Roosters of the world, unite! You have...

Roosters of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your . . . well, you know. Roosterhood.

A Los Angeles county measure intended to zone out the rooster as a raucous, cock-a-doodling nuisance has brought forth a champion: a man declaring that it’s not merely legislation, it’s a sexist assault.

Walter N. Prince of Northridge sorted through a dozen acronyms before he settled on ROOSTER--Rural Outcry Over Sexist Tactics to Exterminate Roosters--and now ROOSTER is agitating against the regulation, which makes a rooster-free county sound like some sort of Amazon paradise, or at least like Chippendales: “Only female adults will be allowed,” and only a half-dozen of those, to be kept in henhouses.

“I think it’s sexist,” says Pierce. “I don’t know why they don’t pick on the girl chickens.”

Without roosters, there may be eggs, but there won’t be any chicks. Without roosters, what will all those 4-H kids do for their poultry projects?

And if roosters are so noisy, says Prince, why doesn’t the county use the anti-noise legislation it’s already got?

“I don’t have any chickens myself. I don’t like the damn things, except to eat,” says Prince. “I resent the government intrusion.”

Pro-rooster petitions are now circulating in feed stores for signatures to be presented at an Aug. 9 planning commission hearing on the matter. No indication of how many hens are signing.

“We were planning to take 10,000 chickens down there (to the hearing), but the more I think of it, the more I think it’s a bad idea,” says Pierce. Now, “we’re thinking of those rubber ones you can buy in the trick stores.”

In 1492, Columbus came here.

On 1492, you can go to Columbus.

US Air’s Flight No. 1492 goes to Columbus every day, from LAX, a flight originating in San Francisco. OK, so it’s Columbus, Ohio. If you’re from California, that’s a new world, too.

Five hundred years have wrought some changes in transport, from those days of iron men in wooden ships. So dreary to go by caravel any more; US Air goes by Boeing 733. But everyone still feels mutinous about the food. . . .

Can’t pronounce perestroika? Say it with flowers.

The designer whose fanciful Rose Parade floats have carried off the palm year after year is doing a slide show-and-tell this week in Leningrad, a town where parade floats have in years past tended to be of the large steel variety, with gun turrets and treads.

Conceptual designer Paul Rodriguez was invited to show his stuff to the Soviet Artists Union, says his spokesman. Don’t be surprised, he added, if the city signs up for a Rose Parade entry in the next few years.

Inasmuch as all the floats have catchy names, maybe they’d select a fitting theme, like naming it for a martyred Communist revolutionary of the 1920s: “Everything’s Coming Up Rosa Luxemburg.”

What next, a May Day parade with Macy’s-style balloons of Marx, Engels and Lenin?

miscelLAny:

After inspectors declared that David Hockney’s painting of the swimming pool at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel was dangerous, its pattern of parentheses perhaps obscuring the view for would-be rescuers during an emergency, special legislation was passed to save the (marks). It put the pool in a different bracket.