Talk about stubborn guys. A driver locked...

Talk about stubborn guys. A driver locked his keys in his sports car in a mini-mall on Sunset Boulevard. By coincidence, a locksmith’s shop was nearby. He walked over and asked: “Got a hanger?”

The locksmith said no. The driver stalked off to ask someone else.

After we mentioned that the now-vanished Ptomaine Tommy’s was credited with creating the “chili (or hamburger) size,” George Laties of Brentwood wrote to ask what the size means.

We yield to columnist/gourmet Jack Smith, who served up the answer a few years ago. Smith wrote that Tommy De Forest’s chiliburger emporium in Lincoln Heights offered his basic dish “in two sizes--hamburger size and steak size.

“The customer would order the usual. The waiter would ask: ‘Which size? Steak size or hamburger size?’ The customer would answer, ‘Hamburger size,’ and the waiter would yell to the kitchen, ‘Hamburger size!’ But few customers took the steak size, and in time that term was dropped and the waiter would simply holler: ‘Size!’ ”

Another mystery, to Bill Schwebel of Palos Verdes, is the Bellflower Neon Sign Co. Visible off the Artesia Freeway, the company is fronted by a large sign that is located on Caltrans property. The sign is currently lacking one element because owner Jim Thompson is wrangling with Caltrans over security arrangements.

And so, reader Schwebel, to answer your question, that’s why there’s no neon sign for the Bellflower Neon Sign Co.

We’ve even come up with an explanation for a sort of Stonehenge West in Santa Fe Springs. It’s a mysterious, block-long formation of 11 marble markers. Turns out to be a sculpture by Phoenix artist Otto Rigan, designed for the Colonnade business park. Rigan says that the markers’ inlaid, mirrored glass will glimmer “in an ever-changing response to the arc of the sun, as well as the artificial light of night.”

We must have had the sun in our eyes when we said that the Caltech chemistry chairman’s formula in our photo Friday was for coffee. It was for cocoa. Then, again, we always did get low marks in chemistry.

And, just to show that anyone can slip up, Mel Diamond of West Hollywood reports that he heard Vin Scully, the Dodgers’ Hall of Fame announcer, attribute the sky-is-falling fable to Chicken Lickin’.

miscelLAny:

L.A. historian Harris Newmark reports that in 1858 a merchant named Manuel Ravenna hired Wells Fargo & Co., at a rate of 12 1/2 cents a pound, to bring the city its first commercial ice. Ravenna ran a saloon.