yes, I think this was a college 'prank') to throw plastic cups around in the street after a wild party, to hold mud wrestling bouts in a kiddie pool in their back yard, to carouse until ungodly hours when their neighbors (including yours truly) are trying to sleep - those are things that the Litter Control Officers and Police Department are quite capable of doing something to deter.  But this is unconscionable.  I hope by some miracle of the internet, the perpetrators' parents happen upon this post, realize THIS is what their kids were vaguely bragging about, and haul their sorry butts to the police station to turn them in. 

Oh, and you can see in the bottom photo that they stole the street signs from the pole at the intersection (and pushed the pole over too), as well as signs from SEVEN other intersections within 3 blocks of my house.  Yeah, real mature.