Florida is up to its old tricks,...

Florida is up to its old tricks, copying Southern California again.

Is there no limit to the nerve of this state, whose official song should be: “California, Here We Come”?

Florida has duplicated Disneyland, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Brown Derby and our studio tours. The city of Orlando chose the most famous name in basketball--”Magic”--for its team nickname.

And, now:

Florida has announced it will begin spraying malathion to combat an invasion of Medflies.

The 73-story Library Tower, also known as the First Interstate World Center, stood tall in contradictory categories in this year’s Roses & Lemon Award competition held by the Downtown Breakfast Club.

The tower, which has won critical praise for its distinctive crown and its blend of curves and right angles, won a rose for “Best New Structure” from the group of local business and real estate folks.

But the “I” logos tacked on the crown, which prompted protests from the designer and numerous angry letters published in the L.A. Downtown News, finished second as the Civic Center’s biggest lemon. Only the latest attempted renovation of Pershing Square was judged to be a more sour failure.

It will be interesting to see how the yet-to-be-opened Ronald Reagan State Office Building fares in next year’s competition--especially the distinctive portholes atop the structure.

Someone took the phrase “ship of state” literally.

Zsa Zsa Gabor, most people would agree, is one of a kind. But there are at least two Eva Gabors in town.

Hence the confusion when an Eva Gabor sued Ralphs Grocery Co. the other day in a slip-and-fall case.

As it turned out, the unhappy party was not Eva Gabor, the actress and sister of the famed Beverly Hills cop-slapper.

But, Carl Buchberg, attorney for the plaintiff, said his client and the actress do have a few things in common. They spell their names alike, are about the same age and were born in Hungary.

And the non-acting Gabor has a son who is 20-year veteran of the Culver City Police Department.

Noted Buchberg, whose office is in Beverly Hills: “Maybe if my client slapped her son you’d really have a news story.”

Meanwhile, actress Elke Sommer has filed a $5-million defamation suit in Santa Monica Superior Court against Zsa Zsa Gabor, claiming Gabor told a German newspaper that Sommer was broke and supports herself by selling handmade sweaters. We assume the defendant is the Zsa Zsa.

Author Joseph Wambaugh hasn’t contributed any wacky cop tales lately, but here’s a Sheriff’s Department adventure recounted by the Star News, a publication of the department’s Relief Assn.:

Returning on a flight from Avalon in a Sikorsky helicopter, a deputy “asked his passenger . . . to look for other aircraft as they approached the airport,” Star begins.

The passenger literally pointed out another craft and, in doing so, hit a “button which immediately inflated the flotation bags on each landing gear” to about six feet in diameter. The pilot “valiantly tried to land . . . but continued to bounce back into the air.”

Mechanics eventually tore the inflatables loose, Star reports, and “were last seen chasing after bags blown across the airport grounds by the down draft of the helicopter.”

Attn. Al Davis:

One radio station reported Wednesday that the just-launched Hubble Space Telescope is so powerful that it has the capacity to pick out features on other planets that are “the size of a football stadium.”

MiscelLAny:

Before 1912, according to “Southern California Trivia,” the city of Walnut was known as Lemon.