Valentine’s Day serenade . . . or...

Valentine’s Day serenade . . . or ride-sharing plea?

A first-stage smog alert had already been called in central L.A. Thursday when singer Robert Goulet took to the skies in a helicopter as part of a KLOS-FM radio Valentine’s promotion. He performed several love songs to the motorists below, including “On a Clear Day, You Can See Forever.”

Rather than firing everyone and abandoning its format Thursday, KQLZ-FM (“Pirate Radio”) should have tried one last advertising campaign. Sure, the station’s audience share had declined. But management could have easily altered its “Screw the Rules” billboards to read:

“Screw the Ratings.”

Over the years, the City of Angels hasn’t built up the most impressive literary tradition, unless you consider its great output of sitcoms. But lately, newspapers throughout the nation have been running stories about Mark Twain with an L.A. dateline.

It’s all because a long-lost “Huckleberry Finn” manuscript was found here the other day. If Twain is associated with California, it’s with the Gold Rush country. In fact, after the manuscript turned up here, one local wire service initially reported that his real name was William Langhorne Clemens and another initially said his last name was Clements .

Twain probably never set eyes on the L.A. River. But Lionel Rolfe’s “Literary L.A.” does pass along some fun--probably tall--tales about Twain (1) engaging in gold mining near Newhall in the 1860s, and (2) patronizing a brothel on L.A.’s North Broadway.

Of course, if the latter report were true, he might have signed in as William Langhorne Clements.

While four Elvis imitators--one of them a child--were signing copies of a book about themselves at the Westside Pavilion the other day, Long Beach Fire Station No. 2 was displaying still another ersatz King: the station’s plaster calf mascot. No blue suede shoes, though.

List of the Day:

The five favorite questions used by veteran West L.A. doorman Rick Rosner to ferret out fake or borrowed I.D.s:

1--What’s your sign? (“Everyone knows their own sign, especially in L.A. But they rarely know it for a fake birth date.”)

2--What year did you get out of high school? (“It really catches them off guard.”)

3--What color are your eyes? (“If the I.D. says their eyes are a different color, a person’ll sometimes say that they’re wearing colored contacts. Put it this way: No one with blue eyes wears brown contact lenses.”)

4--How do you spell your middle name? (“Names like Lynn and Anne give people problems.”)

5--What’s your area code? (“Works well on people with out-of-state licenses.”)

miscelLAny:

The Los Angeles Police Department’s fleet now includes about 70 bicycles, divided among seven divisions that have pedaling patrol officers.