Nineteen-year-old Jennifer Adler has been vindicated. Seems...

Nineteen-year-old Jennifer Adler has been vindicated. Seems her dad, Jerry Adler, who owns Los Angeles-based The Adler Agency, was hopping mad when he got his phone bill after his daughter’s visit from Sweden, where she goes to school. She insisted she had made only a couple of calls. But there were more than 40 calls on the bill, sometimes five and six in one day, but all strangely less than a minute long.

Then last month, there were 60 more calls to Sweden on the bill. Jennifer was long gone back to school. The mystery unraveled earlier this week when Adler’s son Erik, who also lives in Sweden, called to complain that he kept getting calls all hours of the day from Adler’s phone machine. Erik would answer the phone, and there would be Adler’s message being repeated. Seems Adler had recently bought one of those state-of-the-art phones for his home. You know the ones. They redial phone numbers, forward your calls, tell you the time of day. In this case, the machine went crazy and, unaided, it called first Erik and then Jennifer’s number over and over again.

Adler turned off the answering machine. But so far he has been “too embarrassed” to try and get the phone company to disregard the billed calls.

But he is going to call the manufacturer of the answering machine. That is, if the machine hasn’t beat him to it.

Move over Dagwood.

There’s a new sandwich champ. Justin Ahearn, 9, beat out thousands of elementary school students nationwide to garner the annual Ziplock National Sandwich Day Contest. His culinary creation? The Atomic Ahearn, a feast so gut-busting that he had trouble remembering everything in it.

“There’s ham, turkey, corn beef, ummm . . . Swiss cheese, American cheese. . . . Umm, also I think, onions, garlic butter, mustard. Oh, and ummm . . . lettuce and onion. And oh, don’t forget Italian bread,” he said breathlessly in an interview.

The event was held at the Sheraton Grand in downtown Los Angeles on Friday, which was the birthday of sandwich creator John Montague, Earl of Sandwich. The judges, comedian Dom DeLuise and six students from Lomita Fundamental Magnet School, carefully cleansed their palates with water in between bites of the final sandwich entries.

Ahearn, a fourth-grader at Good Shepherd School in Brooklyn, N.Y., who won savings bonds for himself and school, added modestly: “I don’t really cook. I just make sandwiches.” The competition over, the contestants sat down to a banquet of--you guessed it--sandwiches.

Now there’s one more item critics can point to when they accuse Los Angeles of being plasticized: the lane stripes on city streets.

The Department of Transportation is no longer painting the 2,500 miles of center lines, 20,000 crosswalks and 15,000 turn arrows. Instead, they now heat solid bars of plastic to 450 degrees and spread the melted gunk by machine onto the streets.

The plastic lines last about 10 years, while painted lines begin fading after a year, transportation officials say. And even better news, traffic congestion at the work sites has been reduced. The plastic dries immediately, compared to paint, which takes nearly an hour to dry. The material is also easier to see than paint and is environmentally safe. About 60% of the streets in Los Angeles are plasticized.

“We’ve gotten rid of a maintenance nightmare,” said Dave Royer, Department of Transportation engineer.