If the perpetrators of last week's atrocities in Manhattan and Washington are at a loss how to follow-up last week's attacks, San Francisco's flamboyant Mayor Willie Brown has a suggestion.

He's advised that leading Bay Area technology companies make excellent targets, and named names, helpfully pointing suicide bombers in the direction of three of the region's largest tech employers: Cisco, Hewlett Packard and Oracle.

"San Francisco - in fact the whole Bay Area - is a very attractive target," points out Brown, "and not only because of its high visibility."

"Doing something to an Oracle or Cisco or Hewlett- Packard would generate the same kind of worldwide attention as the attacks back east," he says. "And I don't think that's lost on the terrorists."

Well it won't be now, at least if they read The Register or the Chron's Matier and Ross column, where Brown's remarks were noted.

Brown was elected in 1995, and was a permanent fixture in the local headlines until the local economy tanked, and a district-elected board of supervisors (replacing the previous patronage system) spiked his ability to rule by fiat. We suspect he rather misses the publicity, and put this down to some kind of attention deficit disorder.

But it's hardly the kind of thing Bay Area employees want to hear at breakfast. ®