Corrections Dept. Leery of Anatomical Correctness

Doris of the Hundred Days--Republican Doris Allen, last year’s summer replacement Assembly speaker--is long gone, but her below-the-belt observations about male legislators’ primary sexual characteristic linger still in Capitol exchanges.

This week, legislators asked the Department of Corrections to keep a lid on prison costs by sending more inmates out to fire crew camps. Fine, Corrections’ Jim Gomez told the committee hearing, but there are limits to the felons they can place: “We don’t want [male exhibitionists] in the camps,” he said, though his actual language was considerably more vivid. Heading the committee and the charge to cut prison costs was Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer, who had a counterproposal: “They might be OK in a camp. Might help put out the fires.”

And Assemblywoman Barbara Alby (R-Fair Oaks) was delighted that a Senate committee approved her version of “Megan’s Law” to permit local cops to publicize the whereabouts of their local registered sex offenders.

Police and the state attorney general could decide which types of sex offenders to finger, and how to do it--via newspaper and TV stories, Internet pages, billboards or door-to-door fliers.

After the hearing, reporters asked Alby about the matter of proportional punishment: Should, for example, a run-of-the-mill “flasher in Capitol Park” be excluded from a publicity list that also contained violent child molesters and rapists?

Alby fairly bubbled. “Only if he is a legislator.”

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A new leaf: Michelangelo’s “David” is a man of parts--and will continue to be so at a Capitola Italian restaurant. A few neighbors of Caffe Michelangelo wanted the city to order the restaurant to bowdlerize its new 4-foot-high sign, which features Michelangelo’s nude statue of David rendered in full and faithful detail.

But the city, perhaps fearing just the kind of mockery that it in fact received, did not order any fig-leafing of the drawing of a statue that epitomizes the High Renaissance.

And business has been cooking ever since. “I said to the city, give me the name of those people who complained,” says the owner, Neapolitan Gaetano Balsamo. “Maybe I would send them a gift certificate.”

Only one editorial comment has marred the signboard: Some kids adorned the figure on the sign with a wad of chewed pink bubble gum.

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U-turn: A wire service photo and item about a 66 1/2-foot-long limo built by a Riverside auto customizing company on an order from an Abu Dhabi sheik brought this letter from Sheik Hamad Bin Hamdan Al-Nahyan: “I never ordered such a vehicle, do not own it, and have never owned it.” Vinnie Bergermo, the owner of Ultra Custom Coach, says that while the vehicle is not registered to the sheik, he stands by his information and says the sheik is a good customer who he believes ordered the $1.8-million vehicle.

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College Funding

Stanford University leads California colleges and universities in independent fund-raising, although Caltech is the leader in funds raised per student.

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SCHOOL ENROLLMENT TOTAL GIFTS PER STUDENT 1. Stanford 15,176 $240,832,287 $15,869 2. USC 28,185 $138,366,230 $4,909 3. UC San Francisco 3,729 $108,127,887 $28,996 4. UC Berkeley 29,634 $103,088,570 $3,479 5. UCLA 35,110 $98,163,606 $2,796 6. Caltech 1,982 $69,037,462 $34,832 7. Pepperdine 7,725 $50,841,939 $6,581 8. UC San Diego 17,774 $41,119,623 $2,313 9. UC Davis 22,442 $33,689,933 $1,501 10. Loma Linda 3,041 $23,945,625 $7,874

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Source: Council for Aid to Education

Note: Figures are for 1994-95 school year.

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One-offs: A Butte County man jailed for nearly $11,000 in unpaid child support is a leader of a self-styled patriot group who declares that he is the victim of “political persecution.”. . . California’s 26th annual sheep count will find 75 wide-awake volunteer enumerators spending the Fourth of July weekend counting the ever-fewer peninsular bighorn sheep in the 600,000-acre Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. . . . San Jose’s first-in-California law to bill parents for cleaning up their children’s graffiti could generate $10,000 in fines, but cost $14,000 to administer. . . . After a Visalia resident suggested defraying the city’s $2.6-million budget deficit with a $1 contribution from each of its 93,000 residents, 134 people stopped by City Hall to drop off a buck each. . . . Jolly Roger Press in Berkeley has a $1,207.40 royalty check made out to Theodore Kaczynski from sales of the Unabomber manifesto, but the firm points out that his acknowledging authorship and cashing it could be tantamount to an admission of guilt.

EXIT LINE

“I never expected them to risk their lives. I just wanted them to call 911 or hit the panic button under the register.”

--A registered nurse and lawyer, awarded a $1.1-million judgment against an Oakland liquor store whose two clerks refused to intervene when the woman was raped, taken at knifepoint into the store and then beaten.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.