<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : The Pot World’s New Buzz Is From British Columbia
How humiliating. California’s most illicitly renowned cash crop has been out-NAFTAed.
The Golden State’s fabled pot has been blown away by the international marketplace: Canadian marijuana, grown in the border province of British Columbia, is said to be twice as potent and half as expensive as the California classics.
About 15 years ago it was Mexican marijuana that made a play for the California market, until anti-drug forces’ spraying of the chemical paraquat scared off the tokers. Now, a Vancouver police sergeant, Jens Linde, tells the San Jose Mercury News that two-thirds of the “B.C. bud” crop is making its way to California, and at half the price of the $5,000-per-pound primo Humboldt, Mendocino or Trinity stuff.
Among cultivators--some 3,000 just in Vancouver, a city of 600,000--are budding Luther Burbanks who are perfecting ever-more-powerful strains, and we’re not talking maple leaves.
With true free market analysis, Linde sighs: “If it were legalized, at least we could collect taxes on it.”
The Shopping State
California led the nation last year in retail sales by department stores and apparel, accessory stores, which are among the prime stores for Christmas shoppers. Here are the sales totals for the top 10 states, ranked by department store sales:
Note: Figures are in billions.
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STATE Dept. Stores Apparel, Accessory 1.California $20.8 $12.9 2.Texas $16.6 $7.5 3.Michigan $12.2 $3.9 4.Florida $12.0 $6.8 5.Ohio $10.7 $3.6 6.New York $10.4 $10.2 7.Illinois $9.8 $5.1 8.Pennsylvania $9.4 $4.9 9.Georgia $6.5 $2.9 10.Missouri $5.9 $1.8
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Source: “Demographics USA 1995” by Market Statistics, New York
Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times
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Equity unwavered: It’s a 180 on Shakespeare and Marlowe, when the guys took the girls’ roles as well as their own. After 73 years of sending boys to do a man’s acting job, the Ramona Pageant is sending the girls.
The Hemet extravaganza is an annual Southern California Oberammergau based on the Helen Hunt Jackson novel of thwarted love between Alessandro, an Indian sheep shearer, and Ramona, a half-Indian, half-Scottish daughter of a ranchero.
Locals take most of the parts in the production, but not enough boys showed up for the auditions, so girls will be enlisted for the brief but dramatic moment that had been exclusively the boys’: After sitting for 90 minutes of the play among the huge rocks in the natural amphitheater, they rise in unison and raise their hands. This dispenses with one cast problem: comic book envy.
Sherrill Nielsen is now an attorney who had acted in the pageant as a child, and she still remembers the inequity: The boys “seemed to have a lot of fun. They got to take comic books with them up on the hill and read while they waited for their cue. . . . If we wanted to sneak in a comic book, we had to slip it under our dress.”
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Van Gogh was mad, what’s your excuse? An angry Raiders fan, losing face at his team’s drubbing at the hands of the Kansas City Chiefs, saw to it that another man lost an ear. A former college linebacker, described by witnesses as an “obnoxious Raiders fan,” got testy in a San Diego bar when patrons teased him about the Raiders losing to the Chiefs, and bit off part of another man’s ear, necessitating two operations to date. The biter, Carl Anthony Ditmars, has pleaded guilty to felony battery.
The Raiders play the Chiefs again on Dec. 3. Wear earmuffs.
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Drive a crooked mile: Lombard Street, the San Francisco thoroughfare that makes tourists only think they’ve had too much to drink, is back. And forth. And back again. Five months and more than a million bucks after being closed for repairs, the block-long street of eight S-curves is re-bricked, re-piped and repopulated by cars, startling people who had grown used to the street with the 16% grade going carless.
The old bricks have been bought up as souvenirs for $55 each by sentimental, solipsistic San Franciscans--is there any other kind?
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From Bauhaus to barracks: One student comes from Athens, home of the Parthenon, and their leader hails from London, home of St. Paul’s. But alas for Mr. Wright, Mr. Neutra, Mr. Schindler and Ms. Morgan--it was Mr. Quonset’s body of work that 14 foreign architecture students wanted to study when they came to California.
A former Marine Corps base that now houses transients attracted the group to the Imperial Valley, where one of them, a 26-year-old Belgian, also pronounced himself fascinated by the geometric shapes formed by the agricultural area’s irrigation canals.
EXIT LINE
“We knew something was different here when we started to talk about our pollsters the way we used to talk about our gynecologists.”
--Ex-Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (D-Pa.), telling the 700 women at the Forum for Women State Legislators in Coronado about the impact of the “year of the woman” elections in 1992.
California Dateline appears every other Friday.
