It has to be the rudest “Don’t...

It has to be the rudest “Don’t Walk” signal in the Southland. When its red, electronic hand gestures for pedestrians to wait, only the middle finger shows.

Could be a malfunction.

Or, perhaps, a prank by some brainy students.

After all, the signal is in Pasadena, in front of Caltech.

Speaking of brains, there’s a shocking disclosure in Lament, the local publication of Mensa, the high-IQ group.

“Mensa,” it turns out, is the feminine form in Spanish of “stupid.”

Ninth Street Elementary School is on the fringe of Skid Row, but the 49 members of this year’s graduating class had a chance to interact with some of the city’s biggest movers.

They were challenged to come up with a development project for their school by guest instructor Jim Wood, chairman of the Community Redevelopment Agency board. After researching the matter, they wrote up a request to the CRA for a $25,000 grant for 17 computers, one for each classroom.

“They put the proposal together, and they helped see it through the CRA, the City Council and the school district,” said CRA spokeswoman Gayle Anderson.

It was an “A” performance. The computers were recently installed--and, as a graduating present, Wood gave each of the students a miniature computer clock bearing his or her name.

Still another symbol of glasnost, the Soviet Union’s first American-style barbershop quartet, will perform at the L.A. Equestrian Center in Burbank tonight.

We can almost hear the classic line of that barbershop traditional . . .

“Sweet Ad-e-line-ovna.”

L.A. County is the home of traffic-violator school courses in Armenian, Cambodian, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese and, oh yes, English.

But that’s not all. You say you’d like to hear some driving jokes in Vietnamese? Even the Lettuce Amuse U Comedy Schools has a Vietnamese course.

Our recent items on sign snafus reminded Joanne Turner of Pasadena of a local restaurant that posted a notice saying it was closing due to “imminent domain.”

But we should talk. Kenneth Fleischer of West L.A. noticed that we mentioned a “three-wheeled bicycle” the other day. He asks--somewhat sharply in our view--whether that curiosity is “a close relative of a two-wheeled unicycle? Of a two-eyed monocle?”

And we forgot to credit Ron Butcher for the photo in Tuesday’s paper of Virginia Heintz, the city worker who recently retired after 48 years on the job. Mistakes like that make us feel like a real Mensan some days.

miscelLAny:

Machine-manufactured ice first went on sale in L.A. on April 14, 1871.

Photo courtesy Community Redevelopment Agency