Postcards

Good help is hard to find. Savannah, Ga., Mayor Floyd Adams bought a rundown house worth $41,000, then got the taxpayers to help renovate it. Adams used young adults in a taxpayer-funded program that teaches carpentry skills to build an addition to his house, prompting conflict-of-interest charges. According to the Associated Press, Adams now says he is thinking about suing the group for shoddy work. “In hindsight, not trying to do the work with them would have been better,” he said.

Do as I say … According to the Tennessean and the Tampa Tribune, fire stations in Columbia, Tenn., and Tampa, Fla., were found violating local fire codes earlier this year because of missing smoke detectors and other equipment.

They can kiss that arsonist job goodbye. Two Greene County, Ga., volunteer firefighters apparently set a fire at a local church so they could help put it out. But, according to Sheriff Chris Houston, Josh Short and Jonathan Sullivan might have been better at putting out fires than they were at starting them. According to the Atlanta Constitution, after an unsuccessful attempt to start a grass fire, the two piled toilet paper and church bulletins on a gas space heater and lit the pile. But since the church is used only once or twice a month, its utilities had been shut off. The fire burned itself out. “They were not very good at setting fires, apparently,” Houston said.

Money down the toilet. The Reading, Pa., City Council voted in April to amend the city’s plumbing ordinance to require white toilet seats in restrooms in commercial buildings. According to the Philadelphia Daily News, the move was in response to a contractor’s decision to install 108 black toilet seats in the city’s $26.6 million Sovereign Center, which is under construction. Although it will cost $5,000 to replace the center’s black seats with white ones, the change, says Kevin Cramsey, assistant to the mayor, will make it easier to tell whether the seats are clean.