My humble little suburb is in the news today. It must be a slow news day.

We've been following this little drama for the past two years, regarding the oft-vandalized "Welcome to Shoreview" sign. Brad and I both drive past this sign every day. The best part of this saga has to be this news item in the StarTribune, though. They are so careful to not overtly tell the newspaper-reading public what vandals have actually been making the sign say over and over for a couple of years now: "Welcome to Whoreview".

The trouble started two years ago when vandals stole the letter S from the sign at the corner of County Road 96 and Lexington Avenue. That left the sign to read "Welcome to Horeview."

City officials dismissed that caper as a crass prank, but since then vandals have struck three more times, each time taking different letters and spray painting other letters in their place. The unflattering messages were no longer amusing to city leaders and grew into an expensive problem, Martin said.

Apparently the new version of the sign is made in a different way, which will make it much harder to remove individual letters.

As someone who's not native to suburbia and hopes to not be here for that much longer, I have to admit I always got a bit of a laugh out of the vandalized sign because Shoreview is the kind of prim and proper place where this kind of thing is seen as so outlandishly inappropriate.