An Insouciant Contest, but Not Without Satiric Charm

To tide you over until the next International Imitation Hemingway writing contest, a Napa Valley winery wants to know which wine descriptors are most annoying to bibbers, and if its own list of 24 nouns and adjectives is not sufficiently pompous (“wiry, jammy, bouncy, forward, chewy”) Bandiera Winery is also open to write-in suggestions.

Given that scientists have just unearthed what they believe is the world’s oldest vintage--in a 7,000-year-old pottery jar in Iran--the words that come to mind are “salad dressing.”

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Liquid Assets

Water is California’s lifeblood. The four longest rivers in the state drain about 60,000 square miles. The Los Angeles River, in both runoff and watershed, is a mere trickle by comparison.

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RIVER MILES RUNOFF WATERSHED (million acre-feet) (square miles) Sacramento 373 22. 26,548 San Joaquin 370 6.4 15,946 Eel 197 6.3 3,701 Klamath 180 11.1 10,020 Los Angeles 58 .076 822

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Sources: California Department of Water Resources, California Almanac

Researched by NONA YATES / Los Angeles Times

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Parliament of howls: National GOP party chief Haley Barbour visited Sacramento this week to tout Bob Dole in California, and showing up as Heckler Designate was the state Democratic Party’s political director Bob Mulholland, flinging out taunts at Barbour.

Welcome committee member Assemblyman Mickey Conroy (R-Orange) to Mulholland: “Another Commie for Tommie” (presumably antiwar Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica).

Mulholland to Conroy: “So how are the trials in Orange County going?” (indictments of Assemblyman Scott Baugh and Republican aides)

Dole’s California doyen Ken Khachigian, to no one in particular, as the elevator door closed on Mulholland: “Total political low-life.”

The most colorful figure of this colorful exchange was silent--the chagrined, scarlet-faced host, Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle.

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Desert decor: Death Valley Scotty was a marginal prospector but a fabulous salesman--of himself, of his own tale-spinning and of Scotty’s Castle, the sand-bound Spanish hacienda.

It is a testament to Walter Edward Scott’s self-mythologizing that the must-see mansion that bears his name was actually built by a Chicago businessman whom Scotty had conned and then charmed.

The indoor waterfall and pipe organ remain, but the National Park Service wants to do some redecorating--or de-decorating--to restore the place to its pristine 1930s self.

To that end, the service is asking for a look at any pre-1954 photographs of the castle, indoors and out. And of course, if any snapshots out there show the tourists themselves, especially the likes of Lindbergh or Gable or Queen Marie of Romania stopping by, the Death Valley National Park would be delighted to hear about it.

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Draw! The yearbook signing party was canceled, the yearbooks sent back for reprinting, and the high school cheerleading captain was suspended for a week.

The principal at Monte Vista High in Spring Valley near San Diego opened her copy to find blue eye shadow, mustaches and other additions to the photos of four of the school’s cheerleaders . . . cartooned by the fifth.

The genesis of the feud is unclear. The captain, who evidently felt dissed by the other four, sneaked in her work just as the yearbook went to the printer. The four defacees say she lorded it over them and wasn’t a team player. Not so, says the captain’s mom, who thinks they are just jealous of the daughter she described to the San Diego Union-Tribune as “superior” and “drop-dead gorgeous.”

Hijinks or low, the captain “violated a position of trust,” declares Principal Barbara Nowak, and the other four “have learned this is not a responsible way to behave.” Pencils down, class.

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One-offs: The company providing $110 million in liability insurance for the Republican National Convention in San Diego is the same firm that insured the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic. . . . While draining a reservoir in Plumas County for seismic rebuilding, P G & E workers found a 73-year-old Hisler steam locomotive, abandoned in the dam when work was finished in 1923 . . . . An Escondido woman being released after a week’s stay in a Provo jail was rearrested when she was caught on her way out, carrying off the top to her jail uniform--a souvenir of her visit.

EXIT LINE

“There are various kinds of bloodsuckers. We’re are not talking about the Congress-type here.”

--Rancho Santa Fe publicist R.J. Garis, offering a $5,000 reward for a specimen of the chupacabras, the chimerical creature that has taken hold in the public imagination in Puerto Rico and Mexico as the vampire killer of livestock. Garis’ ground rules--it has to be alive and a previously undiscovered species.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.