Attempting to load groceries and a child...

Attempting to load groceries and a child into her car in Santa Monica during a cloudburst, writer Karen Stabiner dropped her wallet. It sank under several inches of water in the parking lot. “I thought a wallet would float,” she remembered thinking.

That was the last she heard of it until Nick Steers phoned her five days later. Steers is a county lifeguard. A passerby had turned Stabiner’s billfold over to him after finding it on the beach.

“What must have happened is it washed into a gutter,” Steers said. “Then it went into a storm drain and washed out to the ocean. And then it washed ashore. It was right on the high tide line and really crusted with sand.”

A few dollars were missing--”they may have decomposed,” Stabiner said--but her wallet still contained her driver’s license and credit cards as well as her yogurt bonus card.

The wallet is drying. “Of course,” Stabiner said, “given all the stuff in the ocean, I don’t know if I’m ever going to touch it again.”

Look, Maria: Valentine’s Day was five days ago. And yet the “I Love You, Maria--Be My Valentine” banner was still draped over a blank billboard on the Long Beach Freeway the last time we looked. Let’s make up your mind, OK?

Another eye-catching message, appearing all over town, is “Turn Your Mind Inside Out.” A cow appears to be dispensing that piece of wisdom, for example, on a bus shelter poster on Bunker Hill (see photo).

It’s all part of a campaign to alter the negative image of billboards. “Our surveys show it’s not the billboards themselves that people hate, it’s the messages,” said John Martin, president of Gannett Outdoor, optimistically. His goal is to show that billboards “can be bold, creative, imaginative.”

We’ve always thought of cows that way.

Like billboards, cigar-smokers have many critics. The International Cigar Club, founded in Santa Monica a year ago, has attracted just 50 stogie-lovers. They band together every few months at restaurants that will have them, like the Ritz Carlton in Marina del Rey. (Not that the Ritz Carlton doesn’t have some standards--it won’t allow people wearing rubber-soled shoes into its bar, even if they’re on the feet of rich yachtsmen.)

The cigar club’s global title is somewhat hopeful. A spokesman admitted that none of its members live in foreign countries but two “travel internationally.”

New Hampshire primary note:

Val Rodriguez of Signal Hill points out that the 9 p.m. movie on TNT Tuesday night was the Western, “Buchanan Rides Alone.”

Turns your mind inside out.

miscelLAny:

La Tijera Boulevard translates as Scissors Boulevard.