Talent agents, on your toes:When U.S. Rep....

Talent agents, on your toes:

When U.S. Rep. David Dreier (R-La Verne) appeared on a British public affairs TV show recently, his straight man--make that fellow guest--was noted Chinese dissident physicist Fang Lixhi, who was allowed to leave China after he took refuge in the U.S. Embassy for months.

On the air they got down to serious foreign policy. But Dreier warmed up the act by telling Fang that his name was the same as that of comic Phyllis Diller’s fictitious husband.

“He laughed hysterically,” Dreier wrote us.

Uh-huh. And after all those overseas tours, tens of thousands of people in dozens of countries still think Bob Hope was the Secretary of State.

Joyce Goerner of Pomona is the first to answer--and in verse, yet--our question, what to do with the Spruce Goose?

Disney wants to shuck the Goose.

Never was of any use.

Put a great big price tag on,

Sell it to the Pentagon.

A tuck under the wings, a little work around the propellers, they could pass it off as a B-2 stealth bomber. Perfect element of surprise; who’d expect to be bombed by a low-flying orange crate?

As they say, or attempt to say, there’s nothing certain in life but negative patient outcome and revenue enhancement.

If you divined “death and taxes” out of that, you qualify to attempt this word problem, from a memo circulated at a major downtown firm:

“Effective today, employee parking fees will be reduced at all ... employee parking facilities ... The total amount you pay for parking each month will remain the same.”

The company is The Times. The memo obviously did not pass through our usual gantlet of alert editerz.

Give up? Like a dishonest mystery writer, we left out the key clue. The city of L.A. imposed a 10% tax on downtown parking. So the company thoughtfully cut parking fees to its employees by that same 10%, so, voila, everybody pays the same amount as before, except 10% now goes to the city instead of the company.

Tipple d’Or is on tour: a solid gold bottle of Pinch, 86-proof Scotch in an 18-karat container (California bottle deposit not included).

After being displayed in local liquor and discount stores, the bottle settled into more fitting digs in Beverly Hills Friday for a multiple sclerosis fund-raiser.

The notion that gold-bedazzled people will reflexively empty gold from their pockets has worked. The Pinch bottle has raised $402,000 for MS research, and the goal is $1 million.

It’s called the most expensive bottle in the world--$115,000--but if you count contents, in 1985, a member of the Forbes family plunked down $157,500 for a bottle of 18th-century plonk: a 1787 Chateau Lafite claret, its label initialed by Thomas Jefferson. Within a year, the cork had dried out from exposure to display lights, and the wine was undrinkable. But we were still amused by its presumption. miscelLAny: Twenty-five percent of Los Angeles County is said to fall within the boundary of the Angeles National Forest.