X Marks the Spot: Front Avenue in...

X Marks the Spot: Front Avenue in Portland, Ore., was renamed Malcolm X Street--overnight. Someone changed street signs secretly, astonishing commuters with hundreds of “Malcolm X St.” signs Wednesday morning along the avenue. The birthday of Malcolm X, a black human rights leader of the 1960s, is May 19. The white lettering matched the size and shape of official city streets signs and had black backgrounds to match street signs in historic districts.

The Plot Thickens: Two editors at Pantheon Books resigned Tuesday in protest of the appointment Monday of Erroll McDonald as executive editor. Helena Franklin and Diane Wachtell cited what they called McDonald’s “unfair attack” on former longtime executive editor Andre Schiffrin. Last February, six other editors quit after Schiffrin was forced to resign. Now all eight editors who worked under Schiffrin have quit.

Reincarnation: Tammy Faye Bakker’s New Covenant Church is trying to buy the warehouse from which it was banned March 11 over financial problems. Bakker wrote in a fund-raising letter: “I am needing to make the down payment immediately, and I need 10 people to give $10,000 each . . . We need another 800 people to give $1,000 each and we could be in our . . . building debt free!”

Idea Looking for a Home: Representatives of the Heaven on Earth company, owned by guru Maharishi Mehesh Yogi, visited Pittsburgh this week with plans to build a community in which cars would be banned and homes are solar-powered. “There are a number of . . . laws of nature which determine how to establish a community,” Yogi spokesman Curtis McDonald said. But builder Murray Rust implied other laws may get in the way: He called Heaven on Earth a “flower-child idea.”