Safe Holiday Tips From Some Lawmakers

Thirty-one legislators, Republicans and Democrats, have accepted Planned Parenthood’s offer for National Condom Week, which begins today: a festive basket of assorted “protection” for office display and for free. One, Sen. Richard Mountjoy (R-Arcadia), very publicly has not, noting in a memo to his fellow legislators that “such a display could be considered sexual harassment, which could offend visitors and/or staff.”

This is the organization’s second annual offer of legislative baskets that include condoms and literature on sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancy. Last year, says PP legislative director Kathleen Mossburg, “we had to fill the baskets back up. They ran out.”

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Gung hay Frank Fat Choy: Frank Fat, the nonagenarian owner of the capital’s self-styled “third house,” the restaurant that’s been feeding and watering Republicans and Democrats peaceably since 1939, celebrated the new Year of the Ox by displaying the qualities of this year’s combatants on the Chinese lunar calendar:

Assembly Speaker Cruz Bustamante, born in the Year of the Dragon: egotistical, dogmatic, tends to intimidate those who challenge him; cross him, and he’ll huff and puff and blow your (lower) house down.

Senate Leader Bill Lockyer, Year of the Snake: possessed of inborn wisdom, can be generous with money (whose?), has no qualms about eliminating anyone in his way.

Gov. Pete Wilson, Year of the Rooster: sharp, neat, precise, organized, decisive, upright. Can be critical to the point of brutality, and fights to the finish if challenged. Has stamina, does his homework, tries to convert everyone to his way of thinking.

(Frank Fat notes that the calendar exists on cycles of 12 because when Buddha departed the earth, only the animals, a dozen of them, came to bid him goodbye--none of them the donkey or the elephant. Sounds like Sacramento ingratitude, all right).

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Internetiquette: After his fiancee explained “in detail” how his remarks could have been “insulting,” Colton’s city manager is issuing mea culpas about his online sizing-up and dressing-down of California women.

Malik Freeman was at home and online about 5 o’clock one December morning when someone in the virtual world asked, “I hear all of the women in California look like ‘Baywatch’ girls. Is that true?”

Freeman’s response: “Everyone says that the women in Sweden are so fine and sexy, is that a rumor or what? It’s definitely not true for California. While the women here have access to beauty aids, they are not all that!” (by which Freeman says he meant inner and outer beauty). While this is a generalization, they tend to cover a lot of ugliness on the inside which shows through.”

Alas for Freeman, this was not private e-mail but a group chat, and somehow his status as Colton’s city manager became known, and the rest is herstory.

He will apologize formally to the City Council next week; his press release groveled, “I now realize that as city manger, anything and everything I say reflects on the city of Colton. I will do my best to make sure that all of my future comments reflect positively on our city.”

Now, about that other question, whether all the men in California look like Don Knotts. . . .

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Love in Bloom

Happy Valentine’s Day--the biggest sales day of the year for the flower of love. California grew 68.3% of the 394.2 million roses produced in the United States in 1995, generating $68.9 million in revenue for California growers. Here are the nation’s nine “rosiest” states.

STATE: MILLIONS OF ROSES

California: 269.3

Colorado: 25.8

Minnesota: 8.4

New York: 7.9

Pennsylvania: 7.3

Michigan: 6.3

Ohio: 5.9

Virginia: 3.8

Wisconsin: 3.0

All other states: 56.5

Source: The Floral Index, Chicago

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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One-offs: Redwood City police want to dump an experimental gizmo that uses sound to pinpoint the location of gunshots because they’ve been getting too many false alarms, mostly backfiring cars. . . . San Francisco officials are searching for whoever tortured a homeless cat with a blowtorch, requiring veterinarians to remove one leg from the Siamese-mix male. . . . Charles Dickens’ twice-great-grandson, Gerald, scheduled to be the guest and one-man show at the Riverside Dickens Festival for the author’s 185th birthday, was intercepted and sent back to England by Minneapolis immigration officials because he didn’t have a work visa. . . . Oakland’s 1923 Montgomery Ward building has been spared from the wrecking ball by a state appeals court at the behest of preservationists, who described it as “utilitarian Arts and Crafts” with “Gothic revival overtones”. . . . Two San Diego County women who allegedly tried to distract customs officials by flirting with them were arrested after 43 pounds of Mexican brown heroin was found in their car’s fuel tank. . . .

EXIT LINE

“They’re saying, ‘If you don’t agree with what we say, we won’t let you say it.’ ”

--Mike Coleman, editor in chief of the UC Berkeley campus paper, the Daily Californian. More than 13,000 copies have been stolen recently, all of them containing articles opposed by a campus group in favor of defending affirmative action “by any means necessary.” In November, 40,000 copies of the edition endorsing Proposition 209 were stolen.