Snapshots of life in the Golden State. : Subject of Sheep Shot Is Basque-ing in Popularity

The R-rated joshing goes on--R for Republican.

This space recently recounted how GOP Assembly Leader Jim Brulte said waggishly that he chose his Bakersfield colleague, Trice Harvey, to head the agriculture committee in part because Harvey “has a proclivity for sheep,” and “in his district, that helps.”

Now Harvey has weighed in on the lamb slam:

“I tell you one thing: I’m a very, very popular man here with all the Basque people,” traditionally, the sheep ranchers in his neck of the Central Valley. “Everybody took it the way it should be taken.” One Basque restaurant has framed a blowup of Harvey’s remarks--and newspaper photos of him with his woolly friends--and hung it just inside the door.

“I have friends in the Assembly who would die, would give anything, to get their picture in the L.A. Times.”

About Mr. Brulte, whose “tender age” and upbringing argue little knowledge of sheep, says the gentleman from Bakersfield: “I appreciate what he said to get me in the paper too.”

The lambs pictured do not know that they have been linked to political lions, and, says Harvey, will not be told.

So far, we’ve heard only silence from the lambs.

Shrinking Farmland

With the increasing urbanization of California, more than 4 million acres of farmland was lost between 1978 and 1992, when the latest agriculture census was conducted.

Here is the decline in farm acreage in the biggest agricultural county and five Southern California counties.

Percentage of Decline, 1978-1992

Statewide: 12.5%

Kern: 9.5%

Los Angeles: 50.3%

Orange: 63.8%

Riverside: 19.5%

San Bernardino: 40.4%

Ventura: 5.8%

Source: Calif. Department of Food and Agriculture

Researched by NONA YATES / Los Angeles Times

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No nudes are good nudes: The “posture studies nude photo scandal” spreads west.

For more than 20 years, into the 1960s, new freshmen at Ivy League or Seven Sisters schools were routinely photographed front, back and sides, naked or nearly so, for some since-discredited study about body shape and intelligence. We’re talking Yale and Harvard and Vassar and Wellesley; we’re talking George Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nora Ephron and George Pataki, New York’s governor.

Mills College in Oakland has now confessed to such photo follies, but reassures its alumnae that their fears went up in smoke when the college incinerated the files in 1967.

Similar reassurances were forthcoming from the Smithsonian Institution, which swears that last month it incinerated 100 pounds of photos and negatives of unclad Yalies.

And an alum of UC Berkeley’s graduate school, a Bay Area teacher, recalls being similarly snapped in the buff in the early 1960s, though he has neither proof nor proof sheets. “I remember being completely unclothed . . . at that time, we were a pretty docile group. I asked myself, ‘Did I dream this?’ No, I did not. I went through it.”

He went on to join the Free Speech movement.

Coincidence? We don’t think so.

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Political muscle: Jack LaLanne, the man they called a “physical culturist,” who took fitness from crazy to craze, has been named to the governor’s council on physical fitness and sports.

The 80-year-old LaLanne celebrated his 70th by towing 70 boats bearing 70 people through the inhospitable waters of Long Beach Harbor--handcuffed.

The council’s chairman, last action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger--who ascended to his state post after being bumped from the President’s Council on Physical Fitness by the Democratic President he did not campaign for--pronounced the octogenarian “a great role model, and he is my hero.”

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Expert protection: For want of a comma, the point was lost. A news release from Westec Security inverted its whole message by omitting the critical punctuation mark:

“TIPS ON SAFEGUARDING YOUR HOME FROM WESTEC SECURITY EXPERT.”

If that’s the case, forget the tips. Just give us the expert’s name and photo, and we’ll pass it along to Neighborhood Watch.

EXIT LINE

“This is just a way of . . . letting government go right into the living rooms of San Franciscans.”

--San Francisco Supervisor Angela Alioto, on the prospect of gavel-to-gavel daytime TV coverage of the board’s often discordant, occasionally amusing but unfailingly engrossing meetings, which would go boldly head to head against a couple of soap operas and shows like “Oprah.”

California Dateline appears every other Friday.