Harriet Moffat, noting that the street lights...

Harriet Moffat, noting that the street lights had gone dark on her block in Westwood, phoned the Department of Water and Power.

“They said they’d send a crew right over,” Moffat said. “At 2 a.m., the phone rings. Someone tells me that the crew will be over to my house in 10 minutes. I said, ‘Why my house? It’s the street lights.’ They said, ‘The street lights?’--then hung up.” The lights stayed dark.

The next day, Moffat deduced (without the DWP’s help) that she should phone the Bureau of Street Lighting. She was out of luck because it was Saturday. “The woman there told me, ‘We have no one for emergencies or weekends,’ ” Moffat said.

The following Monday, Moffat phoned City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky’s office.

“They must have really chewed out someone,” Moffat said, “because the lights were back on the next day.”

And they’ve stayed on. And on. And on. For more than two weeks.

“They’re on 24 hours a day now,” Moffat said.

Only in L.A. did some sleuthing through the city’s bureaucratic maze and learned that the city is apparently trying to correct a problem with the timing mechanism on the lights in Moffat’s neighborhood. Workers fear that if they turn the lights off during the day, they’ll stay off at night.

One mystery solved. Now if we can only figure out the identity of the crypto-Christo who set out about a dozen blue and gold beach umbrellas along the Pomona Freeway near the Phillips Ranch Road exit. Those are UCLA’s colors, by the way.

T&E;, the newsletter for American Express card holders, declares in its “Doing Business in L.A.” section that visitors should bring “a light raincoat during the November-March rainy season. The what season?

List of the Day:

The annual Dick Davenport Memorial Bird Walk, named for an ornithologist who “died while photographing a Bachman’s warbler in Yosemite National Park,” will begin outside the County Natural History Museum in Exposition Park on Nov. 6 at 7:30 a.m. The museum’s Kimball Garrett reports that more than 30 species of flying objects were sighted during last year’s walk, including:

1--Red-shouldered hawk (“Caught a rat near Rose Garden”).

2--Hermit thrush (“We observed a prolonged antagonistic encounter between two birds”).

3--Horned lark (“First sighting for Exposition Park”).

4--Wilson’s warbler (“Late, not in the usual museum sense, but seasonally”).

5--Boeing 747-400.

The bird-watchers couldn’t determine whether the 747 was late in the usual sense.

miscelLAny:

Bullock’s Wilshire, built in 1929 in a bean field, is considered by some historians to be the first suburban department store. To lure customers in their cars away from the downtown stores, the Art Deco landmark offered one of the first sizable, on-site parking facilities.