You know how it is with celebrities:...

You know how it is with celebrities: The bigger they get, the more they must be isolated from the curious public.

So it is with Grunt, the 800-pound porker who received nationwide attention last month when it was revealed that he faced death because his owners had abandoned him in Rolling Hills Estates. More than 400 people, including an Australian man, subsequently offered to take in the big swine.

The county eventually sent him to the 193-acre ranch of Ozzie Osborn (no relation to the singer) in Santa Paula. Santa Paula isn’t known for excitement, but since the pig’s arrival, there have been so many gawkers that the family has been forced to place Grunt temporarily in a large coop.

“You never know what could happen with some stranger,” said Osborn’s wife, Rhonda. “We’ll turn him loose when all the hubbub dies down. But in the meantime, he has a nice mudhole in there.”

She said Grunt pays no attention to visitors unless they “have something to feed him.”

Oh, maybe one other thing would put Grunt in hog heaven.

“My husband,” said Osborn, “is thinking of buying a female for him.”

Looks as though strike negotiators for the Los Angeles City Board of Education ignored the advice of astrologer Joyce Jillson, whose at-large forecast to the world on Wednesday said in part:

“Don’t try to negotiate unless you have all the strength. Students and employees may get the better of their supervisors.”

It was Ditch Day at Caltech Thursday, the annual opportunity for underclassmen to show off their skills in such games as the old

le-the-Automobile-Parts-on-My-Doorstep-Into-a-Functioning-Chevrolet-Engine trick.

Combining the best (and worst) of “Star Wars” and “Animal House,” the event also enables seniors to let off steam from the pressure of academics. What they do is lock up their rooms in imaginative ways and challenge their inferiors to unravel the secret of gaining entry.

The engine, for instance, had to be assembled because only when it was turned on could exhaust be directed into a tube that would trigger the opening mechanism on the dormitory door.

Not all the puzzles required complex thinking.

Students at Page Hall dormitory were challenged to break through a front door covered on the outside with layers of plaster, plywood, and steel plating, and on the inside with layers of concrete, wood and steel--by 5 p.m.

“Apparently,” Caltech spokesman Bob Finn said, “no one had lived in the room for the last few weeks.”

Using such scientific instruments as blow torches, the students bore in only as far as the concrete, which contained a shaving cream can that blew up in their faces.

A flag flap looms in a Lakewood development.

Real estate agent Becky Turner, who places miniature American flags on the front lawn of Lakewood Gardens residences each Memorial Day, sent out a note to the inhabitants declaring that she would repeat the custom even though “I have been asked by another Realtor not to do the Memorial Day flags . . . as he plans to do them.” She questioned whether others were trying to “commercialize” Memorial Day.

However, Dave Emerson, the other agent who plans to plant flags there, contends that he made no such request of Turner, adding, “I don’t think you can have too many flags.”

Residents will have no trouble figuring out who their benefactors are, since the agents attach their names to the flags.

If Malibu does become an incorporated city, will the beach colony change its name so as to break with its past? Perhaps to erase the memory of such recent jokes as Johnny Carson’s observation that residents were offering to pay for valet parking for the homeless and provide free sun block?

Well, the marquee at the Malibu Inn and Restaurant on Thursday suggested a new dateline:

“Hullabaloo, Calif.”