Signing Off: Marquee Man of Midway Moving

Gerald W. Vega, postal poet laureate, master of the Midway marquee, is moving on after two years’ tenure as one of San Diego’s best-read scribblers, the man behind the maxims on the main Post Office marquee.

Being witty on command is no picnic, averred Vega, who’s being promoted in the postal system. Every Friday, a new epigram is expected. It should be clever and should promote things postal, or things otherwise public-spirited.

So Vega lifts liberally, snitching slogans from the American Medical Assn. and in-flight magazines. From his oeuvre: “Our Carriers Still Make House Calls”; “Love for Sale, 22 Cents”; “Mail Early in the Day, Take a Letter to Lunch.”

The most curious things have proved controversial.

Take this one: “Stamp Collectors Are Glued to Their Hobby.” A persnickety philatelist got on the horn, saying collectors never use glue. A play on words, Vega explained patiently. The man countered: Don’t go encouraging stamp-gluing.

Then there was, “Sitting on Your Seat Belts Can Cause Brain Damage.” Vega says he meant heads could go through windshields. But an angry caller demanded, “Where are you insinuating my brains are? . . . You’re insinuating that my brains are not in my head. “

At a Snail’s Pace

Twelve hundred carnivorous snails have invaded Hillcrest’s quiet enclave of gelato bars and imported cheeses. The invaders are pioneers in a pilot attempt by agricultural officials to control a troubling infestation of white garden snails.

The garden snails, striking fear in the hearts of farmers, are proliferating throughout the county, threatening to consume whole avocado groves in a single gulp. Agricultural officials are mulling options: molluskicides? killer flies? nematodes?

The killer snails, called decollate snails, were deposited in three vacant lots (location confidential) heavily infested with garden snails. Officials hope to know next year whether the decollates might be useful countywide in bringing the garden snails into line.

How many are there? Brian Taylor, an economic entomologist for the state, said he couldn’t say. Zillions? the public asked. “Thats a good way to put it,” he responded grimly. “Millions, anyway.”

A Word in Hedgewise

The Horton Plaza spokeswoman was explaining the curious condition of the plaza’s topiary dancing hippos, which sometimes seem to suffer from a slight case of topiary psoriasis.

“They were a little sunburned on the top,” Ann Rollings, marketing manager, explained patiently. “But they’re not dead. They’re growing.”

Meanwhile, the city parks man was explaining the seemingly sorry state of the plaza’s queen palms, many of which were imported from Santa Ana last summer and plopped into the plaza’s park.

“This is windburn,” said Harold Larcome, grounds maintenance manager for the city. “When you haul them down the freeway at 50 or 55 m.p.h., they get windburn.”

One palm bit the dust last month, Larcome said. But he is optimistic that the rest will pull through. He traced their plight in part to the way he said a contractor planted them--in soil mixed with sand rather than native soil.

The hippos fell victim to the mad rush to open Horton Plaza on time last August, assistant general manager Ron Burns said. The vines covering their wire and sphagnum moss frames were immature. They barely had time to grow, then winter came and they became dormant.

“Oh, they definitely looks the way they should look,” Rollings assured us. “That’s why there are signs there that say, ‘Watch Us Grow.’ ”

Speaking of Growing . . .

Among the 300 or so collections that will be on display beginning Thursday at the Del Mar Fair--right there alongside the stuffed animals, the dolls, the Legos, the imported beer bottles and the matchbooks--will be seven shelves of enteroliths.

What, you ask, are enteroliths?

They’re intestinal stones taken from horses. Not quite as precious as pearls, these stones are mineral deposits that formed around a grain of sand or any other foreign object inside the horse. One is a nine-pounder, bigger than a softball. They come in grays, browns, blues and greens. Some are shiny.

“We don’t think they’ll repel anybody,” said Stacy Steele, a technician at the Escondido Veterinary Hospital, who helped gather the collection.

“We don’t know why they form, but they’re only found among horses in Southern California.”

Still, it doesn’t exactly prompt us to want to start our own collection.