Rehearsing With Prop. 49? Maybe He'll Be Back

Arnold Schwarzenegger -- box office to ballot box. There's a lot at stake for the brawn-and-bratwurst-born action hero, whose Prop. 49 gets its out-of-town tryout across California next Tuesday.

It's Schwarzenegger's baby -- perhaps, it's muttered, his first real stab at public policy before running for public office. And it would take more than half a billion dollars each year out of the state's general fund for before- and after-school programs. This is the same pretty unstocked pot that the state has been scraping the bottom of this year to try to fund health and safety and other existing programs; Schwarzenegger says not to worry: "Revenue growth" will make up the difference.

But there's another multimillion-dollar expenditure to which Schwarzenegger is just saying "nein."

An avant-garde art forum in his Austrian hometown of Graz wants to put up a 60-plus-foot-tall Terminator monument, sketched out by Russian artists, of the hometown hero posing Atlas-like with a globe on his shoulders.

Price: more than $4 million. In a letter to the statue enthusiasts, he described himself as "very flattered and honored that such a monument would be considered" but suggested the money "be used for much more important efforts," such as charity.

Which, as we all know, begins at home.

Fruits of Victory for City Boy Simon

When a reporter from a Central Valley newspaper sandbagged Bill Simon with the agricultural equivalent of the "how much does a gallon of milk cost" question often posed to (male) candidates, Simon scored 20%.

But hey, who knew? At an exhibit at the Central Valley's Heritage Complex in Tulare about the difference between fruits and vegetables, a Sacramento Bee columnist asked Simon which of the following is a fruit: cucumbers, peppers, squash, corn and tomatoes. Simon guessed cucumbers. Technically, all five are fruits, so clip this and put it on the refrigerator for whoever is telling you to eat your vegetables.

Nonetheless, Simon has received the endorsement of the vast California Farm Bureau Federation. It praised his understanding of "the complex issues facing our industry [and] the value of our farming community in the state's economy," but did not pose any trick animal-vegetable-fruit-mineral questions.

Capitol Expose at X-Ray Machine