<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : The Motorcyclist, Not the Mannequin, Is the Dummy

To those who persist in believing that perception is reality, meet Michael Cringle.

He is a motorcyclist who, like many drivers in Eureka, has grown accustomed to Natasha, the Police Department decoy, a mannequin who sits in a prominently parked patrol car. The sight of her is not enough to stop traffic, but it does slow it down.

Cringle evidently thought it was Natasha to whom he was making a gesture of digital disdain--but it was Officer Matt Duran, who had taken up his post between Cringle’s outbound and inbound journeys. “He flipped off the wrong dummy,” says Duran, with sound-bite skills Sgt. Friday could only dream of.

Perhaps Cringle--who was ticketed for investigation of speeding, driving in the left-turn lane and evading an officer--thought he was in Mariposa, where a rancher named Bud Bower has done up an old Ford to look like a CHP car and parked it to slow down speeders on “Daytona Lane.”

“Boy, when those people come screaming around that corner, they’re going to see this sitting here and hit the brakes,” says Bower, who got the idea after some lead-foot killed one of his cows a while back.

It is only at a sedate speed that you can read what is painted on the side of the black-and-white: “Highway Petrol.”

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April Fools’ on the hill: Quality parody is almost indistinguishable from truth, so anyone with literary and gambling inclinations could have wagered that when the Mammoth Times’ April Fools’ issue, following recent volcano alerts, reported a vast eruption at the Mammoth Mountain ski area, some people believed it.

Flatland subscribers called in. Mountain folk called in, saying it was in bad taste. At least one home-buying transaction was reportedly canceled by out-of-town purchasers.

The clues were there: The story of a massive eruption was buried in the back pages. The eruption photo was by “David Molehill.” News media helicopters were supposedly circling, satellite sites were set up by the world press, with mass evacuations and blocked highways creating chaos. None of these doings showed up on CNN, or outside the front door, for that matter.

Nonetheless, publisher/editor Wally Hofmann apologized for “one of Mammoth’s most successful (and stressful) April Fools’ stunts.”

But here is a true story you may not believe: voters actually enjoying an election.

Weaverville’s mayoral campaign is a rowdy three-way race of vote-buying and even-wilder-than-usual promises made by John Wayne “the Duke” Wallace, Bear “the Redneck” Aikins and Howard “Tie-Dye” Freeman, who was abducted by aliens from the planet Uranus but, he told the local Trinity Journal, rewarded by them with omniscience.

Because Weaverville, a town 200 miles north of San Francisco, is not incorporated, it has only an honorary mayor. Money from vote-buying in this weekend’s election goes to charity, or, as Aikins suggests, Weaverville could secede: “Maybe we can get some foreign aid.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

High Water Mark

The state’s reservoir storage has markedly improved since the last drought, more than doubling since the low point of 1991. The chart below shows the total amount of water stored in 155 major reservoirs at the end of February in the years listed.

Million acre-feet*

1991: 12.0

1992: 16.0

1993: 21.3

1994: 23.5

1995: 24.5

1996: 30.1

Source: California Dept. of Water Resources

* An acre-foot is enough to supply two families for a year.

Researched by NONA YATES / Los Angeles Times

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Oh brother: And you think the Kaczynski freres have problems. Six FBI agents arrested attorney Patrick Frega on Wednesday while he rode his bicycle near his sister’s home in Escondido. He’s accused of bribing judges in San Diego’s big judge scandal. Frega’s lawyer called the agents “a posse.” At the same time, more FBI agents pursuing an insurance fraud case were raiding the La Jolla home of his twin brother, who has changed his name to Nicholas Valentino. Valentino’s lawyer called the raid a kind of invasion.

Frega and Valentino may be related, the feds say, but their cases are not. Their lawyers talk like they’re related but they’re not, either.

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One-offs: While the number of licensed California drivers has dropped by a million, the number of vehicle registrations went up by half a million. . . . After more than 30 years, the annual Leonard J. Waxdeck Bird-Calling Contest at Piedmont High School--named for the late biology teacher who founded the contest that even Johnny Carson noticed--has been canceled because it “promotes too much anxiety,” says a contest director. . . . An angry witness at an Assembly committee hearing on prisoner chain gangs threw the book at the committee chairwoman--a booklet, in point of fact: the 6-by-9-inch soft-cover Assembly Daily File. It missed.

EXIT LINE

“There was no reason on Earth to take Jerry’s ashes to India, a country he’d never been to, and dump them into the most polluted river on the face of the Earth.”

--Carolyn Garcia, also known as Mountain Girl, ex-wife of the late Grateful Dead sachem Jerry Garcia, on word that Garcia’s wife and bandmate had scattered half of Garcia’s ashes in the Ganges River. Quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.