Bel-Air chef Laurent Braconnier said no one...

Bel-Air chef Laurent Braconnier said no one paid much attention a couple of weeks ago when he told friends and co-workers that his mother, Margarite Braconnier, a so-called psychic based in Paris, had predicted that Los Angeles would have a major earthquake on Oct. 1.

But they were a little more willing to listen afterward, he said.

So when Madame Braconnier, who sometimes works with French police on criminal cases, telephoned her son last week to say a temblor between 6 to 7 on the Richter scale would happen at 1:30 p.m. Monday, the story wound up on the front page of the Spanish language newspaper Noticias del Mundo and was later repeated by all-news radio station KFWB.

Newspapers and news broadcasters received telephone calls from people wanting to know if there could be anything to the report, a number of businessmen in the downtown jewelry district closed up shop for the afternoon, and authorities at the Caltech Seismological Laboratory said they had a virtual epidemic of inquiries. (A Caltech spokesman said callers were told such reports are “sometimes not entirely accurate.”)

Then everybody shrugged and grinned when Monday afternoon passed in seismic tranquillity. But 50% is still not a bad average--as such things go--and Laurent Braconnier said his mother also told him that none of this year’s quakes would be “the big one everyone talks about.”

That quake, she said, will happen in April of 1988 . . . .

Police reported 120 arrests--but only 119 arrestees--during their second weekend “sweep” of drunk drivers in Wilmington.

Sgt. Mike Pattee said 58 suspects went through the Immediate Booking and Release System (IBARS) Friday night, and another 62 arrests were Saturday.

“But only 119 people were booked,” he said. “One guy with a blood alcohol of .12% was released in the custody of a friend after he was booked early in the evening--and then turned up again when he ran a red light a few hours later.

“The second time, he registered .14%. . . .”

Los Angeles has lots of museums: There’s the County Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Science and Industry and the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Cabrillo Marine Museum. Even the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, now under construction in Griffith Park.

But the one that’s opening today in Hollywood may be unique.

Officials of Frederick’s of Hollywood, the lingerie vendors, have set aside a portion of their Hollywood Boulevard store as the International Museum of the Brassiere, featuring specimens that they believe have had “far-reaching effect” in development of the undergarment-as-art-object.

There are push-up models from the 1950s, plunge bras intended for motion pictures, strapless, backless and even supportless models; peek-a-boo brassieres and one known only as “pointed missiles.” But the section expected to draw the most attention is the “celebrity gallery” devoted to intimate apparel worn by the famous and near-famous of the world.

Star item in this section is the one worn by Tony Curtis.

(For the drag role in “Some Like It Hot,” of course. . . .)

Robert Maxcy said he had been kidnaped, beaten and robbed.

Sheriff’s spokesman Hal Grant said Maxcy, 21, told deputies that five men he knew became angry and set upon him when he told them he couldn’t pay them the $700 he owed them for a “business transaction.”

He said they assaulted him, shoved him into their car, and forced him to cash his paycheck in order to pay them. Grant said Maxcy told the deputies he escaped by jumping out of the moving car in South-Central Los Angeles after giving the kidnapers the money they demanded.

Deputies agreed that this sounded illegal, and arrested Andrew Wimberly, 22, Jerome Larry, 20, Felicia Ganden, 22, Steve Michaels, 23, and Michael Jackson, 21, on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon.

And then they arrested Maxcy on suspicion of being under the influence of a narcotic.

“The $700 debt,” Grant said, “appears to have been for cocaine.”