Most reporters can’t resist a good pun.No,...

Most reporters can’t resist a good pun.

No, let us be frank: most reporters can’t resist a bad pun.

As a result, a rather inconsequential fire at a spice plant in San Fernando on Wednesday, “probably one of the smallest fires we’ve had in ages,” said a Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Jim Williamson, was “getting more news media coverage because of the giggles . . . ‘hot peppers and hot fire.’ ”

” . . . got too hot for their own good,” was one example. You get the idea.

This Space, however, plays it straight.

Spontaneous combustion was evidently to blame when far more than a peck of chili peppers burst into flame at the Wespice plant. Fire spread to other flavorings, and though firemen put out the blaze in 19 minutes, Williamson said a fire captain groused that “his station smelled like oregano.”

There. News with dignity. And a pinch of oregano.

Now we’re left with just two big lies.

It seems that some Century City law-types have taken to reassuring people expecting money by faxing them copies of the checks they’re waiting for.

Thus, if the check isn’t yet in the mail, it can be argued that it’s at least on the phone.

Real estate ads have, as everyone knows, acquired an arcane vocabulary that demands about as much deciphering as the old Purple Code of wartime Japan. “Cozy,” for example, means not enough room to swing a sock, and “quaint” means the roof line sags like some elf cottage.

So it was refreshing to see an ad in a local weekly newspaper listing the features of a particular Northeast Los Angeles house, and concluding with inadvertent frankness, “This vintage home will not last.”

He walked like a duck and talked like a duck but . . . the education president, sort of, made his bow at an Encino elementary school Wednesday. Comedian Fred Travalena’s impersonation of George Herbert Walker Bush seemed to leave most of the students bemused.

Preceded by his press agent posing as a Secret Service man, Travalena--whose children attend the school--swept through Bethel Lutheran School in full makeup, shaking hands.

Asked by one student about the drug problem, he jovially addressed his interrogator as “Sam”--a reference to ABC reporter Sam Donaldson, the Bruce-the-Shark of Ronald Reagan’s press conferences.

“President Bush” evidently has not noticed that Sam no longer covers the White House.

It’s deja vu all over again.

The city of Los Angeles revealed last week that it had inaugurated a program to ship the paper trash from downtown offices to China, for recycling into much-needed writing paper, instead of burying it wastefully in local landfills. It was new, it was daring, it had never-been-done-before.

And it was hardly worth the paper it was written on.

A 1925 Chamber of Commerce magazine article, dug up by a production company that makes documentary films about Our City, reveals:

“A somewhat unusual item of export is old newspapers which Los Angeles ships in large quantities to the Far East. . . . Last year Los Angeles enjoyed an income of more than $1,300 a day from this source.”

A rose by any other name is still a rose, at Flowers for a Lady, the drive-in florist shop in Palms that was featured in This Space the other day.

However, the name in the accompanying photo caption was incorrect. The man handing flowers to a drive-up customer was owner David Radell.