Putting the Milk of Human Kindness to the Test

Public breast-feeding got dumped, but the state Assembly now has the pump. Although a bill by Assemblyman Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) to permit breast-feeding in public got trounced in committee--one opponent said it would allow women “to totally disrobe from the waist up”--Speaker Curt Pringle’s chief of staff, Deborah Gonzalez, got her boss to designate a room in the Capitol for working mothers to pump breast milk for their babies.

And GOP and Democratic women are wrangling over a date: whether to set the annual “Women of the Year” observance on May 13--the day after Mother’s Day--as Republicans prefer, or March 18, an octave of days before the California primary, as Democrats wish.

In a press release noting that the GOP wasn’t so much as consulted on this or many other matters when Democrats ran things, Assemblywoman Paula L. Boland (R-Granada Hills) declared that the May date had nothing to do with Mother’s Day, “but it makes you wonder why Democrats hate Mother’s Day. That certainly does represent their constituents’ feelings.”

Two hours and 40 minutes later came a mandatory correction fax: “That certainly does not represent their constituents’ feelings.”

Living on Death Row

With one week remaining before serial killer William Bonin is set to die by lethal injection, here are figures showing the growth in California’s Death Row population. The ethnic makeup of the prisoners currently is 45% white, 38% black, 13% Latino and 4% other races. Eight of the condemned are women.

Year: Prisoners

1996: 436*

1995: 399

1994: 381

1993: 354

1992: 318

1991: 299

1990: 273

1989: 249

* As of Feb. 1

Source: California Department of Corrections

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Return of the native: He was renowned as the last of his tribe, the Yahi, found near Oroville in 1911. But Ishi--”man” in his language; he never told his real name--was probably not the last full-blooded Yahi after all.

It was the arrowheads that he chipped during the five years he lived under the protection of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber that gave Berkeley researcher Steven Shackley the clues. Ishi’s arrow points bore little resemblance to historic Yahi arrowheads. And Ishi was tall and slim; the Yahi and related tribes were short and stout.

After Ishi died in 1916, his fame endured, thanks in large measure to the book “Ishi in Two Worlds,” by anthropologist Theodora Kroeber.

Rather than diminishing Ishi’s significance, Shackley says, the findings show the cultural pressure that the white presence put on the dwindling number of 19th-century California Indians to marry their enemies to survive.

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Kind of random acts: Those warm waves emanating from the state capital? This is Random Acts of Kindness Week, as declared by the Assembly, although no quota was set. It outdoes the federal government’s mere Random Acts of Kindness Day a year ago.

The previous week witnessed a public pledge of accountability, signed by 23 lawmakers of both parties and drafted by the citizens group Your Voices Count. The eighth and final article pledges that participants in the lawmaking process will be treated “with dignity and respect.”

Next step: reviving the Self Esteem Task Force.

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My kingdom for a clothes-horse: Willie Brown, the pol whose clothes are almost as smart as he is, has dropped the other, less liberal Italian shoe: no casual day in the mayor’s office.

That means no jeans or sneakers in the town that’s home to Levi Strauss & Co.; if some staffer made so bold, “I’d send them home and dock their pay,” the new San Francisco mayor told KCBS radio.

All right, maybe he didn’t mean it, about docking pay--although Brown himself has been known to show up a trifle late after last-minute wardrobe agonizing--but he does expect professionalism in manner and dress, his spokesman said.

Perhaps the mayor can steer the sartorially substandard to the San Francisco thrift store where his tax-deductible castoffs are on sale on occasion. The last time, it was eight Versace, Zegna, Brioni and Armani suits, an Italian tuxedo, 18 shirts, a dozen pairs of slacks and other haberdasher’s dreams--on sale three days before his swearing-in, in case people hadn’t a thing to wear.

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One offs: A Mountain View jeweler who used defective Pentium microchips to make chic chip jewelry at the behest of Intel Corp. is suing, saying Intel Corp. commissioned the bijoux designs, then gave them to another jewelry-maker . . . Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross’ lecture series at a La Jolla women’s clinic is entitled: “Planet Menopause: Explore With Us Where No Man Has Ever Gone Before” . . . The nation’s only PEZ museum is in Burlingame . . . Modesto Junior College stopped identifying students by their Social Security numbers after an English teacher allegedly used them to get new credit cards . . . Dolly, the 3 3/4-inch doll who survived the Donner Party disaster in her owner’s apron pocket, is leaving her display case at Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento to play the palace of museums--the Smithsonian.

EXIT LINE

“Not even land mines will keep me away.”

--Armando Licon, of Zacatecas, Mexico, waiting to cross illegally at the border to return to his job as a Los Angeles gardener. Quoted in the Dallas Morning News.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.