People and Events

Singer Michael Jackson “has always seemed like a caring man,” Porntip Nakhirunkanok said. She would like to meet him. “He seems very mysterious to me, very peaceful.”

Porntip Nakhirunkanok, for those who can’t quite place the name, is the 20-year-old, newly crowned Miss Universe. Born in Thailand, she grew up in Southern California and went to Pasadena City College.

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce arranged a press conference for her Monday morning in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. It was heavily attended by reporters and photographers from just about everywhere.

While marveling over the apparent serenity of Michael Jackson, Ms. Nakhirunkanok allowed as how she has no time for boyfriends.

She did not mouth the customary hopes for a film or modeling career. She said that after she finishes her duties as Miss Universe--for which she will receive an estimated $250,000--she plans to enroll in UCLA, become a psychologist and open a clinic.

Some Times readers may have been startled Sunday morning to learn that a Los Angeles police detective named John J. St. John, 53, has taken early retirement after being questioned in connection with the alleged compromise of a federal inquiry into Hollywood labor racketeering.

That was not, let it be understood, John P . St. John, the famed “Jigsaw John” whose long tenure as an LAPD homicide detective has been chronicled in a book by Al Martinez and in an NBC television series. The two detectives are not related.

Jigsaw is still tracking down killers, although he is 70 years old. On Monday, he was out working on a case--as usual. After 46 years in the department, he didn’t sound like he’s going to retire any time soon.

“I haven’t got any idea when,” he said. “I haven’t made any plans yet.”

It’s not that Rockwell the Robot does much, other than roll around and say, “Excuse me,” when it bumps into something, but it won $2,000 for Sepulveda’s Thomas Bensky, a 17-year-old senior at Monroe High School.

“It doesn’t have an unlimited vocabulary,” Thomas conceded Monday as he showed off the creation that took the top prize in a contest sponsored by Rockwell International and the Los Angeles Unified School District. “It’s sort of a toy, really.”

The robot is about 3 feet tall, weighs a mere 5 pounds and has a Styrofoam head with Groucho Marx-style glasses and nose. A stereo speaker is its mouth.

The robot can move back and forth, do a sort of dance and speak simple sentences in a computerized version of its master’s voice.

The designer says he plans to build a bigger and better one someday.

In the meantime, he put $1,900 of the prize money in the bank and spent the rest on a new tennis racket.

Plus a few lottery tickets.

As a recent arrival from Washington, D.C., John Johnson, 40, of Woodland Hills was not fully prepared for life in Southern California. He was taking a walk along Topanga Canyon Boulevard about 10:30 p.m. when a beat-up car screeched to a halt beside him.

The driver called to him, “Hey, buddy, how about a quarter or two?”

Turned down, the disgusted motorist drove away, leaving Johnson to observe that “even the panhandlers have cars here.”

For a time, it looked as though a performance by some Aztec dancers would conflict with a Gabrielino Indian couple’s news conference to protest what they said would be the desecration of their ancestors’ burial ground.

The tribes joined forces.

The Xipe Totec band, three men and a woman billing themselves as “authentic Aztec dancers from Mexico,” had planned to offer a concert at Olvera Street during lunchtime Friday--the same hour that Vera and Manuel Rocha sat down there to complain that a proposed Marina del Rey construction project would mean digging up an old Indian cemetery.

Xipe Totec’s loud conch shell blasts and drumbeats are not exactly chamber music, so it was agreed that the news conference would be introduced by the Aztec performance. But when the Aztecs decided the news conference had gone on long enough, they resumed drumming and that was that.