Bill-on-the-Hill

I've long counted it a privilege to live in North Central New Mexico, about 20 miles as the crow flies from Santa Fe. That's about the perfect distance: far enough that we put our kids through the vastly superior public schools of Los Alamos rather than the disgraceful mess that is the Santa Fe school system, yet close enough to enjoy the city's fine dining, tremendous arts and music scenes, and generally delightful, artistic wackiness. Particularly the wackiness. For example:

Here's today's Web Site du Jour, and read it while it's still free rather than by subscription: http://freenewmexican.com/news/66564.html -- in which a small matter of a midnight breaking-and-entering episode at a Santa Fe jewelry shop is described. Now I ask you: where else in the civilized world could you find a story like this one? And the thing is, it fits. If you read about a story of a mountain lion getting loose in, say, Aspen or Carmel or Flagstaff or any of the other small American towns with the same kind of panache as Santa Fe, it'd probably get cornered in something like a sporting-goods store, or maybe an art-deco restaurant. But not in Santa Fe. Our wildlife has taste, you see.

BTW, apologies if this is a repeat. I wrote it up previously, but it appears not to have been saved, for who knows what reason. Surely, a story like this one is delicious enough to risk having it show up twice, rather than risking it not appearing at all.