This Is Taking New Math to Places It Shouldn’t Go

In the manner of an urban legend, it just keeps circulating, finding new places to land.

Parents at Riverside’s Alvord Unified School District want to know what a teacher was thinking when he gave his racially mixed summer math class a “joke” test asking students to figure out profit percentages of cut heroin and the square-footage capacity in a graffiti tagger’s spray-paint can.

Some parents want an apology from Charles Sanders; others are asking for his resignation. The head of the district’s educators association says Sanders erred, that he had intended to hand out something else altogether, and is ready to apologize.

Ninth-grader Robert Salazar kept the test to show his father, who wants an apology. But activist Louise Palomarez said, “We want him fired! We don’t want no damn apology.”

The same “test” was circulated four years ago, headed “City of Los Angeles High School Math Proficiency Exam,” with spaces for the student’s name and gang affiliation.

Its eight questions, couched with ethnically loaded names that were not included in the Riverside test, asked students to calculate how many drive-bys “Johnny” could do with a .38-caliber ammo clip if he missed so many times per incident . . . how many $65 tricks “Rufus” and his three “girls” would have to turn to pay for his $800 a day crack habit . . . and what percentage of the 27 girls in his gang “Hector” had gotten pregnant if he had “knocked up” six of them.

It may compute, but that doesn’t mean it adds up.

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Fish and CHPs: It only aired in five cities, but it didn’t play well in Fresno.

Image-conscious California cops, “Dragnet” to Rodney King, took umbrage at a fast-food commercial in which a patrol car-mounted camera “catches” a state trooper swiping a driver’s bag of fast food during a traffic stop.

“I love this job,” says the uniformed actor in the Long John Silver’s spot.

The California Assn. of Highway Patrolmen has joined others in demanding that the ad be pulled. The spot aired in Fresno, where the president of the Fresno Police Officers Assn. found it “humorous at first, but then it gets to be like a hemorrhoid--very irritating.” Larry Bertao objects to the image of “the officer taking something under color of authority. That’s a felony and about the worst possible one for an officer.”

Not quite the worst. That would have been stealing doughnuts.

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Taking the Bait

Summertime is the prime sportfishing season off the California coast, and last year 632,236 California anglers reported landing nearly 3.3 million fish on commercial passenger fishing vessels. Here is the reported 1996 catch for 10 selected popular species:

FISH: CATCH

Rockfish: 1,076,110

Sand bass: 604,132

Pacific mackerel: 335,240

Calico bass: 282,673

California barracuda: 271,859

Pacific bonito: 72,665

Yellowtail: 66,763

Chinook salmon: 60,675

California halibut: 19,092

White sea bass: 1,452

NOTE: Includes some fish caught off Baja California.

Source: Marine Resources Division, state Department of Fish and Game

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Computer sleight: Remember the taking of high school yearbook photos? Then what happened under the Capitol dome in Sacramento will make marginally more sense.

For the official portrait-taking, Democratic Speaker Cruz Bustamante stood where the speaker stands to preside over the Assembly. Sophomore (first elected 1994) Brett Granlund (R-Yucaipa) waggishly decided to sit in the speaker’s vacated floor seat instead of his own back-bench post.

And so the official Assembly portrait, intended for pamphlets for visitors and schoolchildren, showed that cut-up Granlund in Bustamante’s chair. But the speaker’s office says it was caught early enough that the wonders of computer manipulation could be employed to move Granlund from Bustamante’s seat back to his own, but only from the waist up. His legs remained at Bustamante’s seat, until someone remarked on it, and now Granlund’s legs, too, have almost completely disappeared from Bustamante’s chair.

Now, how much did Fotomat charge for all of that?

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One-offs: “John TV” debuts today in Stockton, the sporadic televising of the names and booking photos of alleged prostitutes and customers. . . . A Newman police sergeant who won $17 million in the state lottery kept to his plan to compete in the California police summer games two days later. . . . The ProPAW animal coalition wants 433,000 voters’ signatures to place on the 1998 ballot a measure outlawing the trapping of wildlife with cruel traps and poisons. . . . A computer check on a 31-year-old man caught fishing without a license in Florida found that he was wanted on a 15-year-old murder charge in Hayward. . . . The last time it was a “banana peel” beehive so tall she had to bend to get into her car, but now Oakland jailer Carla Cooper-Karanikola is wearing a plain brown wig until she sorts out the hair-pulling with police, who say the pink, copper and gold Shirley Temple curls of her latest coiffure distract inmates and diminish her authority.

EXIT LINE

“You know, I never touch that stuff.”

--San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, refusing a serving of pate in his last line of his scene in “George of the Jungle.” What was the dialogue writer thinking, that there are a lot of yucks in the notion of the sybarite mayor turning down the putative delicacy?

California Dateline appears every other Friday.