<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : San Jose Learning Equal Treatment for All Deities

What’s good for Quetzalcoatl evidently goes for the Three Wise Men too. San Jose, having just mopped its brow from all the screaming and yelling over the city’s decision to place a half-million-dollar statue of the Aztec god in the park to honor multiculturalism, has decided to let a Nativity scene return to the same park, where it’s been for some 20 Noels past.

Christians who had demonstrated and gone to court to keep Quetzalcoatl out went back to the Plaza de Cesar Chavez to keep the creche in , staging their own living Nativity scene. People phoned. People protested. The city relented.

That ceremony was held only after a federal judge ruled that the work was a cultural, not a religious, symbol.

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Bye Bye Birdie: For that price, it might as well have been made out of gold.

The Maltese Falcon, one of two movie prop birds in the eponymous film noir classic, sold at auction for $398,500 this week . . . thus giving the figurine to a swanky Manhattan jeweler, and giving the bird to San Francisco, which very much wanted to keep the falcon in the city where the book is set.

The hunt for the gold and jeweled falcon, “the stuff that dreams are made of,” if you believe Dashiell Hammett’s detective Sam Spade, was the centerpiece of the book and the film, but San Francisco played a big supporting role.

The fictional dick ate dinner at a real S.F. restaurant, John’s Grill, whose Maltese Falcon room has but a copy of the avian in question. (The other authentic prop is in the hands of a Beverly Hills man). Restaurant owner John Konstin flew to New York to bid on the real falcon but dropped out at $140,000.

Pre-auction estimates had priced the bird in the $30,000 to $50,000 range, but it flew above even the $244,500 for Victor Fleming’s Oscar for directing “Gone With the Wind.”

This bird bears the authentic slash marks that actor Sidney Greenstreet made in a fit of fat pique when he found that the falcon wasn’t gold and jeweled--in short, the Ford falcon, not the Rolls-Royce.

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I know it’s only guacamole, but I like it: In California’s answer to the elaborate annual French ceremonials surrounding Beaujolais nouveau , the first Hass avocado of the season was plucked from a tree on a 132-acre grove in Vista this week.

Hass avocados--the uninitiated sometimes call them “alligator pears”--account for most of the avocados in San Diego County, and San Diego County accounts for about half of the nation’s crop.

The first plucking came two days after the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that its quarters in nearby Fallbrook is among 31 ag field offices set to close in California, from Siskiyou County to El Centro--the farming version of base closures.

Since avocados were discovered in Mexico around 291 B.C., we have learned that they are a lousy color for major appliances, an ill-advised diet food (two tablespoons hold 10% of a day’s allowance of fat), but a handsome ornament to tortilla chips.

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Killer angels: The last of the year’s quarter-century anniversaries is the one you might least want to remember. Altamont, the ruinously free concert at a racetrack near Livermore, became the evil twin of Woodstock, notorious for more than 850 exceedingly bad acid trips and riotous conflicts between fans and the Hells Angels, misguidedly hired as security in exchange for free beer. Four concert-goers died, one stabbed by an Angel who was acquitted after pleading self-defense.

“What happened, what went wrong?” the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger asked then. “If Jesus had been there, he would have been crucified.”

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Ex libris: The sad tale of the libraries of Merced County just gets sadder, with no last chapter plot device, no deus ex machina riding to the rescue.

Over the last year, its 19 libraries have opened, closed, opened, scraped by, cut hours and set out the begging bowl for donations. Now a statewide survey puts Merced’s library last among 155 state libraries in per capita library spending--$2.84. Irwindale tops the list at $179.53.

Nearly all of the Merced libraries are open again, in some fashion, some staffed by volunteers and on fiscal life supports from local donations, says the county’s principal administrative analyst, Beverly Morse. “I think there is no interest on the part of board (of supervisors) members to close down, but how soon we’re going to go back to where we were, I don’t know.”

As a frame of reference, for each of the nearly 3.5 million votes he got in the most expensive congressional race ever, Senate candidate Michael Huffington spent $5.74 of his own money.

EXIT LINE

“It’s 23 days ‘til Christmas. Here’s your car seat.”

--A San Leandro carjacker who shoved a woman and her baby out of the car, then tossed the infant seat out too, before driving off.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

California’s Gun Violence

In 1993, there were 4,783 firearms-related deaths reported in California, including suicides but not accidents. The magnitude of gun-related violence is evident in the rapid rise of gun homicides compared with all other homicides.

Source: California Research Bureau/California State Library

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times