Here’s just the thing to conjure up...

Here’s just the thing to conjure up memories of a real old-fashioned Christmas.

The ritzy Hammacher Schlemmer store in Beverly Hills is offering a “Hands-Free Snowball Maker” for $15.50 this holiday season.

The gizmo is guaranteed to make “perfectly formed snowballs that explode on impact and keep hands dry and warm at the same time!”

And, just think, if you want your hands to stay dry and warm, you can have your valet throw them!

Property taxpayers in the Hacienda-La Puente Unified School District must be shaking their heads.

First, the county tax collector’s office mails them bills that overcharge them $125 for every $100,000 of assessed value.

Now comes the latest puzzler. The county sends out notices of the gaffes--carefully blaming them on “an error by the California State Controller’s Office”--as well as “adjusted tax bills,” which it says are “due Feb. 1, 1990.”

As anyone who owns real estate knows (only too well), the next biannual deadline for paying property taxes is April 10. And, in fact, there is no mention of Feb. 1 on the bills.

What the county neglected to explain was that while Feb. 1 is technically the deadline, a payment is not considered delinquent until after April 10.

Ah, bureaucrats.

A while back we talked about the past lives of such restaurants as Engine Company No. 28 (it was a downtown firehouse), Trumps (a one-time Union 76 gas station in West Hollywood), and Trattoria Angeli Cafe (a former Shane Carpet showroom in West L.A.).

Digging through the strata of business licenses in Westwood, you can unearth more examples. There was a time, believe it or not, when going out to eat was an unusual experience and fewer than one out of every two buildings in the village was a restaurant.

Josephina’s in Westwood was once a Ralphs market, Stratton’s was a Masonic lodge, the Moustache Cafe was a market, and Mario’s was Tom Crumpler’s malt shop. (Remember malt shops?)

Some other eateries in Southern California have had interesting pasts. The 134-year-old building housing La Golondria restaurant on Olvera Street was, in its early years, a residence, an auto body shop, and, reputedly, a brothel.

Joe Jost’s in Long Beach started out as a barber shop in 1924, but when Prohibition ended, Joe started serving sandwiches and schooners of beer to his customers. The county told him he could cut meat or hair, but not both. So he retired his shears.

And, the Holly Street Bar and Grill in Pasadena began life, so to speak, as Turner & Stevens Mortuary.

A Forbes magazine article on the sizeable ego of Clippers owner Donald Sterling mentions that he recently bombarded journalists across the country with so many “personal notes” praising their stories and inviting them to Clippers games that “at one California newspaper . . . the office joke became displaying them on the bulletin board.”

Don, we weren’t the ones who squealed to Forbes--honest!