Snapshots of life in the Golden State. : Food for Thought in Higher Education

In the college campus lexicon, “cramming for exams” can mean either filling up on facts or on the four major campus food groups--fast, fried, frozen and junk.

But the Top 40 of Food has given more than passing grades to a quartet of California institutions of higher learning for their higher quality cuisine. Stanford rated sixth on the survey by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Caltech ranked 13th, Pomona 15th, and UCLA came in at 27th.

The prix de cuisine went to Duke University in North Carolina for its hummus, fresh pasta, wokked vegetables and Mongolian barbecue. Low-fat bagels arrive next year.

At the bottom are the nation’s three military academies: the Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy, and, last, West Point, which feeds its cadets ham steak and hot dogs, and as alternative cuisine, tossed salad, some steamed vegetables, and peanut butter and jelly. (But surely not chicken. . . .)

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Voter Turnout

Just under 60% of the state’s registered voters cast ballots in Tuesday’s election. Alpine County, with a mere 803 registered voters, had the highest turnout, 79.1%, and Kings County had the lowest at 44.8%. Here is the turnout for counties in Southern California.

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REGISTERED COUNTY VOTERS % TURNOUT Orange 1,275,775 61.8% Imperial 45,290 59.4% Los Angeles 3,857,805 59.2% San Diego 1,387,525 57.3% Santa Barbara 237,211 56.0% Ventura 382,417 55.9% Riverside 637,139 55.2% San Bernardino 742,975 54.7% Kern 280,128 54.5%

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Source: Secretary of State, Sacramento

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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The e-mail envelope please. . . . Mother Jones magazine’s final Internet election poll chose Colin Powell for defense secretary, fired Clinton Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for drug czar, linguist and anarcho-radical critic Noam Chomsky for press secretary, and Mr. Wizard as secretary of education.

Now, a second ballot on how much weight those choices will carry when President Clinton fills his emptying Cabinet.

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Hot shots: Who was that masked man? A thief, as it turns out. Wrong cowboy show, but right era; a collection of 11 rare guns stolen from a daughter of singing cowboy Roy Rogers turned up in a sting operation.

More than a month after the theft, the weapons--one of them dating to 1917 and another in a case with Rogers’ name on it--were spotted by Rogers’ son-in-law Larry Barnett at a gun show in Ventura.

He called in the cavalry--the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which recovered the guns and arrested a Santa Clarita vendor on suspicion of possessing stolen property and extortion.

When your co-star is a horse named Trigger, maybe these things don’t come as so much of a surprise.

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Scan scandal: First, Buckingham Palace, now Perris City Hall. Will the indignities never cease?

A secretly taped cordless phone conversation--this one between the mayor and a former campaign manager--has set official against official in an Inland Empire “Tapegate,” an eavesdropping scanner scandal that Charles and Diana could sympathize with.

Copies of the tape were delivered to city officials by the heretofore unheard of “Concerned Citizens of Perris.” In them, Mayor Lenwood Long and June Proctor excoriated the council for a wont of good sense, and rated one member in particular as “a freak for praise” whose appointment as mayor would mean “war.”

Some officials blamed the mayor; others--among them the mayor--blamed the electronic snoopers.

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One-offs: About 100 mourners paid respects to Kijana, the Oakland Zoo’s 11-month-old African elephant, which died unexpectedly last month. . . . The Glomar Explorer, Howard Hughes’ secret spy ship sent in 1974 to reel in a Soviet submarine that sank in the Pacific, will be converted into an oil rig . . . . The nation’s first monument “dedicated to the sole pursuit of shopping” will be unveiled at next week’s opening of a gargantuan retail mall in Ontario.

EXIT LINE

“It’s like stealing money from a collection plate. These people were trying to help us.”

--Santa Rosa police Det. Jim Shrum, speaking of the burglars who swiped a chain saw, resuscitator, fire shelters and oxygen tanks from 25 fire engines that came from surrounding counties to control a fire in Santa Rosa.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.