No doubt you’re having a bit of...

No doubt you’re having a bit of a letdown after all the celebrating you did Tuesday--on L.A.’s 209th birthday.

One thing’s for sure: The city isn’t getting any duller as it gets older. Take the odd sight in the Pantry’s sandwich shop on Tuesday--a pair of handcuffs clasped to a pipe in the men’s room.

Other than the fact that they weren’t Pantry-issue cuffs, Marco Colindres, manager of the Figueroa Street eatery, could only offer:

“Some guy must have left them as a joke.”

And then there were the two black, pilgrim-style bonnets that were lying on Spring Street on Tuesday, a block apart. Strange, very strange.

Southern California has such melodious names, with sometimes unexpected translations.

You may know that Las Pulgas Road in posh Pacific Palisades means “The Fleas Road” in Spanish. Perhaps you didn’t know that Puerco Canyon Road in Malibu, the home of such luxury estates as the $5.7-million Malibu Design House, translates as “Pig Canyon Road.” And we won’t even tell the folks in fashionable Laguna Niguel in Orange County that they dwell in “The Lagoon of the Chigger” (a mite whose “bite causes severe itching,” according to one dictionary).

Weighing less than 100 pounds, Arnold may not measure up physically to Grunt, the 800-pound pig that found fame and a new home in Santa Paula after being abandoned in Rolling Hills Estates.

But Arnold, a Vietnamese potbellied porker, is prominent in his own way. His owner, Sally McComb, successfully fought an anti-swine law in Monterey Park that would have forced her to give it up. The City Council is scheduled to give final approval next Monday for residents to keep the miniature pigs as pets--one per household.

There’s nothing like a puerco story with a happy ending.

In a $12 parking lot in Venice, two cops on bicycles were ticketing a flashy green Corvette for an expired license tag when they heard a voice say:

“Warning! You are too close to the vehicle. Step back!”

It wasn’t the car’s owner, but the car’s audio-alarm system. One officer placed the ticket under the windshield and told the machine, “Sorry.”

miscelLAny:

What do United Airport, Union Air Terminal and Lockheed Air Terminal have in common? All were previous names of Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport, also known as Burbank Airport.