You could call Ed Balder the Count...

You could call Ed Balder the Count of Mini-Christo.

Declaring that “size doesn’t matter” in art, the Lancaster radio personality, aided by a group of volunteers, worked tirelessly Friday to set up 1,830 cocktail umbrellas on a lawn outside a Mervyn’s Center store.

No helicopters flew overhead to catch a glimpse of Balder’s sea of four-inch parasols. “You got a better view standing over them,” said news director Todd Leitz, Balder’s colleague at KHJJ-AM (1380).

Like fellow environmental artist Christo, Balder spared no expense. He shelled out $57 for the umbrellas, which he obtained from a local restaurant.

He termed the response so good “that we’ve been allowed to circumvent the gardeners and leave them up all weekend. Then we’ll bury them as mulch.”

The only drawback was his inability to find a Japanese radio station that would stage a simultaneous ceremony. But Balder wasn’t complaining. After all, not a single one of his umbrellas was stolen by a pina colada drinker.

Ignored recently in a couple of magazine surveys of world cities, L.A. was treated to a separate story in the current issue of The Economist.

The London publication noted that at a charity auction in Hollywood, “one mogul paid $110,000 to have David Hockney paint the inside of his swimming pool. Another paid $52,000 for his children to have lunch with Michael Jackson. But an invitation to have dinner with George and Barbara Bush attracted only $5,500.”

The article was headlined: “The Relative Values of Lalaland.”

We believe that La La Land is the accepted spelling.

Are people getting edgier around here? Sheriff’s deputies were called out to a reported robbery of an Agoura Hills savings and loan the other day, only to discover that it was a mock holdup promoting a Pony Express Days festival.

“I don’t know why someone would be so stupid to think it was a real robbery, and call the sheriff,” one organizer told the Country & Canyon Times. “There were a bunch of people in antique costumes with antique guns and a whole lot of photographers all around taking pictures.”

A press release for the black-tie opening of an automotive art show at the Citadel, the old Uniroyal plant along the Santa Ana Freeway, said that it would “be catered by L’Opera of Long Beach, referred to by many as the Spago’s of the Southland.”

Funny, we always thought Spago was the Spago of the Southland.

But then we’re not exactly perfect, either. In Friday’s paper, we mentioned that “Lebanese” was among the 24 languages spoken at a Rowland Heights elementary school. Actually, Arabic is the main language of inhabitants of Lebanon. We’re going to write on the blackboard 100 times, “Lebanese is not a language.”

Eddie Cress saw this life-affirming sign in front of a flower shop on Beverly Boulevard:

“Find a good florist before you need one.”

Cheered on by the team owner and his actress girlfriend, Atlanta now faces Minnesota in the World Series--a match-up that inspired this headline in the Pasadena Star-News:

“Ted and Jane Are Expecting Twins.”

miscelLAny:

Soon after Central Park (now Pershing Square) was dedicated in downtown L.A. in 1866, the city was forced to surround it with a picket fence to keep out stray horses and cattle.