When the Baugh Breaks, the Snickers Must Stop

Since Gray Davis became governor, he has, in his public remarks, mispronounced the surname of the Assembly’s top Republican leader.

Maybe it’s habit, maybe it’s unfamiliarity with the Newport Beach man who was only elected in 1995 and who ascended to the top of the GOP pecking order in part because of term-limits turnover.

At the California Chamber of Commerce convention earlier this month, Davis again pronounced Scott Baugh’s name as “bow,” like the front of a ship or the first syllable of a cartoon dog’s bow-wow bark. Baugh had laughed it off, but this was the last straw--or bough.

Buttonholing a Davis aide, the top-dog Republican insisted, “I don’t care, but the press is snickering. I’m not a dog. It’s Baugh, like Limbaugh.”

A name every yellow-dog Democrat knows how to pronounce.

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Girl, misidentified: A 150-year-old gaffe, perpetuated in thousands of images and hundreds of accounts of the Gold Rush, has been, like the gold itself, discovered.

A popular daguerreotype in the Huntington Library’s collection, identified as portraying a “woman miner,” does not picture a woman at all. It shows an Illinois teenager named John Burt Colton, who headed west to hunt for gold.

Colton followed the fashion of the day and had his picture taken before heading off to the gold fields, according to an article by the Huntington’s curator of photographs. The photographer copied the image of the slight, epicene-looking Colton and began peddling it as “a girl miner in boy’s clothing.” For the $5 price, the buyer also got a yarn about the orphan girl trying to make her fortune in a man’s world and man’s garb.

Back from the gold fields, Colton let the photographer in on his displeasure. Today there would have been lawsuits and copyright claims, but Colton went on with life and the images went into history uncontradicted, until recently.

More recent gender confusion in Oakland: A radio station took down billboards captioned “morning sickness” featuring pregnant women with the heads of two male morning DJs. One woman who collected signatures against the ads said they promote homosexuality, and complained that she had to “reprogram” her granddaughter about pregnancy.

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Security is Job 1: It’s a seller’s market for workers nowadays--maybe even for these workers too. With an eye to how inmates will spend their time after serving time, San Bernardino is sponsoring a career day for the incarcerated.

Wednesday’s event matches up more than 100 inmates from the Glen Helen Rehabilitation Center in Devore for interviews with local businesses such as the Ontario Airport Hilton.

While employers will come with job openings, inmates will come with a dozen hours of training in job-hunting skills, among them writing resumes, networking and being interviewed. Their job interviews will be videotaped--nothing new to people already accustomed to living under surveillance.

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One-offs: A fund-raiser for the woman facing trial for allegedly planting bombs under LAPD cars during the heyday of the Symbionese Liberation Army fell flat as a bad souffle, after the benefit book signing at a Berkeley pub sold fewer than a dozen copies of “Serving Time: America’s Most Wanted Recipes.” . . . May 3 is California State Guide Dog Day, but commuters at the El Cerrito BART station already are upset because a disabled newspaper seller’s dog, Lucy, who has a fatal disease, has been banned from the station. . . . An up-skirt video of the kind banned in California last year was being peddled on the Internet by a California seller who adjudged the video, shot in L.A., as “the best I have seen yet.” . . . A 21-year-old Fremont woman who just got her driver’s license won a new Volkswagen Beetle filled with Oreos by finding one of the five cookies imprinted with the word “car.” . . . A trucker shot and killed by a customs inspector as he reached for a gun at the Otay Mesa border crossing was hauling more than a ton of marijuana in boxes bearing stickers reading, “Say no to drugs.”

EXIT LINE

“I could see it coming and I wanted to stop it before it became bad.”

--San Francisco restaurateur Ed Moose, who banned the use of cell phones inside his North Beach restaurant after seeing (and hearing) one customer use his to call his pal at the opposite end of the bar. Other public sites--like museums, restaurants and golf courses--have begun to do the same.

California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Rape in California

In recent years, the number of rapes of women reported statewide has declined, as have other violent crimes. However, fewer than one in three rapes are reported to law enforcement agencies, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

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Rate per 100,000

Forcible Rapes women

1989 11,956 82

1990 12,716 85

1991 12,942 85

1992 12,751 82

1993 11,754 74

1994 10,960 68

1995 10,550 64

1996 10,238 61

1997 10,182 59

1998 9,777 59

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Sources: Criminal Justice Statistics Center, California Dept. of Justice

Researched by TRACY THOMAS/Los Angeles Times