Read This Column or the Lobster Gets the Hot Bath

Another matter for campaign reform and death penalty opponents:

A group e-mail from the California College Republicans Network suggests this fund-raising brainstorm--inspired, it says, by an unnamed Missouri school which raised funds for the Special Olympics by charging people four bits to vote on whether a lobster should live or die.

“This fund-raising idea, of course, has the added bonus of enraging the animal rights wackos,” the e-mail says. First, it advises the fund-hungry to find a butcher or a restaurant willing to kill and cook a lobster, rabbit or duck. Next, procure a cute representative of said species and take “cute pictures,” then sell votes on campus for $1 each, “Should this rabbit/lobster/duck live or die? Vote here!”

Next, charge admission to the vote-tally announcement at the restaurant; if the creature gets to live, “make sure you have some place that the animal can go to live out the rest of its days” and serve something else. “If the vote is for death, make sure there are small samples of the cooked animal for everyone.”

The bonus round: “If you’re lucky, the liberals will protest you and thus bring more attention to your club and your fund-raising effort.”

And if the creature in question is a horse, you could be violating Proposition 6, banning the slaughter of horses for human consumption.

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Check, please: More evidence that the fabled foreshortened New Yorker magazine cover showing New York City and, beyond it, the vague terra incognita of the United States was no joke. The Riverside Press-Enterprise reports that the new Zagat LA restaurant guide, published in New York, lists as the Inland Empire’s only praiseworthy non-chain restaurant the Mission Inn--scene of Ronald Reagan’s second honeymoon and Richard Nixon’s only wedding--but places it in Palm Springs. At last look, the gloriously rambling hotel remained in Riverside.

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Crossover: It went from one cross to no cross to cries of double-cross.

An artist’s rendering for a proposed floor mosaic of Mission San Jose for the new Alameda County recorder’s building in Oakland omitted the mission’s cross because of concerns that it would look more like a church than a historic mission.

“If you don’t know it’s Mission San Jose,” fretted county Supervisor Mary King, “you think it’s a church and, in view of the necessary separation of church and state, we were concerned.”

The mission’s administrator, Dolores Ferenz, was astonished: “This is history. . . . Maybe I should sic the Alameda County Historical Society on them.”

County supervisors had been stung before, by the stir over a welcoming-arch sculpture for Castro Valley. And that time too, the hue and cry prompted the board to change its mind. In the current case, the board has agreed that the original 1809 cross be part of the artist’s rendering, a 75-by-35-foot project depicting the sweep of county history--mission, livestock, railroads, fishing--in mosaic.

The pro-cross turnout may defuse King’s chief concern about depicting a religious edifice as underfoot art in a government building: “Who wants to get their floor sued?”

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Love in Blooms

The rose dwarfs all other blossoms as the most popular flower given on Valentine’s Day and California produces the bulk of the nation’s crop. In the years since foreign imports have come on strong, California’s percentage has increased while the number of stems grown here has declined.

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Roses grown % of total u.s. (in millions) production 1988 359.2 63.6 1989 376.4 64.1 1990 377.5 64.9 1991 358.0 64.8 1992 345.5 64.8 1993 324.5 64.0 1994 303.4 64.6 1995 272.4 68.5 1996 241.6 68.5 1997 258.5 71.2

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Source: The Floral Index, Chicago

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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One-offs: California’s Army bases are expecting shipments of the first million rounds of a new “green bullet,” which has the same killing power as the old one but is lead-free and thus less harmful to the non-target environment. . . . A convicted drug dealer who turned down a plea bargain for a two-year prison sentence because his Modesto psychic assured him he would never be imprisoned now faces at least 10 years in prison.

EXIT LINE

“It’s too much of a sacrifice to ask someone who cares about honesty and integrity and concrete accomplishments to jump into a cesspool and swim around for a year, and that’s what politics is these days.”

--Katherine Feinstein, daughter of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, of her decision not to run against incumbent Terence Hallinan for San Francisco district attorney. Quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle.

California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.