Cut down to size: Some people miss...

Cut down to size: Some people miss work with the flimsiest of excuses. Then there’s Officer Wax Works of the Long Beach Police Department. The bottom half of his torso is missing but does that slow him down? Not one bit.

The mustachioed mannequin is still on duty, parked on a busy street every day as a warning for motorists to not to speed. A definite employee-of-the-month candidate.

Wax Works may have been a casualty of the rivalry between the Long Beach Police and Fire departments. The latest round of pranks began when Zeep the Sheep, the front-lawn mascot of a local firehouse, disappeared. When Zeep was recovered, the statue was painted black and white and plastered with police stickers.

Wax Works was reduced in stature soon afterward. Don’t expect to see the dummy in a doughnut shop for a while.

Leaded or unleaded?While on the subject of law enforcement--today’s column is turning into an episode of “Cops”--we present the latest in handguns, a revolver that could carry standard bullets in one cylinder and rubber bullets in the other. “This unique gun has the ability to instantly bring up either lethal or non-lethal bullets as the situation demands,” said John Wales of Chatsworth, a co-inventor. Wales enclosed the gun’s specs--confident, we suspect, that they couldn’t be copied by a competitor.

Maybe he should use lighter flour: Though he turned in an outstanding time of 3 hours and 17 minutes in his specialty in the L.A. Marathon, Mike Cuzzacrea failed to set a world record. He finished 11 minutes short of equaling his own mark for fastest race while flipping a pancake the entire way.

Dog day afternoon: A Santa Monica woman was walking her mixed-breed Tibetan spaniel along San Vicente Boulevard when a motorist waved and called out “Wrong dog!”

June Lockhart, the mistress of TV’s “Lassie” three decades ago, waved back.

The fault is everyone’s: “Join the East Hollywood Friends of Geology and Scoutmaster Velveteen Rabbit for a ‘discovery’ hike of new and exciting neighborhood fault lines,” says the bulletin from the L.A. Cacophony Society. “During our walk, we will engage in the distribution of earthquake exemption cards to lucky pedestrians and discuss the merits of Lorne Greene’s performance in the movie ‘Earthquake.’ ”

Which reminds us, it was Ingrid Bergman who felt the earth move in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1943), not Katina Paxinou, as we said the other day. Paxinou probably had an earthquake exemption card.

miscelLAny:

The Pink Pages, a new directory listing gay-supportive businesses in Southern California (including San Diego and the Inland Empire), will debut in mid-April. March 26 is the deadline for listing in the book, which will also carry a national resort section. The publisher is Santa Ana-based Think Pink Publications.