Putting Some Teeth Into Vegetable Slander Law

George Bush, broccoli hater, take care what you say about that cruciform vegetable.

Disparaging the asparagus and ridiculing the radicchio could amount to agri-slander under a measure making a second try at becoming California law.

In it, Paso Robles Republican Tom Bordonaro is reviving elements of his failed 1995 bill authorizing produce shippers and growers to sue anyone who “maliciously” spreads “false information” that a food product is unsafe.

The new proposal would require the state to figure out how the economy has been affected by untrue or derisory remarks about foodstuffs that fill the state’s cornucopia . . . and its bank accounts.

Seven other states are considering agri-slander laws, and 14 more have them: “food disparagement laws” to supporters, “banana bills” to detractors, who are concerned about free speech issues.

Such restrictions date to the 1989 Alar controversy about reports of the possible cancer risk of a chemical used to keep apples fresh. A more recent impetus is the alarm sounded in March about possibly hepatitis-tainted Mexican strawberries used in school lunches in the U.S. California growers pointedly labeled theirs as California strawberries.

Could this require renaming the movie--filmed in San Diego-- from “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” to “Inappropriately Aggressive Behavior of the Esteem-Deficiency Syndrome Violently Predisposed Tomatoes”?

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D-Day Anniversary

Today marks the 53rd anniversary of D-day--the beginning of the Allied invasion of France that led to victory in Europe in World War II. California is home to more veterans of that conflict than any other state--683,900. These are the 10 counties with the most living veterans of that war.

County Veterans

Los Angeles: 150,010

San Diego: 74,030

Orange: 53,840

Riverside: 40,800

San Bernardino: 28,480

Sacramento: 26,810

Alameda: 26,170

Santa Clara: 26,130

Contra Costa: 21,500

San Mateo: 17,870

Source: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Blow out the candles: The party is over--the one that managed to shock even San Francisco. The private 50th birthday gala for the political consultant managing the campaign for the new 49ers stadium bond issue ballot measure--involving what the San Francisco Chronicle called “Caligulaean excesses” among them live public -odomies, -isms, -chisms and a bourbon bottle--didn’t dissuade voters this week from narrowly passing the measure.

Contrast that fete with the decorous behavior of the newest members of Local 790 of the SEIU--the unclothed women who work in glass booths at the Lusty Lady peep show. After contract talks, management agreed, among other matters, to get rid of one-way mirrors, through which the women say customers could videotape them, to give one paid sick day a year, and to honor a new seniority-based pay scale. Dancers will be rehired from a leave if their weight is stable and they have “no additional tattoo or piercing.”

Management wanted contract language about the women having “fun” at work. The women objected, and “fun” is not contractually required of practitioners of naked dancing.

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Know when to fold ‘em: The poker hand that Wild Bill Hickock was holding when he was shot to death in a Deadwood saloon--aces and eights, known ever after as a “dead man’s hand”--might never be dealt in the state’s deadest city.

In 1914, after San Francisco banned public cemeteries because of land scarcity, the city of Colma dedicated itself as San Francisco’s ultimate bedroom community--its cemetery suburb.

Colma, home to a thousand live bodies and a million dead ones, decided that card clubs could guarantee that its live population prospers. But Millbrae Democratic Assemblyman Lou Papan, believing the Grim Reaper and Lady Luck are not a matched pair, persuaded the Assembly this week to ban gambling clubs in any city designated as a necropolis.

Rosemead Democrat Diane Martinez: “What’s the definition of a necropolis?”

Papan: “Cities filled with more dead than alive people.”

Unnamed committee member: “Like Los Angeles?”

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One-Offs: A Temecula pharmacist, convinced that a doctor’s dosage orders amounted to a “morning after” pill, refused to fill the prescription for birth control pills for a wife and mother. . . . The misspelled words that knocked out California’s contenders in the National Spelling Bee: extraneous, indecisively, compulsion, malignant, sonorous, trellised, rasorial and glottogonic. . . . Drinks on the links may become the order of the day after the Legislature voted to let public golf courses join private ones in getting liquor licenses to serve booze on the first 18 holes too.

EXIT LINE

“It’s a great comfort to know that he died peacefully.”

--Valerie Macklin, whose deer-hunting grandfather, John Jones, vanished in a 1971 blizzard in the Rockies. Archeology students recently spied the Modesto man’s body in a shelter of tree branches. Until now, his gravestone said only that Jones was “lost.”

California Dateline appears every other Friday.