LOTT O’ DOLLARS: When your county is...

LOTT O’ DOLLARS: When your county is bankrupt, an extra $50 million can’t hurt. . . . The state Lottery Commission this week released its 1994 financial report. Orange County’s share of the near-$700 million pool that went to education the past fiscal year: $52,404,778. About 20% of that went to the four local community college districts, the rest to elementary and high school education. . . . Biggest share: Santa Ana Unified schools, at $4.7 million, with Garden Grove Unified also above the $4-million mark.

THE HUMAN TOUCH: The very latest in post office design is Rancho Santa Margarita’s “postal store” (E1). Using modern serve-yourself techniques, the store’s success has persuaded the Postal Service to adopt the plan nationwide. . . . But it’s not for all post offices. The one that serves Leisure World in Laguna Hills is not likely to change at all, says a local postal official. “They refuse to use machines. They insist on live people serving them. I think they enjoy the human contact. Some come in and buy only one stamp.”

SAFE FRIDAY: One way to keep city youth away from gangs: Keep them too busy having fun. Safe Haven, a nonprofit program, now offers “Friday Night Live,” message-oriented entertainment twice a month at the Jerome Center in Santa Ana. . . . Magali Navarrete, a Safe Haven leader, cites one poem the youths heard there, from the Chicano Poets Society: “It doesn’t matter if you don’t have money, food or clothes, just remember, si se puede (it can be done).”

SOUNDS CORNY? Here’s a new one for the beach on the Balboa Peninsula you didn’t see before: roasted corn. Vincent Panaia of Irvine got the OK from city planners to set up a fence around a corn-roasting machine. . . . “It’s roasted in the husk,” Panaia explains, then the husk is shucked off. Only one planning commissioner, Mitchell Brown, voted against him. Too tacky for Newport Beach, Brown decided.