Just Sign This Inmate ‘Sleepless in Sacramento’

Is the alleged Unabomber getting celebrity treatment in jail? At least one prisoner thinks so. Inmate Melani Hansen griped this week that Theodore Kaczynski enjoys “a nice little bed” while others in a courthouse holding cell “just had tiled floors and benches” to rest on.

U.S. Marshal Jerry Enomoto confirmed the basic facts, but said that because Kaczynski’s trial will be unusually long, he will spend more time in the holding cell than inmates typically do. Thus, the bed.

Despite her grumbling, Hansen said Kaczynski--suspected in bombings that killed three and injured 29--was “actually very nice and pleasant . . . like the guy next door. . . . He whistled a lot of nursery rhyme songs all the time.”

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Your tax dollars at work: The Legislature toiled long and hard this year, churning out 959 bills that were signed. Welfare reform, tax cuts and health care for poor kids got the ink, but California Dateline found some sexier topics hidden in the fine print. To wit:

* Ear wax. In a major breakthrough brought to us by Los Angeles state Sen. Richard Polanco, licensed audiologists--the folks who test your hearing--may now legally remove ear wax, technically known as cerumen.

“People think, ‘Remove ear wax? Yeah, right, who wants to do that?’ ” says Gail Sollid of the California Academy of Audiology. “But if you’re trying to insert a probe in the ear or do some other diagnostic test, wax can get in the way.”

OK, OK, we hear ya.

* Feral pigs. Thanks to Sen. Bruce McPherson (R-Santa Cruz), you may now shoot a pig without a permit if the porker is threatening you or your property. This may not be a burning issue in, say, Cerritos. But in the farm belt sections of McPherson’s district, wild pigs are a pesky problem.

“These aren’t the cute pigs people keep as pets,” says Rick Van Nieuwburg, a McPherson aide. “They’re big and they’ll charge you.”

Oink, oink.

* State dirt. We have the state flower (the golden poppy), the state insect (the dogface butterfly) and the state motto (Eureka!). Now comes “San Joaquin soil,” the official California state dirt.

Dig it.

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O Tannenbaum: What stands 50 feet tall, boasts 5,000 lights and smells really good? The State Christmas Tree! This year’s specimen is a Sequoia gigantea (known to most of us elves as a redwood) donated by the Candy Apple Tree Farm of Camino, Calif.

Finding a tree impressive enough to please 32 million Californians is a daunting task. Take 1994, for example.

When heavy snows put their chosen pine out of reach, the state’s tree choppers found an enticing specimen in somebody’s front yard. “They knocked on the door and asked the people if they would donate it, and they did,” said Gary Lee, keeper of State Christmas Tree trivia.

Now that’s Christmas spirit.

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Holiday Peril

Using only laboratory-approved indoor lights and keeping the tree’s base in two to four quarts of water will help prevent a Christmas tree fire in your home. Here are statistics on such residential fires reported in California over the most recent years available.

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Dec.-Jan. Fires Property Loss Injuries Deaths *1988-89 73 $2.9 million 31 -- *1989-90 53 $2.7 million 7 -- *1990-91 48 $1.7 million 17 6 *1991-92 35 $8.4 million 16 4 *1992-93 31 $1 million 11 -- *1993-94 30 $1.2 million 10 --

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Note: Numbers for 1994 are incomplete.

Source: State Fire Marshal

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Bond, James Bond: Think you’ve heard everything there is to hear about that meteorological menace, El Nino? Well, think again.

The S.F. Weekly reports that “James Bond, United Artists, Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan have joined in a conspiracy against the people of the United States, the Philippines, China, Brazil and Peru to wreak havoc of unconscionable magnitude for decades to come.”

Citing “unnamed sources,” the paper says that every year since 1963 that the world has endured an El Nino event, we have also been treated to a new chapter in the saga of Agent 007:

* 1963 brought “From Russia With Love,” along with droughts, floods, cyclones.

* 1965 gave us “Thunderball,” a killer drought in eastern Asia and a historic flood in Colorado.

* 1969 unleashed “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” Hurricane Camille and a blizzard that closed the New York Stock Exchange.

Fast forward to 1997. El Nino looms over us like, well, a storm cloud, and there’s “Tomorrow Never Dies.” It’s enough to make you wear waders to the cinema.

EXIT LINE

“I’m excited, I’m happy, I’m relieved. But there’s a little piece that constantly nags at me--a sadness that this happened in this community.”

--Victoria Forrester, fifth-grade teacher in Alameda. Two parents complained after she discussed the “coming-out episode” of the TV show “Ellen” with her class. But Forrester was cleared of wrongdoing by the school district. Quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.