The Attorney General of Christmas Past:Dorothy Morris...

The Attorney General of Christmas Past:

Dorothy Morris of San Marino was pleased to receive a Christmas card from John Van de Kamp earlier this week--even if it was postmarked Dec. 13, 1989.

“It says: ‘Have a Good 1990,’ ” Morris reported.

The card, mailed from Sacramento when Van de Kamp was the state’s top legal officer, evidently lay in some nook of a post office through two holiday seasons, not to mention one general election.

“We thought maybe he was just using up some old Christmas cards,” Morris said, “until we noticed the postmark.”

There was one other piece of evidence attesting to its age, too.

“The envelope,” Morris said, “had a 25-cent stamp.”

The smart kid of the 1990s doesn’t crawl up on Santa’s knee. After all, who wants to have to look the white-bearded character in the eye after being hit with the sensitive, have-you-been-good question. With all the technology available, there are other, indirect ways of communicating.

Knollwood Pharmacy in Granada Hills, for instance, is inviting children to “fax free to Santa” their wishes.

And the pharmacy says that the Jolly Old Elf will even fax back a Santa Gram (a trademark term, by the way).

We’re assuming that Santa’s acquisition of a fax machine doesn’t rule out a personal visit on Dec. 25, but the world’s changing too quickly for us to be certain.

The annual Engineering Design Contest at Caltech drew its largest crowd ever, about 700 people, to Beckman Auditorium. It isn’t often you can see a mechanized Sumo competition.

The double-elimination, 90-minute show on Thursday was the final exam for students in Mechanical Engineering 72. Given identical building materials, they had been assigned to make a motorized device that, when directed by a joystick, could throw its weight around.

Specifically, it should be able to force the device of an opponent off a circular tabletop, just as one Sumo performer pushes another out of a wrestling ring.

The winner was Stephen Chang, whose creation knocked off Keith Langer’s in 30 seconds.

“His (Chang’s) came out of the starting blocks very quickly,” said Caltech spokesman Robert Finn. “And with its wedge shape, it was able to scoop under opponents and just flip them off the table.”

A Day of Symphony, too:

Dec. 7, 1991, oddly enough, is also the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Long Beach Music Teachers Assn.

Incidentally, before we forget, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our contributors for helping us with the column this year.

Have a Good 1990!

miscelLAny:

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