There's a Vote Today, and a Few Fires and More

1. There's a big, big vote today.

2. The Marietta Fire Department will intentionally light two fires tonight as a demonstration of how quickly a home fire can turn from a small flame into a deadly inferno. The fires will be lit at 7 p.m. at s at 112 Haynes St. The event is sponsored, in part, by the Home Fire Sprinkler Coalition to encourage residents to adopt safe practices during a fire and to show the importance of smoke alarms and other safety devices in the home.

3. Marietta's Citizens' Police Academy is in full swing. Participants in the nine-week program have a session from 6 to 9 p.m. today at .

4. Cobb County recently earned a Sunny Award from Sunshine Review, an organization that promotes transparency and affirmative disclosure at the state and local levels. Cobb scored an "A" on the 10-point transparency checklist for government Web sites, an honor only achieved by 112 of the more than 6,000 government sites ranked. The average county score was a "D."

Check out the county site yourself and let us know what ranking you would give it. The city of Marietta site, by the way, was not part of the evaluation or had not be rated yet.

5. A soothsayer in William Shakespeares' Julius Caesar warned the Roman emperor to "beware the ides of March." Of course, Caesar would fall to the knives of former comrades, and the date has forever been imbued with a sense of foreboding. And it so happens that the date marks the birth of Marietta Patch's daughter, who turns 16 today. Should Patch have been warned? Happy birthday, Mackenzie!