Downstroke

Hola le churro! In a significant victory for snack activists, Governor Gray Davis signed legislation last week allowing mobile food vendors to cook and serve delicious churros from mobile churro wagons.

Champions of the churro rejoiced at the news that soon fresh churros will be available on every street corner in California. Sweet, crunchy churros are like long, Mexican donuts, often covered in sugar and cinnamon. According to Jedd Medefind, a staffer for churro-legalizing Assemblyman Tim Leslie, R-Tahoe City, the humble churrro was previously counted among the many foods that cannot legally be cooked from a cart for health and safety reasons. However, the churro’s phallic snack cousin—the hot dog—was long ago granted an exemption from the code.

“It wasn’t a race thing or anything,” explained Medefind. “It just happened that hot dogs have always been an American favorite, and the churro was kind of left behind.”

Medefind said the legislation was sure to help foster small businesses and would make regional fairs twice as yummy.

Watts’ wares: In his time on the Chico Unified School District Board of Trustees, former TV weatherman Anthony Watts has offered up donations to schools ranging from energy-saving gadgets to computer equipment. His latest act of philanthropy is the offering of a real-time weather monitoring system to the city in the event of the Humboldt Road Burn Dump cleanup project going through. Afterward, the system would go to Marsh Junior High School for use in science lessons.

Watts, who runs a computer consulting business, also made a donation recently to the grateful Crime Scene Investigation unit of the Chico Police Department. He’s given a portable forensic microscope that can be used to take pictures of evidence and transfer it to formats that will allow it to be used in court in the form of PowerPoint or other presentations.

A subsidiary of Watt’s It Works company carries the $900 machine for sale to coin collectors, but it was originally developed in Japan for use by the cosmetics industry (It can assess skin condition.)

Where’s Rick? Last week the Paradise Post reported that Assemblyman Rick Keene, R-Chico, missed a vote that would have extended the sunset date for the so-called Megan’s Law to 2007. The vote failed on the Assembly floor by three votes, which means that as of the end of this year, the law will expire and people won’t be able to check and see if there are registered sex offenders living in their neighborhoods. The Post story said neither Keene nor Cliff Wagner, his chief of staff, could be reached for comment by Post press time. Keene’s office said the two were “in the mountains on a tour,” most likely in Keene’s black Yukon SUV.

Our calls to Keene’s home and local office for a chance for the assemblyman to respond to the Post story, initially went unreturned. (On the morning of our deadline, we did see Keene’s Yukon parked in front of his house, and Wagner, in Keene’s front yard.). And just before deadline, Keene staffer Steve Thompson called to say that Keene and Wagner were in Quincy and that he was trying to reach them for our deadline.