Death Penalty Is an Issue Debaters Won't Let Die

By PATT MORRISON

Aug. 25, 1998 12 AM PT

Great gubernatorial debate, wasn’t it?

Wonder who’ll come out ahead when the votes are counted in November--Republican Assemblyman Bill Leonard or Democratic Rep. Gary Condit?

What? They’re not running?

You wouldn’t have known that from the did-not-did-so exchanges between Republican Dan Lungren and Democrat Gray Davis in their debate last week. Each was so fixed on fixing himself in the pro-death penalty firmament that each kept bandying about the names of Leonard and Condit, who had key roles in California death penalty legislation as it wound its way through the mystifying arcana of committee votes, where a yes vote sometimes means no, a no vote sometimes means yes, and once in a while, each means what you’d expect it to.

Condit, a Merced Democrat who was in Fresno for the debate, didn’t expect his California legislative past to figure so large, a spokesman said. And Leonard, who was running errands and attending a fund-raiser during the debate, is so buoyed by his new, free name recognition that he joked he’s “going to announce his candidacy” for something.

And some viewers among the few who did watch were bemused by complex syntax that sounded like a pledge to make California a better place for the living and the dead. In his final statement, Davis thanked Lungren and acknowledged, “You have a wonderful family and God bless you, both your parents are still with you. I lost my father in ’96 and we lost my mother-in-law last summer. But I want to make this a better state for them and I want to make it a better state for everyone in California. . . . “

Eat up: If the feds heed the recommendation of the National Academy of Sciences and appoint a “food safety czar” to halt the rise of food-borne illnesses, here’s the obvious choice for the food czar’s court composer:

Carl Winter, toxicologist, director of the UC Davis Foodsafe program and “the Elvis of E. coli.”

While the chance of microbial life on a wayward rock from Mars gets the headlines, the real and possibly perilous microbial life on berries, burgers, squirrel brains and the whole buffet of human edibles gets much less attention, which worries a bearer of food-safety messages like Winter.

And so, despite the rhyming challenge of words like “gastroenteritis,” Winter has put together a not-for-profit CD of public health ditties, parodies of pop songs that rely on his first career as a musician and his second as a lab man. Ladies and gentlemen, just back from a gig at the Institute of Food Technologists in Chicago . . . Carl Winter!

“Stayin’ Alive”:

“Well you can tell by the way I choose my food/I’m a worried guy in a cautious mood . . .

“Scrubbin’ off my veggies and I’m heatin’ all my burgers to 185, 185, Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive.”

Still, as Winters says, “food may have some hazards, but not eating is always fatal,” hence the song “Eat It,” to the tune of “Beat It.”

“Just eat it, eat it/Don’t make me repeat it,

“There may be microbes, and some residue/But missing out on food’s the worst thing you can do . . . “

One-offs: Fresno is eliminating its 1,300 downtown parking meters in favor of a two-hour honor system. . . . A Marin County woman who ran up $70,000 in credit card debts in one year through international online gambling losses is countersuing her bank, claiming that gambling is illegal in California and online betting is illegal nationwide. . . . A Pixley man was arrested after admitting to stealing $120 worth of hay from two Tulare County farms. . . . Sept. 1 is the deadline for Californians under 25 to enter the California/L.A. County-sponsored contest to design a youth-directed condom package, with six winning prizes of $500 each. . . . In parking-challenged San Francisco, the bumper sticker du jour, the jour being last Sunday: Visualize Parking.

EXIT LINE

Caller: “How about I just send you a money order and we call it like that?” Cop: “I wish it were that easy.”

Caller: “Come on, work with me, please.”

Exchange between a bank robber and a police officer on San Francisco radio station KCBS. An hour after he had held up a Wells Fargo bank and swiped $400, the robber evidently had a change of heart, and called the station to negotiate a reimbursement. Police declined to cooperate. So, then, did the bank robber.

California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

And It’s Not Even September Yet

If you felt like a fried egg during the first part of August, it wasn’t just a hallucination brought on by sunstroke. Here are the average daily maximum temperatures in selected cities for the first 12 days of the month compared to normal August maximum temperatures, in degrees Fahrenheit:

August 1998

Normal August

Redding

San Francisco

Sacramento

L.A. Airport

L.A. Civic Center

Long Beach

Fresno

Bakersfield

Riverside

San Jose