Cheers and jeers from around the news:

• Jeers to Randall Hofland, the disturbed desperado with a deranged desire for derring-do.

He pulled a pistol on a patrolman then ran into the Waldo County woods until emerging to hold a roomful of fifth-graders in Stockton Springs at gunpoint on Oct. 31. He was apprehended without incident, thankfully.

Now, his thirst for adventure is hopefully equal to his tolerance for confinement. Hofland should put walls, bars, guards and razor wire in his short- and long-term plans.

• Cheers, on the other hand, to school crisis planning. The plan in Stockton Springs worked.

But no plan is perfect. Hofland apparently penetrated the school during the morning, when kids and parents mill about the entrances. The superintendent was quoted as saying it was the time when the school was most vulnerable.

Plans only get stronger when they’re compromised – that’s the silver lining from this scary incident.

Schools have a real-life example from which to compare their security preparations, identify flaws and fix them.

Security at Maine schools should be better for it.

• Jeers to the city of Lewiston for not providing little “I voted today” stickers at the polls on Nov. 4. It would have been a small touch that meant much to the people who waited to cast their ballots.

Voting is a civic duty, but this doesn’t mean it should be taken for granted. Even Starbucks offered free coffee to voters on Election Day.

A sticker would have been nice.

• Cheers to the city of Auburn for honoring its history by finding places for its portraits.

Unfortunately, space is at a premium and the walls in the council chambers – for some reason – cannot bear the weight of all that history. This predicament seems primed for a technical solution.

How about this: creating digital images of all the mayoral portraits and using a projector to show all the images, in chronological rotation. Not only would this solve the tricky problem of evaluating who merits placement where, but it could lend itself to other uses, such as to recognize city employees or honorees on certain occasions.

It’s just a thought. To us, it seems like a good one.

• And cheers, but mostly jeers, to Paul Bennett, the new Topsham selectman who resigned when his manslaughter conviction came to light. Bennett has done the right thing by immediately resigning his seat because of the controversy.

But it’s strange his conscience is cloudy now, and not during his campaign. If so conflicted over his conviction, he shouldn’t have run. Instead, he only owned the truth when it was unavoidable.

This, more than his conviction, shows terrible judgment.

Topsham voters should be glad to replace him.