Maybe He’d Settle for a Gold Watch and Handshake

On what is likely the last lap of his California political career, Gov. Pete Wilson should be expecting the encomiums to begin any day now.

The Napa Chamber of Commerce thinks that naming the state mental hospital after something other than Napa itself would be good for the local tourist trade . . . and the Pete Wilson Mental Hospital is one of the alternatives.

The Napa State Hospital Task Force will pull one of several suggested new names from a hat next month to recommend to the state Department of Mental Health, which must OK the new name and send it on to the Legislature to do the same thing.

There will be more than one slip of paper in that hat; other monikers include Northern California Mental Health Hospital, Imola State Hospital--the historical name for the area--and Tulocay Mental Health Center, after the name of a Mexican land grant.

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Why he doesn’t call for a second date: The tarantula mating season around Mount Diablo is filling the trails and hills with arachnids on the crawl for a little coupling and spider procreation.

During the tarantula fall classic, 8- to 12-year-old spiders emerge from their burrows and search out their first and last girlfriends. Once the male spider gets to home plate, in puberty parlance--and sometimes even before--the female usually kills and eats him.

But hey, at least he doesn’t have to pick up the check.

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Good business, bad law: A Ventura County deputy public defender who also sells Amway products got into hot water without soap for approaching a man in the courthouse cafeteria about becoming an Amway salesman--and then finding he is a juror in the high-profile, high-stakes Diane Haun murder case.

“It was pure stupidity on my part,” confessed Deputy Public Defender Gary Wayne to Superior Court Judge Frederick Jones. Juror No. 5 vowed it had not influenced his opinions about the case of the woman on trial in the kidnap-killing of her lover’s wife.

“Just when you think you’ve heard and done it all in your own little world,” said the judge, “along comes a lawyer who actively seeks out jurors in the courthouse cafeteria to sell detergent.”

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Far out . . . and far off: A publicist for a showing of photographs from Linda McCartney’s book “Sixties” to benefit San Francisco’s 1967 Summer of Love anniversary celebration didn’t get the math quite right when his press release noted that July 1967 was the date of the Candlestick Park performance that became the Beatles’ last public concert. It was July 1966, making this year not its 30th anniversary, but the 30th anniversary of the first anniversary of the Beatles’ concert. Tooooo many flashbacks.

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The SAT and English

California’s diversity shows up increasingly in students who take the Scholastic Assessment Test. Here is the change from 10 years ago in the number of test-takers whose primary language included one other than English.

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1987 % 1997 % % change 1987-1997 English 82,711 74% 82,259 65% -12% Bilingual household 14,271 13% 20,396 16% +23% Other primary language 14,251 13% 23,808 19% +46%

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Source: College Board, San Jose

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Less is more, none is most: End-of-session punchiness in Sacramento:

Senate Rules Committee Chairman Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) was ripping through a big binder Thursday trying to find a bill. It wasn’t there.

Someone handed him a copy of a four-page bill. He examined it with care. Finally, he looked up, puzzled, and grumped aloud: “There’s nothing. There’s not a single word [in the bill].”

Except for the front page, the bill pages were blank.

“That’s a Hurtt bill,” offered Sen. Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga) with mock helpfulness. Hurtt is Senate GOP leader Rob Hurtt of Garden Grove. “Now you are beginning to understand the conservative mind.”

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One-offs: In the wake of the death of the princess of Wales, Rep. Sonny Bono (R-Palm Springs) has introduced a measure to ban unacceptable conduct by paparazzi. . . . Fresno County rounded up about 100 wanted felons by tracking them to where their welfare checks had been mailed. . . . World War I Army nurse Dorothy Kohlars, who was in the first group of U.S. Army nurses sent to France and who cared for the wounded from the Battle of the Argonne, celebrated her 102nd birthday in Barstow’s veterans’ retirement home.

EXIT LINE

“Now you can laugh about this.”

--Wrong. A San Jose police detective said this to Gary Riggio after police came to Riggio’s house in the middle of the night, handcuffed him and sat him, half-dressed, in his driveway, ripped open his mattress and questioned him in a 6-month-old bank robbery on the basis of an erroneous photo. A video surveillance camera photo of Riggio innocently cashing his paycheck was aired on a local crime-stopper TV show that urges people to turn in suspected felons. Riggio is thinking about suing; the $3,273 robbery is unsolved.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.