<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : Wilson Cooks Up Some of Clinton’s Tasty Leftovers

The budget has been balanced, but Gov. Pete Wilson’s reelection campaign is borrowing again.

First it used staged crime footage from the Texas governor’s race in a Wilson TV spot.

Now there’s a new device: a fake menu from “Kathleen Brown’s House of Waffles,” each dish a critique of her alleged position-switching.

Cute idea. So cute that the Clinton campaign launched it two years ago: a fake menu from “George Bush’s Waffle House.”

From the Bush menu: “George Bush will be happy to serve you . . . whatever you want.”

Brown menu: “Kathleen Brown will personally customize orders to fit any group.”

Bush menu: “Pay Raise Souffle” (Bush signs federal employee pay raise, then later proposes 5% cut for higher-earning workers).

Brown menu: “Sun Valley Souffle” (Brown bills taxpayers for part of several trips to her Idaho vacation home, reimbursing the state on the day she announced for governor).

Bush: “Sunny Side Up” (Bush saying one month that the country is not in a recession, then the next month saying, “We’re in a global recession.”)

Brown: “California--Sunny Side Down” (her ads call her “America’s Best Treasurer for America’s Worst Economy”)

The Wilson campaign menu does add Brown Plate Specials, “restaurant reviews” (“big league waffling”--San Francisco Chronicle) and yummy drawings of waffles and pie.

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I have saved the best stuff of my generation . . . Stanford has bought all 300,000 items in Beat poet Alan Ginsburg’s collection, and what a haul it is.

The tennis shoes he was wearing when he got kicked out of Czechoslovakia. Old electric bills (presumably paid). Beard clippings. Dried vines. Oh yes, and some original manuscripts, correspondence with the likes of RFK and William Burroughs, and 400 or so journals begun when Ginsburg was 11.

Stanford is not telling the price it paid, but five years ago the collection was reputedly appraised at $1.2 million.

When you’re as big as Ginsburg, they don’t call it junk. They call it “archives.”

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The SAT and English

California’s diversity shows up increasingly in the type of students who take the rigorous Scholastic Aptitude Test. Although the majority of college-bound seniors taking the 1994 SAT were native English-speakers, their numbers are declining. This shows the change since 1989 in the number of test-takers whose first tongue included a language other than English:

1989 % 1994 % % Change 1989-94 English 76,300 71 76,551 65 -6 English and another 15,242 14 17,748 15 +1 Other language 16,448 15 24,000 20 +5

Source: College Board, San Jose

Researched by TRACY THOMAS/Los Angeles Times

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Double or nothing: The legislative session is over. You’d think they’d be sick of dealing with each other.

But Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren are still going at it over Lungren’s office investigating a complaint that “casino night” games at Brown’s annual end-of-session party constituted illegal gambling. (About 18 California firms stage fund-raising “casino nights,” Brown says, for clients from churches to law enforcement associations).

Brown concluded that Lungren must be miffed about not getting his comprehensive gambling control bill approved.

Even before mocking Lungren for saying the inquiry was undertaken by his staff without his knowledge--”I am reminded of a piece of wisdom imparted to me by my daddy many years ago: It is a poor workman . . . who blames his tools”--the Speaker had delivered an acid rebuke on the Assembly floor.

He was singled out, Brown said, because he opposed the gaming bill. “I guess,” said the Speaker, “it was last done in Nazi Germany.”

The only Nazi-era moment that comes immediately to mind is when Claude Rains--Capt. Renault in “Casablanca”--closes down Rick’s even as the croupier hands him his winnings.

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Now they can really call it a runway: Savaged for years by feminists and podiatrists, one high and mighty icon of the Miss America pageant has been spiked--the high-heeled pumps that competitors wore in the swimsuit competition. In Atlantic City on Saturday, contestants will parade in bare feet.

Yet a former Miss California, Deanna Hardwick of Seal Beach, is already nostalgic. “For me, being of the old school, I’d feel it was unnatural not to have them. But let’s face it, the swimsuit in the format that so many people view it is not natural anyway.”

(Her “old school” was 1979--practically one pump in the grave.)

EXIT LINE

“There is a song that says ‘Abba Father,’ and it is so appropriate that our hands are up in the air while I am getting a workout.”

--Carol Leach, who works out at an aerobics class at St. Philip the Apostle Church in Bakersfield, where two churches are offering fitness programs exercising to hymns. Quoted in the Bakersfield Californian.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.