Well, friends and neighbors, our town has one more laurel to sport upon its bully brow. Durham has been proclaimed the nation's Most Tolerant City.

Yes - not Noo Yawk, not Austin or Ann Arbor, not even flower-powered San Francisco, but our very own Bull City, U.S.A., according to Newsweek's Daily Beast website.

Shouldn't come as any surprise, really, considering what all we tolerate around here. What all we tolerate, shake our heads at, and repeat once more, "Only in Durham."

Take this crime business, which is a very serious matter, and the mayor and our other authorities in charge are out to do something about it.

And we wish them the greatest success this time and have every confidence they will achieve it.

Law enforcement in Durham has, after all, had its Matt Dillon moments. Of course, it's had other moments more in the line of Barney Fife.

Take parking tickets.

No, seriously.

From time to time, City Hall has realized how much money its coffers are missing due to unpaid fines for overtime parking and determined to crack down. To the point that once, in 1982, a narcotics merchant's transfer from the county jail to the state pen was stalled until he paid up his parking tickets.

True, no good deed goes without its unintended consequences. In 1986, some downtown interests complained that overzealous ticket-writers were driving (so to speak) business away. Shortly afterward, a raise in the fine schedule was held up (so to speak) because the new tickets were misprinted.

Zealotry notwithstanding, by 1996 the parking-fine ledger was about $1 million in the red. City Hall decreed three strikes (or unpaid parking tickets, as the case may have been) and you were locked up - your wheels, that is, in an immobilizing device called a "Denver boot."

By 2005, the parking-fine shortfall was up to $2 million and, speaking of unintended consequences, no one seemed to consider that immobilizing a scofflaw's vehicle into a timed-out space did nothing for prospective customers cruising the block for somewhere to park the car.

Ah well.

Crime itself in Durham has had its highs and lows. Our Bull City gave America one Frank "Pee Wee" Matthews, who began his career stealing chickens on Canal Street and rose to become a Godfather in the East Coast cocaine trade - then jumped a federal bond in 1973 and disappeared, at least as far as the law was concerned.

On the other hand, there was the case of the stolen house - a duplex, even.

One day in 1992, property manager Lynn Cherry went to check on a place in his care only to find it gone.

The owner, it seemed, had been talking about selling the property to the school district, but an overzealous house mover had jumped the gun and hauled it far away.

That was when "Only in Durham" took on a whole new meaning.

Amusing asides aside, though, upstanding Bull Citizens must cheer our leaders' current resolve to clean our mean streets up. Just as we did when the mayor kicked off the gang-deterring Project STAY ("Saving Today's At-Risk Youth") and then-DA Jim Hardin designated a "gun prosecutor" to clamp down on violence.

In 2004. Our cheering might be cheerier now if it didn't feel a bit like deja vu.

Mayor Bell said it back then: "We take two steps forward on one thing and four steps back on the next."

Tolerance, we must agree, has its limits.

And this time we don't mean Only in Durham.