Hair gain scheme: The Doo Dah Parade...

Hair gain scheme: The Doo Dah Parade will have a new and suitably disgusting float this year--the World’s Largest Hairball, expected to fluff out to nine feet in diameter and weigh about 300 pounds.

“Hair is really heavy,” observed Jerry Archambeault of Supercuts, the float sponsor.

He said the chain is “asking people to bring in their hair. Or, of course, we can cut it. We’re collecting some in trash bags now.”

Archambeault added proudly that the float would be all hair, explaining: “We’re not stuffing it with paper or anything.”

Mindful of the danger of a spill, the company is using a double-container strategy: The giant hairball will be encased in two layers of industrial-sized plastic bags during the Nov. 29 parade.

“God forbid we had only one bag and it broke,” Archambeault said. “We’d have hair everywhere.”

Sacre bleu! An Only in L.A. contributor recently alerted the state Department of Motor Vehicles that she saw a MERDTET license plate. “Apparently no one at the DMV spoke French,” our correspondent said.

Phonetically, MERDTET is a much earthier French version of blockhead.

“Given the fact that we have issued well over 1 million of these personalized license plates, occasionally a configuration has been issued that may be considered inappropriate,” the DMV’s Clissie Rushing responded.

“We have started cancellation proceedings for MERDTET.”

Well, we sure feel like a . . . blockhead: Krystal Doyle, an 11-year-old Glendoran, has taken us to task for criticizing a first-grade teacher who included the word Plimoth on a list of Thanksgiving terms. “Back then, this is the way the Pilgrims spelled Plimoth,” scolded Krystal, adding that she has “visited Plimoth Plantation” in Massachusetts.

Scott Freshman, a fifth-grade teacher in Burbank, put it another way. “This particular word,” he said, “was not Quayled.”

But they went thataway!Ed Schlossman found a pair of dueling signs in Thousand Oaks with a sort of “Seek a cop--Go to jail” theme.

Once was enough: Terry Donovan of Simi Valley writes that a friend brought back a “Los Angeles Triathlon” T-shirt from a Soldiers of Fortune convention in Las Vegas. The shirt shows mock international symbols for “shoot,” “loot” and “scoot.”

Commented Donovan: “I really hope this particular ‘tri’ doesn’t become an annual event.”

Will they request a continuance?Daily Variety reports that production of the TV program “People’s Court,” starring Judge Joseph A. Wapner and his faithful sidekick, Doug Llewelyn, will halt at the end of the season. You may recall that in a poll taken in 1989, 54% of those questioned could identify Wapner, while only 29% could name a single member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Talk about bad ratings.

MiscelLAny:

Los Angeles County now has six area codes: 213, 310, 818, 805 (in Antelope Valley), 909 (in Pomona) and 714 (in part of La Mirada).