<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : San Francisco’s D.A. Has His Guard Up After Firings

It is etched into San Francisco’s civic memory almost as deeply as the big earthquake: Dan White, angry after quitting his post as supervisor and then not getting reappointed when he changed his mind, crept into City Hall with a gun in 1978 and killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

The city’s new district attorney may fear something of the same, for the San Francisco Chronicle has reported that D.A. Terence “K.O.” Hallinan, a former supervisor himself, has posted a guard in his office after firing 14 prosecutors.

The form-letter pink slips were left on prosecutors’ desks one day during lunch, shortly after Hallinan took office last month.

“They’ve posted an investigator there, presumably in case one of us decides to go in and shoot him,” one veteran prosecutor told the newspaper. “In all my years, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

No more mass or anonymous firings, Hallinan has promised.

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The Platemakers

Inmates at Folsom State Prison have made the license plates for California motor vehicles since 1947, stamping them out lately at a pace of about 36,000 a day. Inmates must have at least the equivalent of a high school diploma, pass a literacy test and have no history of escape attempts or arson.

Year: Plates Made (in millions)

1991: 6.4

1992: 6.7

1993: 3.85

1994: 5.5

1995: 5.6

Source: Prison Industry Authority, Folsom State Prison

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Precipitous matters: Let it snow, but please--not too much. Or too little.

The state’s water resources folks were forced to put off their annual snow survey at Echo Summit in the Sierra for a few days this week because of “the possibility of too much snow.”

But at the other end of the gauge, the lawmen and lawwomen of Big Bear know when there hasn’t been enough snow: burglaries go up.

High unemployment in snow-related occupations means that people will filch not just TVs and VCRs and quick-hock items, says Sgt. Lance Clark in the Bear Valley Voice, but “stuff to live on”--toilet paper, food, soap and toothpaste. (Watch for an upcoming monograph on the link between global warming and tooth decay in ski resorts.)

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Not the same old song and dance: At Wednesday’s late-night finish to the Assembly’s whirlwind session, Assemblyman Larry Bowler, an Elk Grove Republican, called over colleague Jim Brulte of Rancho Cucamonga. Then Bowler--who, on a party convention panel in 1994, warned that too much pop culture incites “sexual deviancy, violence and a pro-dope lifestyle”--switched on a boom box and filled the chamber with the Beatles singing “Revolution.”

The majority GOP whooped and sang along while the Democrats sat with folded arms and dour faces. When the hootenanny ended, Assemblywoman Diane Martinez (D-Rosemead) groused that John Lennon would turn in his grave if he heard it: “John Lennon was a true revolutionary. This is a mockery.”

Then Santa Monica Democrat Sheila Kuehl, possessed of a wicked sense of humor, rose with a grin, looked over at her GOP colleagues and said, “If you play it backwards”--and she paused with her actor’s timing--”it says, ‘Watch out for Nov. 5.’ ”

Such is life in the baby-boomer Legislature.

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One offs: The hot new sport in the hot rich stretches, says Palm Springs Life, is golf cart polo. . . . Two San Jose high school students studying the Depression nearly got shot by police as they tried to stage and videotape a 1930s-era holdup at an ice cream store. . . . Fresno’s public transit has added a fleet of 55 yellow bicycles, left unlocked around downtown in a park-and-ride-and-park honor arrangement. . . . The oldest known survivor of the 1906 San Francisco quake, Claire O’Rourke of Plumas County, celebrated her 111th birthday with an oatmeal breakfast, as she has since childhood, musing, “We used raw milk. Or was it no milk? I don’t remember. Would you? That’s over 100 years ago.”

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The illustrated brushoff: Some very vivid art is commercial art, so why the plain wrap on that discreet packet, the condom?

The “Prophylactic Artifice” competition asks artists under 25 to submit designs for condom packages. Deadline is Valentine’s Day--which is also the start of National Condom Week. Four winners will each be awarded $100, and the glory of seeing their conceptions on 40,000 contraceptive packages.

Contest sponsors are the Marin AIDS Project and the group Public Art Works. The controversy of Public Art Works’ last venture, “Have you seen me?” photos and accounts of minority kids on grocery bags, will be as nothing compared to the likely lamentations from this one.

Now if it was a slogan they wanted instead of an image, there’s, “Your sex life isn’t boring--why should your birth control be?”

EXIT LINE

“How does it feel to be the densest person ever to chair the budget committee?”

--Assemblyman John Burton (D-San Francisco).

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“It feels great!”

--Freshman Assemblyman Gary Miller (R-Diamond Bar), the new chairman of said committee.

--Exchange in the Assembly members lounge in Sacramento.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.