Assembly’s Power Brokers Prepare for a Y2K Outage

Can you imagine a legislative body being silenced, straitjacketed, unable to act--because of a power failure? Neither can the California Assembly. So, in case Y2K turns out to be as bad as doomsayers say, it has a backup plan:

Manual typewriters.

Although the Assembly’s computer systems and power sources have been brought into Y2K-OK status, Assemblyman Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks), who chairs the general-housekeeping Rules Committee, is erring on the side of caution.

Staffers dispatched to track down new manual typewriters could find none nearby, but an Internet search found Italy’s Olivetti typewriter company, and the order went out for six, at $259 each.

“We’ll keep them in the closet and pull them out if we need them,” said Hertzberg. “Six should be enough.”

Yes, but do people remember how to use carbon paper?

Even if typewritten bills make it to the Assembly floor, votes are tallied electronically; how would a powerless Assembly exercise its ballot power?

Just as it once did. Hertzberg aide Paul Hefner has a chalkboard and hand-held cards ready to record “yea” or “nay” votes as legislators holler them out one at a time.

Over in the state Senate, where oral roll calls are still SOP, Y2K raises no such fears. Says Senate secretary Gregory Schmidt, “We have plenty of quill pens and inkwells, voting cards and pencils.”

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Lights, credit card, action!: Real or virtual, action toys and sports gear lead the list of California kids’ preferred playthings, ranking above the amusements of choice in more sedentary parts of the country.

A Virginia marketing research firm called CACI enlisted a New York company to survey 40,000 people nationwide, and found that Ventura tops the national average by 10% when it comes to the demand for both sporting equipment and action figures. Statewide, demand is 3% and 4% above the national average in the two categories.

Curiously, California kids’ desire for toy trucks or cars was 4% below the national average, except in the San Joaquin Valley, where Merced kids wanted toy wheels 10% more than did kids across the nation.

The chart-toppers and low-downers listed by the Wall Street Journal were Laredo, Texas, kids, who have the highest demand for dolls and crayons, and Honolulu children, who express the least appetite for toy vehicles and crayons.

Like child, like parent: A survey in Men’s Fitness magazine finds Philadelphia, home of cheese steaks, to be the nation’s flabbiest city, and San Diego to be its fittest.

Assessing 29 categories, including obesity, smoking and TV watching, the magazine’s other flab finalists are Kansas City, Houston, Indianapolis and New Orleans. Its healthy burgs are San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C.

A separate study from the consumer group Health Network named as the nation’s second-least-fit city . . . Fresno.

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Hair and there: Two cases from the court of multiculturalism:

A temporary mail room clerk has sued Safeway Inc. and two other firms, alleging that he was told that if he wanted to keep his job, he’d have to cut off his dreadlocks. Darcel Walker said he quit rather than go under the barber’s blade. “My hair grows naturally into dreadlocks,” making the style “a direct manifestation of my African American heritage.”

And the name “Filipino Yellow Pages” is too general to be trademarked, a federal appeals court ruled. That lets a Southern California firm use the name for its directory. The original publisher of the Filipino Consumer Directory said he lost $82,000 in business after the rival firm published its own volume.

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One-offs: Dewey, the last of the San Francisco Zoo’s 19-year-old Kodiak bear triplets, has died. . . . A new interactive Web site called Crime Watch, put up by the Oakland police, lets residents monitor the number and nature of crimes neighborhood by neighborhood. . . . Bank of America is trying to persuade its employees to volunteer to “Adopt an ATM” near their homes, picking up trash and spiffing up the site once a week. . . . Billboards along California 101 between the Silicon Valley and San Francisco are fetching up to $100,000 a month. . . . The Santa Cruz County Civil Service Commission ordered that a sheriff’s sergeant fired for setting off confiscated fireworks at a Fourth of July party get his job back.

EXIT LINE

“There are a lot of people who turn over their wardrobes every season. Why shouldn’t I take advantage of that?’

--Sally Hawn of Mountain View, browsing among the couture resale racks in Menlo Park, where some chic Silicon Valley millionaires take their slightly used Chanels and other designer gear to be resold for mere multiple hundreds instead of multiple thousands of dollars.

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California Uncorked

Worldwide shipments of California sparkling wine, which declined over the last seven years, have begun to rise again, thanks to a more robust economy and, of course, the swiftly approaching millennium festivities. Here are the numbers of cases shipped, 12 bottles of bubbly to the case, during the last decade, according to a wine industry consulting and research firm:

California sparkling wine

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Year (millions of cases*) 1990 7.1 1991 7.4 1992 7.2 1993 7.0 1994 6.4 1995 6.3 1996 6.2 1997 6.1 1998 5.8 1999 7.1

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* Figures are through Oct. 31 of each year.

Source: Gomberg, Fredrikson & Associates, San Francisco.

Researched by TRACY THOMAS/Los Angeles Times

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California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.