Slouching toward Bend: Free-lance writer Bob Woodward...

Slouching toward Bend: Free-lance writer Bob Woodward says you can always spot an ex-Southern Californian behind the wheel in his town, Bend, Ore. “If you’re obeying the 25 m.p.h. speed limit, they blink their lights, honk their horns and maybe flip you off as they pass,” he said.

A year ago, when he became “very frustrated” about the presence of the “pushy” newcomers from south of his border, he wrote to a local newspaper and called transplanted Californians “locusts.”

He pretty much forgot about the letter. But on the eve of the Nov. 3 election, Woodward, making his first try for the office of city commissioner, was startled to see “copies of the letter plastered all over town. Someone was trying to discredit me.”

Maybe.

Woodward won in a landslide.

Dan Quayle will not be mentioned in this item: Six-year-old Davy Harris of West L.A. was given a list of Thanksgiving terms to learn how to spell by his first-grade teacher, including “November,” “Indians,” “turkey” and, uh oh, “Plimoth.”

“Maybe it’s the way the Pilgrims spelled it,” theorizes his dad, Roy. “Too bad it wasn’t Toyota. People in California would never misspell Toyota.”

The wrong class to fall asleep in: Bill Rice of Canoga Park found a marquee in Burbank that gives new meaning to the saying, “You’re never too old to learn.”

There was life before the Richter scale: Professor Ralph Shaffer’s history class at Cal Poly Pomona, which is studying old issues of The Times, found what surely must be one of the earliest mentions of one bit of local folklore.

“We had a light shower yesterday morning, and another last night, and today has been a thundering day, and seems very warm,” a Times correspondent wrote on July 16, 1886. “Still the thermometer does not stand above 88 degrees. . . . This seems a little earthquakey.”

Yup, “earthquake weather” was detected more than a century ago.

A reason to go on living: It was 198 days ago, during the L.A. riots, that a heartless thief stole Madonna’s bustier from the Bra Museum at Frederick’s of Hollywood. Not that we’re counting. Anyway, despite pleas from Only in L.A., it was never returned.

But guess what? The Material Girl herself has come to the rescue, donating another one. (Gee, we never thought of that solution!) Frederick’s says the bustier will go on display soon along with scanty attire formerly worn by Cher, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Phyllis Diller . . . Phyllis Diller?

miscelLAny:

Whittier is one of the few cities in Southern California, apart from L.A., that has been the residence of two First Ladies: Pat Nixon and Lou Hoover.