With the March 2000 changeover fast approaching, the Maine Public Utilities Commission has begun airing a series of TV ads to acquaint consumers with the ins and outs of electric restructuring. The campaign stars the Wattsons, an animated family of light bulbs — Watt and Flow, their children Electra and Shorty and the family dog Sparky — who, in a “lighthearted, situation-comedy” way, will offer assurances of uninterrupted power and explain such complexities as choosing a supplier, the various energy source options and the default standard offer. And, just in case things do go on the blink, they’ve got Fritz the cat on standby.

It cost some $133,000 to remove and store the four Klir Beck wildlife dioramas from the south wing of the State House for a renovation project. Now it turns out the taxidermic nature scenes won’t fit back into the space they occupied for 40 years, so Plan B is to blast out a new home for them in the rock-walled tunnel connecting the Capitol and the State Office Building, for a mere $680,000. Stuffed animals, stiffed taxpayers.

A wave of outrage rippling across the nation reached the East Coast the other day when dozens of Hindus picketed a Boston church to protest the distribution of a Southern Baptist Convention prayer booklet that says Hindus “have a darkness in their hearts that no lamp can dispel.” The church pastor conceeded that the booklet, released during a Hindu religious festival, was “poorly timed” and “arrogant,” but planned to distribute it anyway. Perhaps a pile of these booklets and a match could dispel darkness where it’s the darkest.

The U.S. Customs Service is moving to fire an inspector who went public with charges that black and Hispanic airline passengers were being targeted for drug searches because of their race. Although the allegations led to Congressional hearings and sweeping changes in Customs policy, officials say Cathy Harris must be fired because she violated agency rules regarding the handling of the internal documents she used as proof — to look the other way would be to show favoritism. Too bad this aversion to bias wasn’t in effect when they were strip searching everyone whose skin was the wrong shade.

When Tropical Storm Floyd swept across low-lying New Jersey in September, flooding thousands of homes, Lorraine Zdeb of Millstone opened an emergency animal shelter on her 5 1/2 acres of relatively high ground and cared for nearly 100 of her neighbor’s pets until the water receeded. Now, she’s being prosecuted by Millstone for violating the town zoning ordinance. While the FBI, Congress and the White House crow over new statistics showing a 10-percent drop in crime since last year, this — along with the Cathy Harris/Customs case — suggests that there’s still a lot of good deeds going unpunished.