A Cool and Unusual Way to Savor California’s Multitude of Flavors

The Latest Scoop: If California were an ice cream, what flavor would it be?

That’s the question being posed in a Dreyer’s Ice Cream contest to create a new dessert flavor for the state’s 150th birthday. The winning idea, which is supposed to symbolize California with “a clever name, meaningful ingredients and a Golden State taste,” will be manufactured and sold next year.

Sample entries released by Dreyer’s include Silicon Chip, “a strong coffee ice cream with megabytes of chocolate chips.”

Here are our ideas:

* Chinese Theater Surprise: Remove the lid and there’s a celebrity handprint stamped into the ice cream.

* Baywatch 2000: A blend of coconut, melon and grapefruit that comes in your choice of carton--Pamela Anderson Before (a half-gallon) or Pamela Anderson After (a pint).

* Valley Girl Swirl: It’s, like, totally awesome.

* Graffiti ‘n’ Cream: Vanilla streaked with unsightly patterns of chocolate, strawberry and orange sherbet.

* Commuter Crunch: Sort of like Rocky Road, except the almonds and marshmallows are replaced by chunks of freeway asphalt and Gummi Botts dots.

* Calista Caramel: 100% fat-free.

* Suburban Sprawl: Vanilla with evenly spaced chunks of white chocolate. Ingredients list is replaced with a litany of CC&Rs; forbidding the consumer from rearranging the chunks.

* Magic Kingdom: Costs $33 a gallon and you have to wait an hour and a half between each spoonful.

Grocery Store of the Week: A San Francisco Safeway store plays a tape recording of thunder and flashes a light to simulate lightning 10 seconds before its fruit misting device comes on.

Alarming Trends Bureau: Paula Corbin Jones, who accused President Clinton of sexual harassment, now has her own psychic hotline.

Beam Me Up, Lord: Siena College in New York offers a class called “Star Trek and Religion.”

Viva Titanic: Reason No. 214 why NATO should be bombing Las Vegas instead of Yugoslavia: Casino owner Bob Stupak has proposed the construction of a giant hotel-casino replica of the Titanic on 10 acres near the Strip.

According to the Associated Press, the ship-shaped casino would have 1,200 “cabins” that resemble rooms on the original liner--as well as a towering “iceberg” that houses an 1,800-seat showroom.

Quote of the Day: “I found it greedy.” (Disney chairman Michael Eisner, who was paid $576 million last year, commenting on former Disney studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg’s demand for a shorter contract that didn’t give up the bonuses offered as an incentive to sign a longer deal.)

Contest Reminder: The deadline for slogans, products or merchandising ideas to promote the new millennium is Thursday. Tip: We’re buried in “Third time’s a charm” slogan variations, but we’ve received only one millennium product idea.

Best Supermarket Tabloid Headline: “Psychic Banned From Playing the Lottery--for Life!” (Weekly World News)

Unpaid Informants: Wireless Flash News Service, Ann Harrison, Susanna Timmons, Leah Garchik’s San Francisco Chronicle column, James Bates. Off-Kilter’s e-mail address is roy.rivenburg@latimes.com. Off-Kilter runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.