No Back-Door Events for the Acting Governor

When both Gov. Gray Davis and Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante sashayed down to Mexico City for last month’s inauguration of Mexico’s new president, that left California in the hands of its acting governor: John Burton, the far-from-shy San Francisco Democrat who heads the state Senate.

When a reporter asked Burton his plans for his governorship (all 25 hours of it), the senator answered, “Have a couple of fund-raisers”--and, as reporters laughed, added, “. . . and walk right in the front door.” More laughter.

That was a dig at Davis. Last September, the governor, in the midst of a siege of signing and vetoing hundreds of bills before a legislative deadline, sneaked off to a fund-raiser--or, rather, sneaked into one. Others went in by the front door, but the governor arrived later by way of a next-door neighbor’s backyard, amid rustling shrubbery and a phalanx of security men concealing him from a TV camera. A spokesman said it was security, not secrecy, that prompted the unorthodox entrance.

Burton’s “fondest hope” as acting governor, he joked, was to find a bill, “send it down to the governor’s office, veto the bill, take it back upstairs [to the Legislature] and override it.”

In the Democratic-dominated state Legislature, that’s as close as it gets to divided government.

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Tell it to the judges: So the Internet isn’t the dot-Comstock lode after all. But it’s not because the silicon slump left them with spare time that three Web site builders crafted a techno-dissent to the U.S. Supreme Court’s handling of the presidential election.

It was “frustration and the desire to give other people the opportunity to register their frustrations,” said co-creator Luke Lozier of San Francisco, whose firm builds e-business Web sites.

Their site, https://www.illegitimatebush.com, is an online petition for disagreeing with the court’s December ruling shutting down further vote counts in Florida and essentially ending the election, advantage Bush.

“This is the first activist move any of us has ever made of any magnitude,” Lozier said. “The three people who worked on this site voted for three different [presidential candidates].”

Although they’ll be tallying virtual signatures before Bush’s Jan. 20 swearing-in, Lozier says the site will stay up and running for four years, as a protest. After all, “It only costs us $35 a year.”

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Semper fido: Pvt. Mac, the English bulldog who was just named the new mascot at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, will see daily evidence that he has some large paw prints to fill.

In a place of honor at the depot is a plaque honoring other past mascots, including the most famous of all, the terrier-bulldog Soochow. Soochow saw combat at Corregidor in World War II and was taken prisoner in 1942 by the Japanese.

Although starving Marines and other American POWs subsisted on lizards, rats, snakes and even dogs and cats, no one ever suggested that Soochow become a meal.

Soochow survived and returned to San Diego a hero at the war’s end, with the rank of sergeant and a World War II victory medal. He died in his sleep in 1948 and is buried across from the depot’s mess hall.

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One-offs: A San Francisco City Hall time capsule destined to be unlocked 100 years hence contains, among its objets, Rice-a-Roni, a bit of the AIDS quilt and Mayor Willie Brown’s fedora. . . . Watsonville police arrested three boys with a Molotov cocktail, an idea they said they’d gotten from a Sony PlayStation game pitting French resistance fighters against Nazis.

EXIT LINE

“We’re going to put a brass railing about four inches from the floor, put stools out there, and at five in the evening we’ll flick on the neon sign that says Sierra Nevada [beer].”

--Marin County supervisor John Kress, speaking jocularly of the huge (seven-foot radius) and high (42 inches) reception desk outside the supervisors’ offices; some residents find the $45,000 price tag, even for what is an entire reception center, to be, like the desk itself, really high.

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California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.

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Stuck on Him

Only two nations have more official Elvis Presley fan clubs than California. The King would have turned 66 this month.

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PLACE CLUBS England 35 Canada 26 California 24 Australia 16 Brazil 13 France 6 Japan 4 Romania 3 Chile 2 Croatia 1 Sri Lanka 1

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Source: Elvis Presley Enterprises Inc., Memphis

Researched by TRACY THOMAS/Los Angeles Times