<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : Governor Lends a Hand to Anti-Horcher Campaign

Republicans in the 60th Assembly District got a flyer urging them to recall Assemblyman Paul Horcher, once an R from Diamond Bar, now an I for independent.

It was Horcher’s vote for Willie Brown that halted the Republican victory roll to the speakership. For that act of betrayal, says the mailer, “there is only one proper response”--recall. Gov. Pete Wilson sent along a letter agreeing.

Included is a photo of Brown, laughing. But what’s that white thing draped over his shoulder? The photo was edited from a 1992 Associated Press photo, and the white thing is Wilson’s left hand, the one he signs bills with. The rest of the governor has been cut out of the mailer photo. In the original, governor and Speaker are smiling during the budget stalemate after someone asked whether they get along. The answer must be, when it suits them.

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Chaos couture 1995: Who needs Paris or Milan for guidance in chic? Lending an altogether new meaning to the fashion “runway” was Gov. Pete Wilson, dressed for yet another helicopter tour above (choose one) flood/quake/riot/fire/ -ravaged Southern California.

This year’s wardrobe for surveying natural disasters looks new, perhaps a little something from the Governors’ Wear catalogue: dark blue waterproof fabric jacket (Land’s End? Eddie Bauer?), green plaid lumberjack shirt and jeans.

The only dissonant touch was ankle-high tan suede boots, not what disaster people have in mind when they say, “Wear boots.”

Understandably, the governor confined part of his walking tour to the dry strip of PCH.

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Right instincts, wrong season: A call about a mountainside fire sent the Big Bear Lake Fire Department out with all due speed . . . to find, according to the Bear Valley Voice, that the smoke from the putative fire was a cloud.

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Blood, toil, sweat and beers: Thirty years dead, and he’s still getting toasted. Winston Churchill, the echt Englishman, has another encomium: Churchill theme pubs coming to the well-known Anglophile strongholds of San Francisco and San Jose.

The first is to open in June, sponsors say, to tie in with V-E Day 50th anniversary celebrations.

“They are hoping,” says spokesman Martin Robins, “to produce an English pub where you can step back into time with stone floors to stub your cigars in.”

Now hold on a Prop. 99 minute here. Calling these pubs “Winston” doesn’t automatically mean you can go around smoking in them.

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Radio daze: First Congress, now radio--the GOP just keeps on coming. Mere months after adopting a liberal talk-show format, one station is tossing the talk on the ash heap of broadcast history, instead lining up a conservative “Murderer’s Row” with the likes of Pat Buchanan and Ronald Reagan’s non-dancing son, Michael. The station: KSFO, in that conservative bastion, San Francisco.

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Prison vs. Education

It costs $20,760 a year to house an inmate in a California state prison, while it costs $12,432 to house and educate a student at any University of California campus. More than half the cost of housing a prisoner goes for security. Here is a breakdown of the overall annual costs.

Prison UC Student Category Inmate (Any Campus) Inmate Support/College Room, Board $5,762 $5,406 Prison Reception, Diagnosis 249 NA Prison Security 10,788 NA Health Care/Student Personal Expenses 2,732 1,402 Inmate Work-Training/College Fees 1,229 4,111 Books, Supplies, Transportation NA 1,513 TOTALS $20,760 $12,432

Sources: State Department of Corrections, University of California

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Fly me to the moon: Where does a millionaire California builder and art collector fly? Anywhere he likes. For using his American Express card to buy Roy Lichtenstein’s icon of pop art “I . . . I’m Sorry” at Sotheby’s, Eli Broad earned 2.5 million frequent flier miles.

That’s enough to send three platoons to Kuwait and back, or several lifetimes worth of air commutes to L.A. from some of Kaufman & Broad’s far-flung subdivisions.

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The Maple Leave Forever: Bravo, eh, to those Canadians who answered the “Dateline” quest for Canadian cultural contributions for Californians to boycott in response to a snippy Toronto editorial about this state’s voting patterns. Among them: William Shatner, Peter Jennings, the Winnipeg ballet, Mary Pickford, John Candy, Margaret Atwood, Gordon Lightfoot, Robertson Davies, Monty Hall, and of course Sgt. Preston of the Mounties and his dog, Yukon King.

EXIT LINE

“No Way Dude”

--New traffic signs on West Lodi Avenue in the eponymous Central Valley town, to steer skateboarders off the sidewalks. Quoted in the Lodi News-Sentinel.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.