On Birch Street, a thief tried unsuccessfully to break into an apartment by prying a window with a fork. Cretin. Clearly, he was using his salad fork instead of the illegal home entry fork aligned on the far left side of the napkin.

Roughly six hours after the side of the 12-Hour Club in Lewiston was painted pristine white, taggers came by and de-virginized the wall with cans of spray paint. Wow, man. Nobody saw that coming.

The plan is for everybody to stop buying gas from Exxon and Mobil. I am privy to this strategy because I am a trained journalist with top-notch sources on speed dial. That, and I keep forgetting to enable my spam filter, so I get an estimated 1.5 million e-mails a day on the subject. I also get a half-million or so e-mails threatening that I will die of syphilis of the face if I do not forward an e-greeting featuring a dancing elf to 10 of my closest friends. But let's stick to OPEC for now.

I'd be happy to stop buying gas from the big oil companies if there is a real chance it will bend those beasts over their barrels. But I'm wary of national efforts generated through random e-mails. Remember a few years ago you were warned that if you flashed your headlights at an approaching high-beamer, gang members would kill you? Turned out that not one such incident had ever occurred in the history of automobiles. Remember when a stream of messages informed you that the Internet would no longer be free and each e-mail you sent would cost a dime? What happened there? That's right. You stopped writing your mom and now you're out of the will.

E-mail efforts are great for creating a buzz, but people tend to have difficulty carrying those concepts into the real world. Tell you what I'm going to do, though. For the next few weeks, I'll wind my way to East Bog Hoot to fill up my tank at Clappy's Gas 'n Go in an effort to kick Uncle Oil right in the crude. If there is one indication by June that others are doing the same, I'll eat my words and scrape every bug off every windshield in the lot.

I have my doubts. In spite of the good e-tentions, the population has unrestrained lust for putting tigers in their tanks.