Candidate for S.F. Mayor Runs on 4-Legged Platform

Every dog has his day, and who knows? Maybe today is Basil’s.

It’s election day in San Francisco, and Basil, the 7-year-old black Labrador retriever and mayoral candidate, has promised to clean up parks (starting with his own good conduct, of course) and to make a beef-basted bone available to every San Franciscan.

Basil launched his candidacy, according to his Web site, because, “I figure being the ‘real’ dog in this pack of politicians makes me the perfect choice to lead this San Francisco into the next millennium.”

Basil’s candidacy is hardly odd in a city with as rich a cast of characters as the Emperor Norton I, an engaging lunatic who paraded around 19th century San Francisco in plumed hat and epaulets with his dogs, Bummer and Lazarus.

Among this crop of mayoral candidates, Basil might not top the eccentric point scale.

Supervisor Tom Ammiano is also a gay stand-up comic who said he boycotted a Clinton visit to the city “even though I’ve been practicing my curtsy for weeks.”

Former Police Chief and Mayor Frank Jordan, in a notorious campaign stunt, posed nude in his shower with two radio DJs before voting day four years ago--and lost . . . Clint Reilly was revealed once to be injecting testosterone, which seemed redundant for a political campaign consultant . . . and current Mayor Willie Brown’s dandyish chic and personal hauteur could match that of Emperor Norton.

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My word! The congressman denies it, the senator believes him, the editor stands fast.

In a withering letter to Capital Style magazine, Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) said the magazine’s “gossip column” got it wrong: He didn’t say those mean things about Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and he suggested the magazine’s readers would be “better served by more attention to Capital substance and less to ‘style.’ ”

Kam Kuwata, Feinstein’s trusty campaign manager, says he takes Cox at his word.

Bill Thomas, the magazine’s editor, says flatly that two staffers heard Cox say it, and that Cox “knows what he said, and we know what he said.”

Oh, what was it Cox allegedly said?

The magazine’s current issue claimed Cox remarked at a recent state GOP convention that Feinstein, who is facing reelection, is “old, fat and lazy, and her husband doesn’t want her in politics anymore.” (Feinstein is 66, Cox 47.)

Kuwata suggests that “maybe they got Dianne confused with me--and I’m going to the gym right now.”

Beyond dispute is that Cox’s letter misspelled Feinstein’s name as “Diane.”

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Wasting time A San Francisco clock whose tock had ticked through upheavals both social and seismic was reduced to cast-iron rubble after a delivery van backed into it.

The clock outside R. Matteucci & Co. jewelers was fashioned 91 years ago in an era where the working man couldn’t always afford a timepiece of his own. The owners moved the clock two blocks down Columbus Avenue when new owners moved the store.

Amid the debris, Arlene Hale, whose father tended the clock after he bought the shop, is hopeful that “we can replace it or have something new done.” But please, no digital.

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One-offs Berkeley is considering an ordinance allowing the city to post the names, addresses and phone numbers of scofflaw slumlords in front of their blighted properties. . . . A professor at Appalachian State University has found that trees in Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon endure the worst ozone of all the national parks, in part because of their proximity to farm-belt pollution from the San Joaquin Valley. . . . If you think you see a lake east of Palm Springs, it may be the Metropolitan Water District, using a surplus 100,000 acre-feet of water to pour into the desert in an effort to create an aquifer.

EXIT LINE

“Most people don’t realize the huge volume of insects these guys eat.”

--Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History biologist Paul Collins, speaking of bats such as the common brown bat, one of which can eat 600 mosquitoes an hour. Vandenberg Air Force Base is dismantling many of its World War II-era buildings and, because of the risk of disrupting some of the 11 bat species that live there, enlisted the museum to identify bat habitats.

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Alzheimer’s Research Centers

Nine state-sponsored centers for Alzheimer’s disease have diagnosed and treated more than 10,000 patients since 1989. Here are the university medical centers administering the program, and the locations if not at the university.

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Center Patients evaluated 1989-98 UC San Diego 1,334 UC Davis, Martinez 1,250 USC, Downey 1,246 UC Davis, Sacramento 1,223 UC San Francisco 1,141 UC Irvine 1,085 Stanford University 1,037 UCSF, Fresno 928 USC 820 Total 10,064

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Note: A 10th state-supported center opened at UCLA last year.

Source: California Department of Health Services’ Center for Gerontology, Sacramento.

For more information on the program, call (916) 327-4662.

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.