Politics, and Show Biz, Make Strange Bedfellows

We’ve gotten used to actors being president, playing with the idea of being president--or at least a politician. But here’s a politician with presidential designs who’s looking to get into the movie trade.

Sen. John McCain, Arizona’s first GOP presidential contender since Barry Goldwater, has sold the rights to his memoirs to USA Films for an undisclosed sum reported to be top dollar, which is almost as high in Hollywood as it is on Capitol Hill.

“Faith of My Fathers” is McCain’s story of struggling to live up to his family’s considerable military achievements, then surviving years of torture in a North Vietnamese POW camp.

Now the plot thickens: The head of USA Films is Barry Diller, who has already given $1,000--top dollar under campaign law--to Democrat Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign. As a further twist, Diller holds a major interest in broadcast deregulation issues pending before the Senate Commerce Committee--which McCain chairs.

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Druid, dude The surf is up, and staying up. “Surfhenge” is a recent installation art piece at Imperial Beach in San Diego, its tall loops of colored acrylic intended to put spectators in mind of surfboards stuck in the sand.

Lest anyone not get the point, scattered around near the work are 10 benches, each made to resemble a vintage surfboard and each bearing a plaque explaining Imperial Beach’s role in the thriving turf of surfing.

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Forever, and for a moment The man in the moon . . . could be you.

An Oakland company named Applied Space Resources is planning a moon mission to retrieve lunar dust for research and sale. If the plan takes off, the firm will also offer a one-way trip for clients’ photos, favorite music or verse, to be left on the moon.

The indestructible “Eternity Disk” will miniaturize three pages of data for $189, and leave it on the moon for all eternity when the lunar lander arrives at the Sea of Nectar, in an estimated $50-million venture planned for the year 2002.

And a San Francisco high-tech firm, Disappearing Inc., says it has found a way to create planned extinction in e-mail with a self-destruct device that makes a message unreadable after the sender has decided it has done its work.

The ease of e-mail, and its apparent impermanence, have enticed everyone from gadflies to Bill Gates, sometimes to their grief: Investigators can retrieve e-mail that senders long since thought had vanished--evidence in the Microsoft trial and the Iran-Contra affair.

The system, which should be available within months, encrypts each message with a key, which both sender and receiver hold. The sender decides how long the key will work, and after it has “expired” the message is rendered unreadable. It won’t, however, improve the quality of e-mail prose, which is often unreadable anyway.

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One-offs A barn owl was being treated for injuries and a Dublin, Calif., man was jailed for allegedly shooting the bird from a tree and then beating it with a board because its screeching disturbed “Monday Night Football” . . . An unassigned Oscar, missing since 1982 and identified as authentic by its serial number, was found on the bedside table of a Madera man by sheriff’s deputies during a search . . . The San Francisco eatery that is the last vestige of the Doggie Diner chain has been denied landmark status by the city’s planning commission, allowing the owner to bulldoze the dachshund sign and the building to expand a garden center parking lot . . . Before Pulitzer Prize-winning comic artist Art Spiegelman agreed to speak at smoke-free UC Santa Cruz, he insisted upon--and got--permission to smoke during his remarks, from university officials who decided that smoking was a key part of his presentation . . . Audie Bock, whose election to the state Assembly made her the Green Party’s highest ranking elected official, is quitting the party to become an independent, which means she can skip the March primary and concentrate on next November’s general election.

EXIT LINE

“We’re not bird fascists.”

--Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, director of the San Francisco health department’s office of occupational and environmental health. The department ordered Frederick Hobson, on pain of a $100 daily fine, to move his bird feeder after a neighbor in another apartment complained that droppings from the birds damaged her flowers. Hobson hopes the Board of Supervisors will henceforth give bird lovers a break.

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California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.