Cool it, party animals: We know you’ve...

Cool it, party animals: We know you’ve brought out the funny hats, noisemakers and fireworks. But we just want to caution you not to overdo it today while you’re celebrating the biggest social event of the season . . .

L.A.’s 211th birthday.

Gee, it seems like just the other day when the city turned 200.

Time to reconsider that open border policy?In Pacific Palisades, where nearly everything shuts down at 10 p.m., police were called out to a teen party after neighbors complained of loud music and unruly behavior. The Palisades Post reported ominously that most of the youths “came from the local area. But several reportedly came from”--and we pause here to heighten the drama--”West Los Angeles.”

And you gave all the credit to the French: UCLA paleobiologist J. William Schopf asserts in a new book that sex began about 1.1 billion years ago in what is now China. The participants: Some single-cell floating plankton. They must have met in a single-cell bar.

Mystery of the day: A bumper sticker on a truck in Highland Park said, “No Lot Lizards,” and contained a drawing of a lizard that was bisected by a red slash mark. What are lot lizards? They sound like less fun than plankton.

How many lawyers did it take to write this?Stephanie Fishkin of Alhambra found a coupon in which Domino’s can’t seem to make up its mind whether it will or it won’t accept a competitor’s coupon--or whether a coupon is even “necessary,” whatever that means.

Blimey: Two British newspapers are jointly publishing the International Express, a weekly tabloid that, in the words of its publicist, will start bringing “the best and juiciest of British social news (a.k.a., gossip) to the West Coast in early October.”

We found a shocking item in an early edition of the Express--party-goers attending “Hugh Hefner’s annual midsummer bacchanal at his 29-room Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles’ Holmby Hills . . . realized times had changed when they spotted a driveway sign: ‘Warning--Children at Play.’ ”

And the sign wasn’t referring to adult children.

1,040 ways a fictional character can be murdered: The university brochure, “Expert Sources at Pepperdine,” lists a specialty of English professor Michael Collings as:

“Stephen King.”

miscelLAny:

One of the unplanned features of L.A.’s Bicentennial celebration, 11 years ago today, was a 5.1-magnitude earthquake.