Lockyer Adds a Little Bite to State’s Political Roots
California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer recently returned to his roots, and put down some more as well.
His commencement address to his alma mater, Sacramento’s McGeorge School of Law, had something of politics, and something of . . . Martha Stewart in the garden. Lockyer’s remarks on “If politics were a garden” ran down a list of political flora of both parties:
* Jerry Brown would be bamboo: The introduction seemed like a good idea at the time, but you can’t get rid of the stuff.
* Bob Dornan would be an avocado: green on the outside, essentially a nut within.
* Willie Brown would be sweet corn: provides an earful and carries a lot of greenery, sucks up all nutrients in the vicinity.
* Pete Wilson would be iceberg lettuce: big head, difficult to transport back East.
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Bullish for bears: Golden Bear cubs ought to get reacquainted with the bear of very little brain before the fall semester rolls around.
Among the dozen books on the suggested summer reading list for UC Berkeley-bound freshmen is “Winnie the Pooh,” who shares the list with such august titles as the first two books of the Old Testament and Carl Sagan’s “Contact.”
Pooh was nominated by Berkeley brain expert Marian Diamond, who was delighted by the “elegant simplicity” of A.A. Milne’s imaginary menagerie.
That’s the latest buzz out of Berkeley, where one buzz is harder to find. The city, concerned about pesticides and unfair labor conditions, is looking into buying only organic coffee for its workers; it has already banned Salvadoran coffee beans for eco-political reasons, and the serving of drinks in foam cups, for environmental ones.
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PhD: He’s not a healer, he says; he just counsels people to “help them figure things out.” He’s not a medicine man or a shaman, either, in spite of the fact that he is a Kumeyaay Indian who practices his restorative traditional rituals on the Viejas Indian reservation in southern San Diego County. “To tell you the truth,” he says, “English isn’t a very good language to describe what I do.”
What he definitely is now is Dr. Ron Christman, courtesy of an honorary degree from the California School of Professional Psychology in San Diego--an acknowledgment of the former high school dropout’s work as guest lecturer and volunteer mentor at the college. “People cure themselves--I’m just there to help them see the possibilities.”
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Banner year: Where? Here!
Taking a cue from Gertrude Stein’s fabled remark about her hometown, Oakland has begun flying its colors--a black and white flag atop the Oakland Tribune tower bearing the single word, THERE.
Developer John Protopappas hopes Oakland sites will take up the colors; the word comes from Stein’s lament at the razing of her childhood home: “Anyway what was the use of my having come from Oakland. It was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there there is no there there.”
So there.
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Lord, mayor?: One Central Valley town had better be alert for a power play from London. If Britain’s House of Lords is indeed divested of power as planned, one member--former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan--could be looking for work.
Macmillan’s title: Earl of Stockton.
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One-offs: The world’s tallest living thing: the 6- to 8-century-old Mendocino Tree, a redwood deep in a grove near Ukiah, and coming in at 367.5 feet . . . In California’s first and perhaps only, the Santa Cruz League of Women Voters elected a man to be its new president . . . The National Trust for Historic Preservation includes two California sites on this year’s “Most Endangered Historic Places” list: San Francisco’s Angel Island immigration station, known as the Ellis Island of the West Coast, and the San Diego Arts and Warehouse District, imperiled by plans for a new Padres stadium . . . All 150 of the $1,495 commemorative “California Sesquicentennial Tribute Rifles” are sold out.
EXIT LINE
“There’s nothing better to get stuck in your brain than knowledge.”
--Ben Davidson, former ferocious star of the peripatetic Raiders football team, touting the value of reading to students at Camp Leon, a football camp run by San Diego schools and Athletes for Education.
California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Subjects for Women
California universities grant more graduate* degrees in engineering and the sciences to women than universities in any other state. Here are the numbers for 1995-96, the most recent year available, with the states ranked by total degrees granted.
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ENGINEERING NATURAL SCIENCE TOTAL STATE DEGREES DEGREES DEGREES 1 California 763 1,092 1,855 2 New York 424 1,337 1,761 3 Texas 333 754 1,087 4 Massachusetts 365 521 886 5 Illinois 226 653 879 6 Pennsylvania 308 468 776 7 Michigan 310 434 744 8 Ohio 239 374 613 9 Florida 216 298 514 10 Maryland 123 370 493
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Source: National Center for Education Statistics
Researched by TRACY THOMAS/Los Angeles Times
*Includes both master’s and doctoral degrees.
