Something smelled in Pasadena, and it sure...

Something smelled in Pasadena, and it sure wasn’t roses.

Dozens of residents called the city’s Fire Department, complaining of an odor similar to that of rotten eggs.

Firefighters, suspecting it might be a natural gas leak, entered a veterinary clinic that appeared to be giving off the potentially dangerous odor.

Whereupon a television newsman near the entrance lit up a cigarette.

“Hey,” his cameraman yelped, “you’re gonna blow us all up!”

KNX radio reporter Diane Thompson, who was standing nearby, said: “I was afraid I was going to get a really big scoop, if I survived.”

A firefighter quickly asked the reporter to douse the cigarette, and the city lived to host another Rose Parade.

Pasadena firefighters, meanwhile, determined that the odor was not natural gas, though the Big Smell remained a mystery at day’s end.

When photographs of “Steel Cloud,” the winning entry in the West Coast Gateway competition, were printed in Los Angeles newspapers last year, some critics compared its machine-like design to a freeway crash scene, a giant metal grasshopper, or L.A. after the Big One.

So no one was surprised when the first public showing of a model of “Cloud”--the $33-million monument that would span the Hollywood Freeway--was held out of town. Far up the road. In San Francisco.

Now, at last, it’s coming home. Beginning Aug. 1, Angelenos, if they dare, can creep up close for a look themselves in the lobby of City Hall East. Come prepared.

Warns Councilwoman Gloria Molina: “It’s stressful just to look at the drawings.”

Meanwhile, The Big Wave, winner of the Gateway to Santa Monica competition, is in comparably calmer waters.

Artist Tony Delap’s 42-foot-high steel structure, erected on Wilshire Boulevard to mark an entryway into Santa Monica (or an escape from Los Angeles, depending on your point of view), was inaugurated over the weekend amid a procession of vintage cars and local bands. The Wave edged out more than 50 other ideas, including archways that would have featured:

- A giant illuminated fish on top.

- Separate entry tunnels for cars, bicycles and pedestrians (“like mouseholes,” said Henry Korn, Santa Monica’s arts administrator).

- A Jolly Old Elf sledding up and down an incline to celebrate the “Santa” in Santa Monica.

Though somewhat more conservative, The Big Wave is perhaps the city’s most distinctive feature from the air, now that Santa Monica Airport has dismantled the giant sign that said: “Please Fly Quietly.”

Smile, you’re on. . . . “Totally Hidden Video”?

Allen Funt, the creator of “Candid Camera,” is frowning.

Funt went to court in Los Angeles in an effort to bar the Sunday premiere of a new hidden camera show on Fox Broadcasting Co. He claimed that the show, “Totally Hidden Video,” features actors portraying “ordinary people in staged vignettes taken from ‘Candid Camera.’ ”

However, Superior Court Judge Kurt Lewin turned down Funt, declaring that “the judgment of the viewers would be better than some prior restraint.”

CBS may be taking a licking in the ratings from NBC, but Roger Beck of Sherman Oaks reports that there appears to be no panic in the KCBS lunchroom at Columbia Square.

The other day the soup of the day was listed as:

Calm Chowder.

Then there’s the sign in an Inglewood restaurant that advertises:

“ Beacon and Eggs.”

Scrambled, no doubt.