It sounds like a parent’s nightmare: A...

It sounds like a parent’s nightmare: A first-grader with a credit card.

But everyone seems happy with the Glendale Unified School District’s unique system of having parents prepay $20 for a bar-coded plastic card that entitles their children to 20 lunches.

“Before, a lot of parents were tired of hunting around for $1.25 (the cash price of a lunch) at the last minute each morning as their child was going out the door,” said Rick De Burgh, the district’s director of food services.

The system, aside from allowing the district to keep computerized records for the federal government’s subsidy program, also speeds up the cafeteria lines. More than 1,000 children use the cards.

“Kids that age love to wad up the the dollar bill into the smallest piece possible around the quarter,” said De Burgh. “We even had one kid who would tape the wad to his quarter.”

The district is also aware that kids have been known to lose things.

“We keep the cards in a box five feet from the (cafeteria) line,” De Burgh said. The cards go back into the box after lunch.

In other words, Glendale’s version of the American Express slogan would be: “Don’t leave the cafeteria with it.”

We mentioned the other day that a Hollywood attorney has been asked by Parker Bros., the makers of Monopoly, to stop using business cards bearing “Get Out of Jail Free” designs.

No chance, says the 66-year-old attorney, Jack Deitsch. He maintains that the courts have held that the drawings on the Monopoly cards were used years before the game was invented and are “in the public domain.”

Thus, the courts have told Deitsch, “Pass Go.”

In March, the Compton Fire Department experimented with all-water bed sleeping accommodations in its four station houses.

It was part of a study aimed at determining whether firefighters could get back to sleep easier on those surfaces than on standard mattresses after a middle of the night call. The results are in, and the 40 water beds are staying. On standard beds, 30% of the firefighters reported it was “very difficult” falling asleep again. With water beds, just 7% complained of sleeplessness.

An all water bed fire department is, by the way, another first for L.A.

Resuming our Redundant Names series, Adelaide Tatto of Pacoima nominates her neighborhood’s La Rue Street (“the street street”). It is, however, one article and one noun short of the all-time leader, “the the tar tar pits” (the La Brea Tar Pits).

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The least scenic portion of Southern California’s Coastal Bike Path, most riders agree, is the stretch in Redondo Beach that passes through an underground parking lot.