Guru of garbage: Ending three days of...

Guru of garbage: Ending three days of semi-bearable suspense Friday, Mayor Tom Bradley introduced the much-ballyhooed mystery man who will star in a multimedia ad campaign to encourage trash reduction.

It’s semi-funnyman Chevy Chase, who looted a trash container filled with tennis shoes, orange peels and a broken toaster at a press conference to point out the type of items that can be recycled.

“This toaster will be fixed and I will be sending it to the mayor,” Chase quipped at one point.

You could say Chase is well qualified for this post because so many of his movies have been trashed by critics.

Not that kind of recycling!One incident left out of the film “Bugsy” points up the freewheeling ways of the newspaper world of the 1940s.

After Ben (Don’t Call Me Bugsy) Siegel was shot to death in the living room of his girlfriend’s rented home in Beverly Hills, a reporter-photographer team from the old Los Angeles Examiner showed up. They invaded the closet of the dapper mobster and walked off with dozens of his coats and ties.

When the brother of Siegel’s girlfriend complained to the Examiner, both were fired, though not before many of the duds had been distributed to friends and colleagues.

The photographer, who claimed that the looting was the reporter’s idea, was heard to complain afterward: “I never got any of the stuff!”

Bug in the script: Incidentally, while we recently complimented the makers of “Bugsy” for giving a supporting role to the old HOLLYWOODLAND sign, Carlo Panno of Burbank points out that in one scene a gangster complains of being “ripped off”--an expression that didn’t come into common usage until a couple of decades later.

Three-way duel: Gavin Feehan of Granada Hills found what appears to be an epic clash of signs at the corner of Plummer Street and Etiwanda Avenue in Northridge. We plan to finish reading them over the weekend.

List of the day: Darn that Michelangelo computer virus. It evidently caused us to spell vitae as vitai Friday when we discussed a Latin inscription on the Central Library wall. (Or should we confess the truth to the person who spotted it, Father William J. Bonner of the St. Malachy Roman Catholic Church?)

To play it safe, we’re presenting some of L.A.’s English -language building inscriptions that we have found intriguing:

* Wealth means power, it means leisure, it means liberty --National Bank of Commerce, Hill Street.

* To build a business that will never know completion --Bullock’s Wilshire, Wilshire Boulevard.

* The city came into being to preserve life, it exists for the good life --L.A. City Hall.

We always knew that L.A. existed for the good life.

miscelLAny:

In 1890, the Santa Fe Railway offered a free train ticket “from anywhere east of the Rocky Mountains” to anyone who bought property in Lordsburg, now La Verne. The catch was that the purchase had to be at least $500.