Spell-check failure? Experts warn that the Michelangelo...

Spell-check failure? Experts warn that the Michelangelo virus--said to be capable of destroying data in infected personal computers--isn’t expected to strike until Friday.

But Nancy Verellen of Culver City, who took the accompanying photo, wonders if the virus has staged a surprise attack--on the signs of a local computer equipment company.

You can call it L.A.: One of the honors accorded retired USC linguist Dwight L. Bolinger, who died earlier this week, was his appointment to a mayor’s commission in 1952 to determine how to say Los Angeles .

The issue dated back at least to the 1880s, when the L.A. Chamber of Commerce implored visitors: “The Lady would remind you, please / Her name is not Lost Angie Lees .” (Still, President Theodore Roosevelt went the Lost Angie Lees route when he visited in the early 1900s.) For years, The Times campaigned for the traditional Spanish pronunciation with a daily reminder on its editorial page.

But Bolinger’s commission, admitting that it was unrealistic for the transplanted Easterners to use the Spanish variation, reduced the debate to hard “g” versus soft “g.” Loss-ANG-uh-lus versus Loss-AN-juh-less .

Bolinger, who chaired USC’s Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, ruled that the soft “g” was closer to the Spanish version. So Loss-AN-juh-less it was. The city formally requested that broadcasters adhere to this pronunciation. Among the disappointed was then-Mayor Fletcher Bowron, who considered himself a true Loss-ANG-uh-leno .

Wipe-out: The C-Street Surfing Museum is scheduled to open in Ventura on Sunday, giving California four shrines to the hang-10ers, the others being in Huntington Beach, Oceanside and Santa Cruz.

What we don’t understand is why there is no such gallery in L.A. County, the scene of numerous surfing milestones.

For instance:

* What beach was the inspiration for the “Gidget” movies as well as John Milius’ “Big Wednesday”? Malibu.

* What city erected a statue of surfing pioneer George Freeth? Redondo Beach.

* What high school did the Beach Boys attend, where Brian Wilson flunked one music class when he handed in the song that became “Surfin’ Safari”? Hawthorne.

Maybe the Bigfoot Museum in Malibu would consider enlarging its area of study.

Free counseling: You can spend hundreds of dollars on analysts--or you can drive north on the Hollywood Freeway and soak up the wisdom of the scrawled message on the Barham Boulevard overpass:

BIG DEAL.

P-word prattle: Poet Troxey Kemper of L.A., responding to a lively debate on The Times’ Letters page over the evils caused by such terms as power and profit , sent us a 100-line, 300-word poem composed entirely of different “p” words.

It begins:

Petty penny-pinching politicians

Peddle patent platitudes,

Promise paradise plentifully,

Perpetuate peacock puffery . . .

Pardon. Pooped pundit’s parting.

miscelLAny:

The city’s first escalator is believed to have been installed in Bullock’s Department Store at 7th Street and Broadway about 1907.