For Your People’s Park Dirt, Call 1-800-Berkeley : Snaphsots of life in the Golden State.

Nuclear-free Berkeley, the People’s Republic of Berkeley, Berserkeley, that city that takes its politics so very seriously, may be selling out . . . or selling itself. It is a notion alarmingly close to capitalism: Council member Carla Woodworth suggests that the city market its own memorabilia. She was thinking of those signs proclaiming Berkeley a nuclear-free city; others have in mind roach clips shaped like the UC Berkeley campanile, or dirt from People’s Park--the Mother Earth of the Free Speech Movement--or Silly Putty bullets fired during park riots. Why not a collector’s plate series, “The Radicals of Berkeley?”

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Assault Weapons

Since the state’s Assault Weapon Control Act took effect in 1990, a total of 61,837 assault weapons, owned by 37,485 Californians,* have been registered with the state Department of Justice. More than 70 types of assault weapons are covered by the act, including semiautomatic rifles, Uzis and shotguns. Below are the numbers of owners and assault weapons registered through May of this year, ranked by the top 10 counties:

COUNTY OWNERS WEAPONS Los Angeles 12,954 21,451 Orange 3,198 5,455 San Diego 2,723 4,524 San Bernardino 1,895 2,872 Santa Clara 1,630 2,854 Alameda 1,488 2,529 Riverside 1,270 2,085 Sacramento 1,262 2,051 San Mateo 928 1,842 Contra Costa 1,082 1,717

* Four out-of-state residents have registered five weapons for use inside California.

Source: California Department of Justice

Compiled by Times researcher TRACY THOMAS

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Into the woods: The other boys of summer are gathering again. One fortnight each year, some of the nation’s most powerful men--such as every Republican President since Silent Cal--have packed up all their cares and woes and headed for the exclusive, expensive Bohemian Grove encampment in Sonoma County, for edifying lectures, first-name networking, cross-dressing skits and manly horseplay. This year, the high and mighty will have to get down and funky without David Gergen, who had to quit the all-male San Francisco club to join an even more exclusive circle as presidential counselor. “We hope somebody will come from the Clinton Administration,” says Bohemian spokesman Dick Arnold forlornly. “And we don’t run around naked--too many hornets in the daytime, too cold at night,” he adds. Sorry, Dick: Bill usually doesn’t go anywhere Hillary isn’t welcome. The club has staved off women’s attempts to join, saying they would inhibit men from doing free-spirited guy stuff, like the time-honored Bohemian tradition of urinating on trees. No objection there: At least they can’t leave the seat up on a sequoia.

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Creature discomforts: First it was a pilot whale being petted on camera by a Watsonville woman as a photographer taped the tender moment for an “I Witness Video.” A San Francisco federal judge will be deciding whether that’s harassment under the Marine Mammals Protection Act. Then, two men cranked off shots at Xewe, one of the first California condors hatched in captivity and released into the wild. They missed. Nine endangered desert tortoises were rescued this summer in the Mojave Desert from men collecting them to eat at a Cambodian wedding in Modesto. A humpback whale got tangled in an gill net off the Ventura coast just this week. Now some Captain Ahab manque is harpooning federally protected sea lions in San Diego Bay, and the fed-up Feds are offering a $1,000 reward. Maybe they’ll also extend Be Kind to Animals Week to the other 51.

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The real Michelin Guide: Prose master John McPhee proves again in a recent New Yorker that he can make anything readable: “The world’s largest pile of scrap tires is not visible from Interstate 5, in Stanislaus County, California. But it’s close . . . the hills conceal the tires from the traffic . . . the tires are so deep that they form their own topography--their own escarpments, their own overhanging cliffs . . . from the highest elevations of this thick and drifted black mantle, you can look east a hundred miles and see snow on the Sierras.” Afterward, you can take the kids to Yosemite.

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There she goes: After seven lean years--well, slender but healthy years--the Miss California pageant leaves San Diego (motto “America’s Finest City”) for Fresno (motto “So Close to So Many Places”). For the six decades before it was in San Diego, the pageant that sends a California woman to the Miss America contest each year was staged in Santa Cruz, but it went south in 1986 after “Myth Kalifornia” protests got more press than the original.

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The price tag of peace: Ever since the Pentagon began closing up shops, the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office, the folks who stage the military’s garage sales, have been doing just fine. Civil service auctioneers put on the block everything from ammo boxes--empty--to old uniforms--also empty--at auctions such as the one Aug. 3 out on the Marine base in Barstow. “This budget reduction stuff has us busy as the dickens,” says Mike Henderson, who got out of the civilian ad game years ago. Note to anyone organizing your own small country: for destroyers, landing craft and the like, you still have to buy through the catalogue.

EXIT LINE

“They (the competing bills) deal with such a difficult issue. It is so hard to make a choice, so it’s easier not to make a choice.”

--Sen. Charles M. Calderon (D-Whittier), who abstained from voting on one no-smoking bill and was undecided on another.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.