Ain’t progress wonderful? L.A.’s Transportation Department is...

Ain’t progress wonderful? L.A.’s Transportation Department is experimenting with new digital parking meters--the first ones that can be reprogrammed without being dismantled. In other words, they will make it easier for the city to raise parking rates.

Perhaps Mensa, the high-I.Q. organization, lowers its standards slightly to recruit members in Orange County.

Mensans down there , hosting a national convention at the Anaheim Marriott, sent out a press release to The Times that began:

“What happen when over one thousand geniuses get together under one roof?”

We don’t know--what happen?

Not a pretty picture: Drivers jumping out of cars--including Porsches and BMWs--to beg people exiting from Lucky markets. The yuppie panhandlers haven’t been asking for money, though. They’ve been asking for grocery receipts.

It’s all because of a promotion involving Lucky and Delta Airlines whereby anyone with grocery receipts totaling $100 or more could get discounts on airline tickets.

One Los Feliz-area shopper even saw would-be air travelers “scrambling around the floors, trying to find receipts that people had dropped.”

Signs of summer’s approach (cont.): A traffic tie-up on the San Diego Freeway, caused by a spill of watermelons.

Then there was the tie-up on Sunset Boulevard caused by a giant hand that restrained a Cadillac in a parking lot as part of a concert promotion. It was an inflatable beast--not the long arm of the law.

Speaking of sights, Bill Cohen of West Covina has a tip for “Travel Tips,” a program on the Discovery cable channel. There’s no longer a “world-famous Marineland in Rancho Palos Verdes,” as the travelogue informed viewers. Discovery also listed the nonexistent theme park in Orange County, which isn’t true unless the Big One struck and we didn’t notice.

But we should talk. The other day, we mentioned that the last great train robbery in California occurred in Newhall in 1928. Louise Byers of San Marino begs to differ.

Her husband, Fred, was aboard a train on Feb. 22, 1933, when a man wearing a bandanna hopped aboard the observation car at a stop in Ontario. The bandit robbed Byers and two others but was then killed in a gunfight with the conductor, who also died. Fred Byers, now 82, suffered a slight leg wound from a ricochet.

The incident was later recounted in the book “Great Train Robberies of the West.”

“My husband,” said Louise Byers, “has always gotten a kick out of the fact that his name is in the index with Jesse James and the Dalton Gang.”

And that was the last train robbery. Unless you count the guy who was arrested the other day with a load of model trains that were stolen from a Rosemead collector.

miscelLAny:

There were 12 Republicans registered in Vernon at year’s end, compared to 42 Democrats. But, then, the population of L.A.’s neighbor to the south is 92.

No, this is not the long arm of the law. It’s a giant balloon on Sunset Boulevard.