Meanwhile, in sunny Florida . . ....

Meanwhile, in sunny Florida . . . Just wanted to get your mind off the downpours. Anyway, it seems that calls from reporters have been raining on Bruce Van Lenten, owner of a Brooksville, Fla., tattoo parlor, since a local paper revealed that he specializes in drawing Disney characters.

In fact, he’s fashioned 53 tattoos of Mickey and the gang on the body of fellow worker Jim Jones. A local TV station picked up the newspaper story, phoned Disney, and suddenly a Disney spokesman was on the air talking about copyright infringement. (Disney, you’ll recall, once demanded that a day-care center take down unauthorized posters of its characters.)

“If they (tattoos) are already on his (Jones’) body, we would probably just ask him to desist from doing it any more,” spokesman Charles Ridgeway said. He added that Disney would also like the needle parlor to stop “drawing the characters on other people.”

Van Lenten says that he hasn’t been contacted by Disney yet but would be willing to heed any requests, though he can’t understand why the Burbank company would be bothered.

The Disney tattoos “are all in good taste,” Van Lenten emphasized. “It’s not like we have Mickey and Minnie doing anything together.”

Now back to the rains: No matter how big of a storm hit, you knew there would still be officials gurgling that the drought isn’t over yet. But here’s even gloomier news, culled from a San Gabriel Valley newspaper by Don Nelson. A headline said: “Rainfalls Have Helped Drought.”

Take that, MCI . . . Gary Warschaw passed along a bill from AT&T;, which is supposed to illustrate how efficient the utility is at reducing paperwork.

List of the Day: The wandering ways of some local roads:

--San Vicente Boulevard careens into Wilshire Boulevard on each side of Beverly Hills.

--80th Street turns into 79th Street when it crosses Sepulveda Boulevard in Westchester.

--Montrose’s streets are laid out in curves to resemble the petals of a rose. (The 210 Freeway, which arrived later, didn’t conform to this pattern.)

--Onizuka (formerly Weller) Street, a diagonal path between 1st and 2nd streets in Little Tokyo, was carved out as a short cut by racing stagecoaches more than a century ago. Passengers on two lines would bet against each other on San Pedro-L.A. trips.

--Firmona Avenue becomes Fir Avenue in Inglewood.

--Several streets radiate from the Los Alamitos traffic circle in Long Beach, including Los Coyotes Diagonal. Legend has it that the circle’s designer was killed in a traffic accident there. “I also heard he’s buried under the pavement,” said one Long Beach engineer, “but I don’t think either story is true.”

Take two aspirin and hold for this recording: Callers to Kaiser Permanente’s hospital on the Westside hear a pleasant taped voice that first tells them what button to press “for appointments or to verify appointments,” and then what button to press for leaving “a message for your physician.”

Finally , the recording says: “If this is a life-threatening emergency, please press 9.”

miscelLAny:

Jeffrey Book writes in the Auto Club’s Westways magazine that after last year’s earthquake, Big Bear residents joked about giving the area a new name--Chimney Falls.