She Wants to Subtract the Adders

It reads like a Steven Spielberg script, but there’s no prop man to take away the snakes at the end of the day at Pearl Slaugh’s Aberdeen, Ida., home, which has been invaded by hundreds of the slithering reptiles since October. The 84-year-old woman, who says she is “terrified of snakes,” reports that she has found them sliding across the kitchen floor and wrapped around doorknobs. But she’s gotten to the point where “I can kill them myself,” she said. The invading reptiles are not poisonous--they are kin to the harmless garter snake--but nevertheless “it’s a nightmare,” she said. The snakes apparently took refuge in Slaugh’s home after their winter dens were destroyed last summer during construction of a bridge at a creek near her home. Snake experts who have been called in have suggested that a hole be dug in the creek bed and filled with gravel in an effort to lure the snakes back.

--Industrialist Armand Hammer said he has invited Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to visit Los Angeles, should Gorbachev be in the United States this fall for a summit conference. “There’s a 90% chance of a summit meeting,” the 88-year-old Hammer, who has been a friend and confidant of Soviet leaders since the days of Lenin, told a Times reporter. “I’m sure Gorbachev will be coming over. I’ve asked that he put Los Angeles on his agenda.” He did not indicate the Soviet leader’s response.

--A Lutheran minister in San Antonio is weary of his Sunday services’ being disrupted on the morning of the daylight-saving changeover. So the Rev. Guido Merkens has asked the members of the congregation of Concordia Lutheran Church to wait until the last amen this Sunday before moving their clocks ahead one hour. “Why should they lose an hour of sleep because people decided Sunday would be the least disruptive day to change to daylight-saving time?” Merkens said. “I’d like to see what businesses would do if they made the change on a Monday.”

--The city that came up with the idea of No Parking signs reading: “Don’t Even THINK of Parking Here” has come up with another deterrent to illegal vehicular stops--tacky looking, hard-to-remove stickers that are slapped onto the windows of the offending cars. “This vehicle violates N.Y.C. parking regulations,” the sticker says in bold black on a field of what Sanitation Commissioner Brendan Sexton calls “ugly Day-Glo green.” And the only way to remove the eyesore is, as the last line of the sticker instructs, “with warm water and a scraper.”