Postcards

Commitment-phobe. Just because Greg Daniels, a 51-year-old resident of Austin, Texas, parks a dozen cars in front of his home and uses them in rotation, does not mean that any of them is junk, he says. Police disagree. The department has been towing the cars and charging Daniels to buy them back once they have been confiscated as junk. Daniels told the Austin American-Statesman in July that his cars are always legally parked, but he’s not ready to settle down with just two or three of his favorites.

I’ll have the usual. In five years, Gregory Goins has made 1,209 ambulance visits to the emergency room at Highland Hospital in Oakland, Calif., to treat chest pains. The trips for the 47-year-old man have cost the public $900,000. Despite the burdens Goins places on hospital staff, they have grown accustomed to his sometimes twice-daily visits. One doctor told the Associated Press, “He’s got his 15 minutes of notoriety every day of the week.”

And chads were not involved. According to the Associated Press, there were several irregularities with ballots collection in a November initiative that would have authorized public seizure of PG&E electric utility lines in San Francisco. For example, 240 ballots got stuck in a machine and were uncounted, 400 blank ballots were found at a poll worker’s house, and, on election night, 5,500 absentee ballots were moved from a heavily guarded room to a lightly guarded one. The initiative lost by a few hundred votes. San Francisco election officials denied any misconduct.

It just doesn’t have the same effect when you tell someone he is coming back as a newt. Officials at the Waupun (Wis.) Correctional Institution have appointed a Wiccan as one of the prison’s two chaplains. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Rev. Jamyi Witch was appointed despite the fact that Wicca does not preach eternal damnation, which many regard as important when dealing with maximum-security inmates.