Metro Cornucopia

Sometimes the Metro section at the St. Pete Times is the jewel of the paper. I spent a long time with it this morning, reading bits of stories about desperados and lunatics outloud to my wife, who pulled out the A section before I could grab it. My luck.

Rebecca Catalanello: TAMPA — The man started coming around about six weeks ago.

He was an unemployed electrician. Fifty-two years old. A nice guy, though given to drink.

Pastor Jarvis Ball liked the man. An electrician himself, Ball fed him, clothed him, invited him to attend services at Covenant of God Ministries here in Sulphur Springs.

And the man did.

At some point in his life, through what Ball calls "circumstances," this former electrician became homeless and turned to alcohol. But he refused to sleep under someone else's roof, slumbering instead in his car.

Tom Lake: Calories are for burning. They make muscles fire and blood flow. They cannot measure taste, texture or edibility. Even wood has calories.

This topic has fresh meaning for Polk County jail inmates, who suddenly find themselves without corn bread, chocolate milk, boiled eggs or peanut butter.

Instead, they have crackers, powdered milk, prefashioned egg patties and translucent wafers of turkey, unless some other meat can be bought for less.

Sheriff Grady Judd is behind this new austerity. He says the changes will save $160,000 at a time when most public agencies must do more with less. And, in keeping with Florida Model Jail Standards, which seem to have little regard for gustatory pleasure, the new menu will still give the inmates 2,300 to 2,800 calories a day. Day-old bread burns as well as fresh does. Maybe better.

Justin George: TAMPA — The first time Jacqueline Wimbush got into a fight and lost a fingertip, doctors managed to save it.

Not this time.

Wimbush, who has a history of brawling, lost the tip of her left ring finger to another woman at a busy East Tampa meat market Monday, Tampa police say. "Right now it's gone, and there's nothing I can do," she fumed Wednesday.

The separation began Monday before noon when she entered the Aliana Meat Market and took a number, awaiting a butcher's attention.

It was No. 53.

The market, sandwiched between the Hope gas station and an African-themed bazaar, has an outside mural of a cornucopia filled with pigs, hens and cattle. It empties onto the earth like Noah's ark in reverse. The store sells oxtails, beef hearts, cow heads, salted pig tails, hog jaw and burnt cow skin.