Short Stories

For Those Who Think They Have Everything The Whale Center in Oakland suggests you combine “large” with “largess” and adopt a gray whale. For 50 tax-deductible dollars a year (and you don’t have to buy it a Cabbage Patch doll), you can adopt one of the 17,000-plus leviathans that cruise California’s coastal waters. You’ll receive an adoption certificate listing you as the adoptive parent, the name you choose for your new offspring and its biographical information, including ID number, age and sex (lest you scar the poor thing for life with the wrong gender-engendering name), and where and when it was last seen. You’ll also get an official photo of your little big one, although it’s likely to be a paparazzi- type grab shot of flanks or flukes, since these babies are a shy lot. It’s 10 o’clock--do you know where your cetacean is? Book of the Millennium The Domesday Book is coming--again. This 5-million-word tome is William the Conqueror’s ambitious land, human and occasional livestock survey of 11th-Century England, which he had overrun. As the book celebrates its 900th birthday this year, it’s fitting that, in real-estate-mad California, UC Santa Barbara is compiling the data bases for the newest editions. “If you’re of English ancestry, you’re probably in there--maybe as a slave,” says associate researcher Robin Fleming, who with colleague Katie Mack is computerizing the data. Within a year Anglophiles can buy, for $150, any “shire” (county) in England--meaning facsimile pages with a new Michelin-like key-code: tiny pigs, mills, churches, and a crown for royal property. Libraries that want more than just the computerized statistics from 1086 will have to wait for the multivolume, $3,000, scholarly edition, and bibliophiles can, in a few years, fight over the 125 deluxe editions, bound like the original in stout English oak. As for William himself, “he’d love this,” muses Fleming, whose work began more than three years ago. “But I think he’d be a little disgusted because our computerized version is taking longer than his original did.” Autographs From his hot-selling poster of a ’59 Cadillac a few years ago, Harold James Cleworth discovered that although Californians often jettison their spouses, they are always faithful to their automobiles. So the one-time London illustrator has become the portrait painter to the cars. Silicon Valley tycoon Thomas Perkins brought his 1933 Duesenberg for a sitting in the artist’s Venice studio, and Cleworth has painted the chili-pepper-red Lamborghini of television actor John Schneider. The price--pardon, commission-- of these portraits starts at $10,000, and there are cars he won’t paint. “A lot of these neo-classics,” he says, “make my blood curdle.” Cleworth, who drives a turquoise-and-cream ’58 Chrysler Imperial, says cars are quite the perfect artist’s model. An Edsel, which has “the silliest face I’ve ever seen,” can hold that smile forever.