Who’ll Call the Tune in 18-Part Harmony?

Troubled ocean waters may have been calmed when the California Coastal Commission turned down a plan for a vast oceanfront resort complex on the Central Coast near Hearst Castle, but a little ways south, there is still discord in Harmony.

Much of the artsy townlet (reputed population 18) is owned by Samson Marian Mehdizadeh, who is buying 700 oceanfront acres with an eye to converting all of Harmony into a headquarters for peace and, well, harmony: a theme park of global food and customs, seminars on world problems, playgrounds and parks and campsites.

Which you’d figure might be OK with local Harmonics. Not.

Linda Fayette, who makes and sells a line of clothes and purses, speaks for many--OK, several--residents when she says it sounds distastefully like “Disneyland North. We’d end up being like any other tourist trap,” rather than the bucolic little burg Harmony is.

Oh, did we mention the slaughterhouse?

It’s a testing ground for Mehdizadeh’s notion on preventing violence:

“If you kill 200 chickens during the day, at night you’re not going to want to go out and shed more blood.”

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Creature discomforts: A bad fortnight for California’s feathered, flippered, furred and four-legged population:

In Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco, more than a dozen sea lions have been found shot, and some decapitated--a federal felony. Investigators believe it may be the work of fishermen who resent the sea lions for eating steelhead and salmon, whose stocks are dwindling because of habitat problems.

Sacramento and San Francisco-area residents who placed newspaper ads for lost dogs are getting calls from scammers who promise to take the missing pet to a local shelter if the owners give or wire them money in advance, anywhere from $150 to $1,000. That too is a felony.

In the Chinatown districts of seven cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, undercover “customers” with World Conservation and the World Wildlife Fund found that--as we enter the Year of the Tiger--nearly half of the shops illegally sold products containing parts of profoundly endangered animals, including tigers and all-but-extinct rhinos and leopards. Some Chinese believe tiger parts can cure ailments from acne and hemorrhoids to laziness and rabies. Selling tiger parts for any reason has been illegal here for 20 years.

But some animals may take heart. A measure whose sponsors are collecting signatures for a place on the November ballot would ban commercial and recreational use of cruel traps and snares and poisons on state wildlife, while maintaining them for predator control. ProPAW, a coalition of seven animal protection groups, says the traps not only kill bobcats, beavers and foxes just for their fur, but even trap family pets, who may chew off a leg to escape.

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Dead dad beat: Four Southeast Asian children who were fathered by a weird American entrepreneur with a genius for business and a fondness for Asian bar girls stand to inherit $90 million each.

The San Francisco Examiner says that the estate of DHL air freight founder Larry Hilblom, who died in a 1995 plane crash, is giving as much as $240 million for medical research to UC San Francisco. Another kind of research--DNA tests--established that two Filipino girls, a Vietnamese boy and a Palauan teenager were Hilblom’s children, by four different women.

The size of their inheritance depends on the value of the estate, which, like Hilblom’s offspring, is scattered across the world.

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The Golden State

Last Saturday was the 150th anniversary of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. It is still mined in the state; the most recent production peak was in 1993. Production in the first full year of the Gold Rush, 1849, is shown:

Troy ounces in hundreds of thousands

1894: 500

* Note: There are 1,097 ounces in a troy ounce.

Source: California Department of Conservation.

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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One-offs: A geographically impaired Los Angeles TV station captioned its video of a storm in the Sierra Nevada as “Sierra, Nev.” . . . The Golden Gate Bridge will have not one official song, but several--an official ballad, an official historical song, and the prospect of an official rap song, pop song and so on. . . . Facing possible “unrealistic piercing quotas,” body piercers at a San Francisco boutique have voted to join a local union for contract negotiations. . . . The 50-year-old “Acres of Orchids” site, which has drawn such visitors as Mamie Eisenhower and the queen of Denmark to its 35 acres in South San Francisco, has been sold to a housing developer. . . . Sacramento’s Ride Share program funding is at risk in part because participation dropped dramatically--after the wrong phone number appeared in its ads.

EXIT LINE

“The thing Congress likes to do more than anything else is nothing.”

--Sen. Barbara Boxer, advising state and federal water officials on ways to present their appropriations request for Delta restoration to Capitol Hill.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.