A passenger riding squirt-gun?It happened in Pomona...

A passenger riding squirt-gun?

It happened in Pomona and Charles Coleman was the unlucky guy in the next lane.

Coleman, 36, says he was driving down Garey Avenue when an armored truck pulled alongside.

“I saw the gun port slide open and what appeared to be a handgun,” he said. “It fired. It turned out to be a water pistol but I didn’t realize that at first. When the water struck me in the eye I ripped off my glasses and momentarily lost control of my vehicle. I also hurt my ankle slamming on the brakes.”

Coleman followed the truck, took down the license plate number and contacted the firm, Armored Transport Co. (A call by The Times to the company was not returned.) Coleman said that a company official apologized to him for the incident but he has filed a complaint with the Pomona Police Department.

“This was a criminal act,” he said.

Here’s how confidential the city’s new Whistle-blower Hot Line is: It’s located in a former bank vault.

The city Ethics Commission, which operates the hot line, now makes its home in a defunct Security Pacific National Bank branch in the Los Angeles Mall.

“We put the hot line there (in the vault) for illustrative purposes to show it’s serious and confidential,” said Benjamin Bycel, the commission’s executive officer. “We don’t have a person working inside it. But we do have one sitting outside about six steps away.”

Citizens can now report violations of laws by city officials to the hot line’s state-of-the art tape recorder 24 hours a day.

Time will tell whether security has to be beefed up to guard against officials trying to crack the safe.

Murphy’s Law strikes again:

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, in town to persuade local businessmen to invest in his nation, was playing a slick video boasting of Israel’s “high-quality products” when the soundtrack went dead.

Roger Tefft points out that you shouldn’t take the instructions literally at the Long Beach parking garage in the accompanying photo, because the sign “is below a railing that overlooks the ground from two stories up.”

The unkindest cut of all:

As a chain-saw juggler, Robert Gruenberg had a perfect record. But when it came to paying his income tax, his juggling wasn’t as successful.

Gruenberg, 31, a Venice street performer turned used car dealer, was placed on two years’ probation Tuesday and ordered to pay back taxes after pleading guilty to three counts of under-reporting his earnings.

Gruenberg, who once demonstrated his talents with power tools on the Johnny Carson Show, was also ordered to contribute 150 hours of community service. Teaching the art of chain-saw juggling, perhaps?

miscelLAny:

Speeding bicyclists became such a problem in downtown L.A. in 1883 that worried pedestrians called on the City Council to pass a law requiring riders to install bells as warning devices.