Another one of Southern California’s cultural contributions...

Another one of Southern California’s cultural contributions is under attack.

Comedy traffic schools, which got their start with Lettuce Amuse U in San Gabriel, have attracted an “increasing number of complaints” from the industry, the courts and the public because of their names, the state Department of Motor Vehicles says.

The agency announced that, beginning next March, it will designate traffic schools by their license numbers, rather than by their names, on the lists of such companies it distributes to courts.

The schools, which enable some drivers to wipe traffic violations off their records, will be allowed to keep their names, however. So the Yellow Pages won’t be robbed of such eye-catchers as So Cheap It’s Stupid and Burgers and Fries.

Lettuce Amuse U found nothing funny about the DMV announcement.

“The only complaints we’ve ever heard,” grumbled a worker at one office, “was that some schools offer comedy but then you show up and it turns out to be an amateur or a cartoon.”

This week’s good-timing award goes to the Santa Monica Emergency Services committee, which had just convened a meeting in the City Council chamber Wednesday when a 3.5-magnitude earthquake struck.

“Everybody just looked at each other,” said Brenda Sweet, a reserve police officer, “like, ‘Are they causing this for the meeting?’ ”

“The Last of the Great Stations,” author Bill Bradley calls it in his book of the same name--the last in that series of grand railroad terminals built in the United States before the advent of jet airliners and superhighways.

Union Station turns 50 next month, and the railroads and the city are planning a celebration for May 5-7 that will include views of the landmark’s “mission moderne” architecture, exhibits and a luncheon in Fred Harvey’s defunct but well preserved Art Deco restaurant.

Still, it’ll be hard to top the show for the opening, which drew 500,000 people and featured a historical parade of horsemen, mule-skinners, stagecoaches, horse cars, trolleys and an 1869 locomotive.

Maybe it’s a slight case of adopter’s remorse.

No sooner had the county Animal Shelter announced that it had selected the Ojai ranch of Ozzie Osborn as the new home of Grunt, the homeless, half-ton pig, than Osborne’s wife, Rhonda, sounded a bit disgruntled.

“Seems to be any animal in the country who’s not wanted by somebody, guess who gets it,” she said.

Obviously, this Ozzie Osborn is no relation to the rock singer, whose most famous connection to animals is that he took a bite out of a bat.

Alarmed over an apparent increase in crime at MacArthur Park, area residents have scheduled a Candlelight Hum Against Crime tonight at 7.

“Humming is something everybody can do,” said spokesman Carmelo Alvarez, a board member of the MacArthur Park Foundation, a nonprofit organization. “It transcends language barriers.”

The hour-long hum, which will begin in a tunnel that goes under Wilshire Boulevard, will be one phase of a “peaceful and creative” procession around the park designed to bring attention to such ills as crack dealers.

“We want to bring the community together and show that we want this crime to stop,” Alvarez said.

And, for the vacationer who refuses to get away from it all: Satellites to Go has on display at the Long Beach Convention Center a $3,000 cable-television satellite dish that attaches to the top of a recreational vehicle.