People and Events

“Don’t worry, it’s fake,” 28-year-old George Stark told a couple of Hollywood police officers when they spotted what looked like a bomb on the front seat of his pickup truck.

But they did worry. Stark was arrested on suspicion of possessing a facsimile bomb. The cops said they stopped him at Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street because his truck didn’t have license plates. That was when they saw what they took to be explosives.

It turned out to be three wooden dowels painted red and taped together with electrical tape. There was a coiled wire on one end.

Stark explained that it was there to discourage car thieves.

After adding up the figures, officials realized that the 700 millionth passenger to use Los Angeles International Airport since it opened in 1947 passed through one of the terminals sometime last October.

They missed him.

The problem for a young golden eagle named Chaparral is that he trusts people. That, says Judy Everett of San Dimas, is apt to get him shot or captured.

Everett, who runs the nonprofit Wild Wings of California, is licensed by the state Department of Fish and Game to rehabilitate injured or sick birds of prey and songbirds in order to return them to the wild.

Chaparral was found nearly six months ago at a Chino park, where he probably was lifted as a chick from his parents’ aerie and then either escaped or was abandoned--starving, anxious and scrawny.

The eagle is recovering in protective custody, but Everett says, “We are trying to keep him away from people, to give him as little human contact as possible while we get him ready for flight.”

Getting him ready to return to the sky means teaching him to kill his own prey by providing rats and the like “without his being aware we’re doing it.”

The main thing, Everett notes, is that “he gets to know he’s an eagle and we’re not.”

There was another effort to set wildlife free on Friday when a young gray whale wandered into the kelp beds off Palos Verdes Peninsula and stirred concern that he (or she) might be caught in a gill net.

Los Angeles County lifeguards set out to see what could be done about cutting it loose but discovered that the mammal wasn’t entangled in anything.

“The whale’s fine,” senior ocean lifeguard Scott Linkletter was able to report by late afternoon. “It wasn’t entangled. It was just sitting around in the kelp a quarter of a mile off Lunada Bay, doing its own thing.”

As the boats moved toward him, Linkletter said, the whale swam leisurely out into the open water, then meandered back into the kelp as the boats turned away. “He’s just having a good old time,” Linkletter said.

The lifeguard said whales don’t explore the kelp beds often, but “they get into the surf line a lot and move around. They’ll lay there for a couple of hours. Who knows what they’re doing?”

As of Friday, a motorist reported, the electronic billboard on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles that keeps track of the nation’s smoking-related deaths noted that the toll for 1988 had reached 7,071.

The year was just a week old.