This being Southern California, the L.A. Marathon...

This being Southern California, the L.A. Marathon has always offered more world-class eccentrics than world-class runners: Usually two or three basketball-dribblers, a juggler, a snooty French waiter with tray and champagne bottle, a couple of guys in doctor’s smocks transporting a dummy on a stretcher, and the inevitable character in the gorilla suit.

Marathon V, set for March 4, will offer something unique even for L.A.: A runner dressed as a human bean.

He’s Barry Kirk of Port Talbot, Wales, who naturally goes by the name of Captain Beany. (Oddly enough, Beany has never competed in the Boston Marathon.)

Aside from his running feats, the 35-year-old legume sent along several newspaper clippings recounting another type of marathon experience: He lay in a vat of baked beans for more than 100 hours to raise funds for charity. Contributors were allowed to pour beans on his head.

Asked by telephone how spectators reacted, Beany said:

“Some laughed. Others said, ‘My God, what an awful sight.’ ”

Time stands still at the corner of Collis Avenue and Hill Drive in South Pasadena, where a sign still points the way to the “Arroyo Seco Parkway.”

The parkway hasn’t gone by that name since 1954, when it was renamed the Pasadena Freeway. (You know, the one where have you have to slow from 75 m.p.h. to 5 m.p.h. at some hairpin-curve off-ramps.)

The sign, one of many that the Auto Club installed before turning the job over to the state in 1956, could date back as far as 1941, when the parkway opened. No one’s quite sure.

Like our local celebrities, many freeways started out with different names, at least in the planning stages.

Cahuenga Parkway, for instance, became the Hollywood Freeway. The Ramona Parkway is now the San Bernardino. And the Santa Monica Freeway was listed as the Olympic Parkway on early maps.

The L.A. River, which never gets any respect, originally had its name on the Long Beach Freeway. After Richard M. Nixon’s fall from grace, his name was impeached from what is now the Marina Freeway.

And, in 1987, the Century Freeway was renamed the Glenn M. Anderson by the state Legislature in honor of the Long Beach congressman. It’ll be an even bigger honor if the project’s ever completed.

The 88-year-old Walk of a Thousand Lights is growing dimmer and dimmer.

Better known as the Pike, the Long Beach amusement park was once the site of such wondrous curiosities as the Jackrabbit Racer, Painless Parker, Reckless Ross and a fake Al Capone car.

They’ve long since disappeared to make way for a planned development of office towers and hotels, whose only rides will be of the elevator variety.

One holdout is Nick Frudakis, a 36-year-old attorney whose grandfather bought the Checker Board Cafe in 1951. The city says it will soon begin condemnation proceedings if Frudakis doesn’t sell.

On Friday, he’s inviting the public to attend a “Remember the Pike Day” rally from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. at the still-operating tavern, which also houses artifacts of the area’s past.

Frudakis considers the Checker Board an artifact and wants it incorporated into the new project.

“The city says it wants to get rid of the old Navy bars,” Frudakis said. “Well, my grandfather was proud to serve the Navy. But if they want, I’ll make it into an espresso place, or a flower shop.”