People and Events

Presuming one can take the word of the British Medical Journal, a Los Angeles man hospitalized in London has finally learned the cause of the abdominal pain, backache, fever and other signs of infection that set in after he went out celebrating last New Year’s Eve.

Doctors found a swizzle stick in his small intestine.

The patient was not identified.

The Physician’s Weekly newspaper, reporting on the journal article, called it “a stirring medical mystery.”

Hollywood’s $70,000 project to repair a bunch of damaged stars has begun with workmen jackhammering out of a Vine Street sidewalk the embedded salutes to Shirley Temple, the Mills Brothers and Michael Landon.

They’ll be getting to Irish McCalla, Anna May Wong and Snub Pollard before they’re through.

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which since 1960 has lined its Walk of Fame with 1,868 brass-and-terrazzo plaques honoring entertainment industry celebrities, figures that 165 of them are so chipped, scarred or worn that they need retouching or replacement.

The three-month job is being financed by the sale of souvenir mugs, plates, books and other memorabilia that tourists love to cart off to places like Webster Groves, Mo.

The work got started following Tuesday’s kickoff ceremony attended by actor Cesar Romero, honorary Hollywood Mayor Johnny Grant and others.

The only problem as the jackhammer went to work, said chamber spokeswoman Ana Martinez, was that some people thought it meant a new star was about to be planted. They wanted to know when and who.

The workers’ truck now carries a banner explaining.

Irma Chenetz, secretary and self-described “chief yenta” of Temple Akiba in Culver City, thought she might stir more enthusiasm for the temple’s April 2 Passover seder by sending members of the congregation an announcement that gefilte fish are again in abundance in Santa Monica Bay after years of depletion.

A temple scientist, according to the statement she issued under Rabbi Allen S. Maller’s name, “speculates that this year’s bountiful harvest may have been a result of the disappearance of the gefilteblast, a natural predator that snatches up young gefiltes and uses them to caulk windows.”

Chenetz said she adapted the spoof from one somebody once whipped up about gefilte fish supposedly reappearing in Long Island’s Great White Bay. Was she afraid that someone outside the congregation might take it seriously? “I hope not,” she said.

That crunching sound drifting across the San Pedro Channel from Santa Catalina Island turns out to be from the eucalyptus longhorn borer (or, more accurately, thousands of them) now chewing their way through the island’s many eucalyptus trees.

Senior deputy forester Paul Rippens of the Los Angeles County Fire Department said the voracious beetle may have begun killing the island’s eucalyptus trees more than a year ago, when it probably arrived in loads of firewood.

The pest, originally from Australia, is a particular threat on Catalina because eucalyptuses make up 90% of the island’s non-indigenous trees. An irrigation method normally used to keep the insect from healthy trees is impractical there because of the water shortage.

Several independent entomologists are going to take a look. Then the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy and forestry officials will try to decide what to do.