Postcards
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Chop change. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently voted to pay up to $50,000 in benefits to city workers who want to switch gender. According to the San Francisco Examiner, the bill, if signed by Mayor Willie Brown, would make the City By The Bay the only governmental body in the nation to offer such benefits.
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Except in Minnesota … According to Reuters, Arnie Rubin, an electrician from Brooklyn, N.Y., is starting a political action committee to support bald men running for government office. Rubin, who is losing his hair, claims that bald men face discrimination in politics, and he points to New York’s city council and state congressional delegation as evidence. “It’s an image thing. Bald men don’t feel represented,” says Mark Lampert, a New York bartender and the other member of the HAIRPAC.
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S-t-u-p-i-d. That’s 13 points. An Alachua County (Fla.) sheriff’s deputy and a law enforcement intern were reprimanded for their conduct during a drug bust in Gainesville. According to the Independent Florida Alligator, the two played Scrabble while officers recovered 16 marijuana plants, 160 grams of dope and drug paraphernalia.
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When your counterfeit money operation fails. A man in Berkeley, Calif., was arrested in March for running a parking ticket scam. According to the Daily Californian, he was placing authentic-looking, highly detailed citations on illegally parked cars and including envelopes for mailing fines to his post office box.
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Low-speed pursuit. While on golf cart patrol at a county fair, two Merced County, Calif., sheriff’s deputy marshals found two men trying to enter the fair by crawling under a fence. When confronted, one of the men jumped into the deputies’ cart and tried to get away. “He didn’t calculate that the cart can only go 5 mph, but a deputy on foot can go 6,” Cmdr. Bill Blake told The Modesto Bee.