A Spanking New Twist on Letterman’s Nightly List

Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle may be torn between presidential suitors Bob Dole and Lamar Alexander, having pledged to each, but he’ll always have a job in comedy. Pringle delivered a Lettermanly top-10 list of bills mocking the bona fide legislation that the new and unwonted Republican majority approved. Among them: splitting California into three states--Northern, Southern and Rush Limbaughland--and posting the National Guard at the Nevada border to keep businesses in.

Good parody, of course, comes so near the truth that it is often barely distinguishable from it. One item on Pringle’s faux-bill list permits Mickey Conroy--who wrote the two defunct corporal punishment bills--to paddle anyone he likes.

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Rear-guard action: First it was “Showgirls,” which showed too much girl. Now it’s California Tan, which bared too much derriere epidermis for the doyens of San Mateo County’s bus line.

The district’s 300 buses will not roll with any ads promoting “nudity, tobacco and alcohol,” declared transit board member Adele Della Santina, whose board nixed the photo promo for the sleaze-to-success film “Showgirls.” The unedited California Tan ad, she said, is “about as offensive as the Coppertone baby ad”--the classic dog-tugs-to-show-toddler’s-tan-line.

In its defense, company spokeswoman Mandy Kisthardt points out that the ad had been refused nowhere else, and it “has gone nationwide--even in Utah.”

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Vote Jagger . . . no, not that one: He’s got a credit card, a campaign committee and an answering service. Now all he needs is a birthday--his 18th, at which age California would permit Brian Jagger to run for lieutenant governor. The present lieutenant governor, Democrat Gray Davis, squired the Cool (upper case, as in the Sierra foothills town) 17-year-old around his official digs this week, posed for photos that he admonished Jagger not to use in his campaign literature, but failed to persuade the young Republican of the error of his partisan ways.

Jagger--whose suit and tie outspiff just about everyone else’s in the Capitol since Willie Brown went off to shepherd San Francisco-- is shooting for the 1998 ballot, on which his competitors will in all likelihood be a cast of thousands of term-limit outcasts old enough to be fans of that other Jagger guy.

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Medical Professionals

The state Medical Board licenses 189,801 physicians and other medical professionals. About a quarter of the licenses are held by residents of other states or nations. Here are selected categories licensed as of June 30, 1995, compared to three years earlier:

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LICENSE TYPE 1992 1995 Physician/Surgeon 103,073 102,622 Physical Therapist 12,895 16,066 Respiratory Care Practitioner 12,104 15,143 Psychologist 10,038 12,552 Speech Pathologist 6,388 8,306 Acupuncturist 2,722 4,444 Physician Assistant 2,189 3,023 Podiatrist 2,158 2,600 Psychologist Assistant 2,330 1,883 Audiologist 1,058 1,412

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Source: Medical Board of California

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Hot news: First amendment updates: An Oxnard dockworker faces trial for touching off a string of arson fires--using tabloid newspapers as fuel. Tabloids with missing pages were found in the suspect’s home, say officials who are clueless about the choice of tinder.

And San Francisco has made it a fineable offense to steal newspapers. The regulation is not directed at a former police chief who was fired after some of his officers dumped thousands of copies of a local paper that bore an unflattering fake photo of the chief, but at those who raid news racks to sell the goods to recyclers. Henceforth, the news rack rule is: read it, then reap.

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Cross purposes: This particular violation of Rule 4103 was something apart from the usual transgression of setting fire to a pile of dry brush. What the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District inspector discovered smoking up the winter sky was a 30-foot wooden cross, wrapped in diesel-soaked burlap and put to the torch.

This is the second cross that Bill Albers, truck driver and soi-disant Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, has set aflame on his land near Modesto, according to the district; a lawsuit is in the works that could mean an injunction and civil penalties of as much as $50,000 per burn, making the pastime a costly cross to bear.

EXIT LINE

“Frankly, I like the sound of freedom in the background.”

--Navy Vice Adm. Brent M. Bennitt on the flight line at Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego, giving a standard military rejoinder to noise complaints--this time to reporters asking why he didn’t order F-14s to shut down their engines so he could be heard better.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.