The dime novels always talk about cops...

The dime novels always talk about cops putting people on the hot seat, but c’mon.

A self-contained trailer fitted out with six solar-powered bathrooms will be delivered next week to the Los Angeles Police Department from a Riverside firm whose proud motto is, “We offer luxury seating.”

The man who coordinated this for the LAPD’s tactical planning unit is Sgt. Stan Roberts, and the guys have given him quite enough ribbing about “Stan’s cans.”

The city had been looking for some time for a portable system it could use in outdoor operations like an earthquake, for example. This one they can trundle out to “situations like Operation Rescue (daylong mass arrests),” Roberts said, “and field emergency operations where there’s no hand-washing facilities available, and no power sources. These things run on their own solar-charged cells.”

Sam R. Torres created Solar Sanitation Systems three years ago, and now his potties are invited to all the best places, like the opening of the Nixon Library in Orange County and PGA tournaments. His are rather like airline bathrooms, and more sanitary than hole-in-one portable toilets, he says. The solar power provides lights as well as running water for flushing and for the stainless steel sink. He added a bit of carpeting, after golfers’ cleats scarred the linoleum.

The U.S. Navy has ordered some, and so, says Torres, has the Soviet Union, where people are used to standing in line for everything.

But, is it Art? No, it’s Jonell--Jonell Gomez, a painter photographed on his way to a job in a Hollywood building. Pictures can deceive: Gomez was not the art critic responsible for the comment painted above the graffiti on the building’s exterior. His job is to paint the interior.

Meanwhile, our answer to the graffiti question is, No, we can’t read it. Can you? We hear so much about slum dwellings that we now pause for some anecdotes about the high-priced spreads.

The current Southern California Real Estate Journal invited property managers to unburden themselves in its pages, and they bewail luxury condo and office-building tenants who have:

--used the sauna to thaw frozen turkeys;

--hung meat in the elevators to harass other tenants;

--shut down one elevator at the same time every day to have sex between floors.

One tenant with a fancy aquarium demanded to be reimbursed 20 fins per fish (that’s $100 in old street slang) after some of them died when the air-conditioning failed. The property manager noted that the lease offered no provision for that, and the tenant relented, but sniffled, “It would have been nice if you had sent a condolence card, or went to the funeral.”

That special phone number Todd Witteles asked for last year because it was “easy to remember,” the one with 7777 as the last four digits--it’s been rather too easy.

First, giggly schoolgirls happened onto it, and now call up daily to hear Witteles’ ever-changing messages on his answering machine in Rancho Palos Verdes. Then, “every little baby in the area seems to pick up the phone and randomly dial my number,” the result being endless recordings of “a lot of babbling, then some father yelling ‘Hang up that phone!’ ”

The worst, though, came not long ago, when some investment house ran a newspaper ad with the same phone number, preceded by “this very small 800.” So small that several hundred readers didn’t even see it, and all called Witteles for investment information.

Never seek financial advice from a ticked-off 18-year-old. Witteles said he left a “nasty message” on his machine, and within days, a new ad appeared, with a new number to call, and the 800 part printed “real big.”

Seen dockside: Adel Nasrallah, also known as Eddie Nash, awaiting a new trial after a mistrial in the quadruple 1981 Laurel Canyon murders, had his day in someone else’s court on Wednesday. Nash, held without bail and wearing jail blues, testified during the penalty phase for Linell Dumas, convicted of murdering the mother of a sheriff’s deputy. Nash appeared as a character witness.

miscelLAny:

The Electric Theater, this movie town’s first movie house, opened on South Main Street on April 2, 1902.