Divorce license?A car on the Santa Monica...

Divorce license?A car on the Santa Monica Freeway was observed with a vanity plate that said: DEB’N’ART.

The plate frame carried this rhyming update:

“Are now apart.”

Deb appeared to have won custody of the automobile.

Perhaps it should be a prerequisite: A prospective bride and groom took one look at the long line for marriage licenses in the Santa Monica courthouse and asked a clerk if there were any interesting trials where they might kill some time. “There’s a real good messy divorce across the way,” the clerk said. The couple happily trouped off to that courtroom, the would-be groom quipping: “We’ll see what the future might bring.”

Go ahead and joke. But we’d recommend against buying a vanity plate.

Stupid Criminal Tricks: Two suspected bank robbers were arrested in Pasadena less than a mile from the Bank of America they allegedly held up. Police said they were attempting to make their getaway in a . . . Yugo. Surprisingly, the car hadn’t broken down.

We Break for Misspellings: Dain Heald wonders whether the confidence of customers in a San Gabriel Valley auto garage might be shaken by its flyer (see reproduction).

The vision of St. Bernard? Dog lovers from around the world will no doubt be flocking to Valley College in Van Nuys soon to observe a seemingly miraculous stain on a sidewalk that resembles a pooch. Especially if the specter starts to slobber.

Gee, maybe he ought to get into politics: On the last three nights of the Republican Convention, KCBS Channel 2 re-ran the miniseries “On Wings of Eagles,” about the rescue of two jailed Americans in Iran by a dynamic, can-do employer named H. Ross Perot.

Is he seen as a 1996 threat to the Republicans? In case you didn’t notice, President Bush made two unfavorable mentions of Elvis in his acceptance speech Thursday night. We’d say that pretty much rules out any chance of the singer ever posing for a photo in the White House with Bush as he did with Richard Nixon.

miscelLAny:

Speedway, a Venice street, is so named because it was originally paved with bricks, like the Indianapolis Speedway. A sports car race was held there early

in the century, but now traffic moves pretty much as slowly as in the rest of L.A.