<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : A Couple of Items With a Startling Ring to Them

That’s why they call them hotlines.

The 900 number set up by Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren so people can find out about registered child molesters in the neighborhood was working fine and dandy, so says California Lawyer magazine--except in Humboldt County. There, callers were put through to a phone sex service, thus hearing about offensive sex instead of sex offenders. (“Hi, I’m Dan, I’m a lawyer and a Virgo with brown hair and blue eyes.”)

And in another California clime, a La Jolla woman who wants the Ross Perot party’s nomination for Congress in the 49th District endorses chain gang labor for career criminals and corporal punishment for lesser offenses. The candidate’s name is Mistress Madison, a professional dominatrix, whose business phone is the same as her campaign number and her political aspirations vis-a-vis the sitting congressman, Republican Brian Bilbray: The last four digits of her phone number are WHIP.

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The real bay to watch: The next time someone--let us say, Bob Dole--casts aspersions on Hollywood as a place of intrigue and license, let him come to San Francisco.

In the stretch toward Tuesday’s election day, the leading candidate for district attorney, son of a prominent left-wing lawyer, acknowledges a paternity suit from his 10-year-old son by a flight attendant when he was between spouses. Says Terrence Hallinan: “I love the little guy. He’s on my family health plan.”

And the midweek debate between the two runoff candidates for mayor found the incumbent, Frank Jordan, waving a dollar bill to suggest his opponent’s cupidity, when in fact Willie Brown wouldn’t even so much as blow his nose for a dollar.

The mayor’s police chief is on trial across the bay in Oakland on charges of sexual harassment (including a French kiss). And the mayor’s wife had to deny a rumored lesbian affair on the front page of the Sunday paper, characterizing the notion as “stupid,” a word that may backfire in a heavily gay voting town.

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Cat scratch fibber: He went turkey hunting in Napa County, and it seems he bagged one--himself.

The Charles Stewart of the Animal Kingdom award may go to the 27-year-old hunter who shot himself in the foot with a .20-gauge shotgun with a turkey magnum load, then made up a tale of being attacked by two mountain lions, perhaps to cover his embarrassment.

Fish and Game investigators closed the books on the matter after finding nothing on the Dixon man’s wound (the foot where he says he was cat-attacked), his boot or his clothing that bore any traces of mountain lion jaws, claws or hairs. Hound dogs failed to find any cat scat or tracks from a wounded mountain lion. Besides, cougars don’t hunt in pairs, and go for the throat, not the feet. The “short, coarse golden hairs” were plant fibers.

Charles Stewart was the Boston man who shot his wife and blamed it on a black gunman. Cougars were the Villains of the Month in several recent attacks on sheep and hunters in the area, but Fish and Game folk have concluded that this occasion was not one of them.

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Median Incomes

Married California taxpayers filing jointly in 1993 had a median income of $40,706, meaning half of all joint tax filers were above that level and half below. Over the past 22 years, the tony Bay Area counties of Marin, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara have consistently reported the highest median incomes. Here are the top 10 counties in 1993, the most recent year available.

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COUNTY Median Income 1.Marin $60,689 2.Contra Costa $55,888 3. Santa Clara $54,672 4. San Mateo $52,981 5.Alameda $49,615 6.Solano $47,457 7.Orange $46,730 8.Ventura $44,764 9.Placer $44,157 10.Sacramento $43,502

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Source: California Franchise Tax Board

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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A fatal choice: Another kind of freedom of choice in California--the state has asked to reopen the San Quentin gas chamber as an alternative to execution by lethal injection.

Just over a year ago, federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel barred the venerable technique of execution in the prison’s two-seat gas chamber as “inhumane,” saying it created “anxiety, panic, terror and pain.” While the state’s appeal of her ruling didn’t dispute any of that, it does want her finding that the gas chamber violates constitutional standards to be overturned.

After all, the same year that Patel ruled, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals did not toss out Washington state’s use of the gallows.

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One offs: A San Bernardino man, the father of 17 children, has another big number to his name--his “third strike” conviction for defrauding the welfare system of $16,500, which earned him 200 years in prison. . . . City budgets being as meager as they are, Watsonville cop Bradley Chagnon didn’t have a real police dog to send into the crawl space of a house to roust a sleeping man, but he barked convincingly enough that the man emerged on his own. . . . Fir-purloining by the tree thief of Rio Dell may be foiled by hourly police patrols intended to keep the municipal Christmas tree from being stolen, as it was last year, right down to the extension cord.

EXIT LINE

“You’re not going to get anything from a pig but a grunt.”

--Samuel Patterson, chairman of the Reparations Committee for African Americans, which drafted a lawsuit seeking reparations for slavery, criticizing a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision turning down the group’s suit.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.