Another reason to hate Southern California:Encino attorneys...

Another reason to hate Southern California:

Encino attorneys and neighbors Kenneth R. Schild and Michael P. Rubin receive prominent mention in a Time magazine cover story.

They’re suing each other, as The Times previously reported, in a dispute that began when Rubin couldn’t take a nap one afternoon because Schild and his son refused to stop playing basketball.

Title of the Time cover story: “Busybodies & Crybabies: What’s happening to the American character?”

From Valley lawsuits to . . .

“Valley Girl” was rejected for inclusion in Webster’s New World Dictionary, as we mourned the other day.

But Santa Monica librarian Gera Freeman points out that we can all take pride in the fact that the term was accepted by the Oxford English Dictionary. Just in time too. The dictionary quotes one source as saying that “the stilettoed, 10th-grade Valley Girls, who stalk the West Coast Galleries, have been replaced by the Mall Girls.”

Our recent reference to the long-gone John Wayne bust, which was made from the infamous Malibu Rock, drew an update from an attorney for Brett-Livingstone Strong, sculptor to the stars.

In 1979, you may recall, authorities pulled the Malibu Rock off a cliff above Pacific Coast Highway, where it was making threatening gestures. Strong took a chunk and fashioned a likeness of Wayne, which later went on display in Century City and outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

Strong, whose other credits include John Lennon and Lawrence Welk, talked of taking the Wayne head on a world tour, but that never developed. Instead, says attorney William Ryan, the work was sold to a Scottsdale, Ariz., company “for approximately $1 million,” and later donated to Lubbock (Texas) Christian University, where it now sits in the library’s Reading Room.

One suspects the Duke would be more comfortable outdoors.

Craig Endler of Canyon Country forwarded a Recycler classified ad placed by an obviously intrepid photographer.

Meanwhile, Gerald Jones of L.A. found what appears to be another multi-service business, in the tradition of those weddings/income tax/notary emporiums. This one obviously specializes in foodstuffs and surrealist works of art.

Basil Langton of Santa Monica notes that the motto of nearby Pilgrim Lutheran Church has a rather cutting Southern California theme:

“Free Faith Lifts Every Sunday.”

miscelLAny:

The four oil islands off Long Beach are named for the late astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White, Roger Chaffee and Theodore Freeman.