Biggest chicken in town: The honors keep...

Biggest chicken in town: The honors keep piling up for a 23-foot-tall plaster creature who has inspired a line of gauche clothing and bizarre trinkets.

It’s hard to believe that Chicken Boy was marked for destruction just a few years ago when he was removed from the roof of a downtown L.A. restaurant of the same name. But Future Studio, an L.A. design firm, acquired him for chicken feed (i.e., moving costs) from the defunct eatery.

Since then, he has become the star of the Chicken Boy mail order catalogue, which was saluted in a recent issue of Newsweek. (Maybe, now, the House of Dior will take notice of Chicken Boy Head and Beak Wear.)

“Chicken Boy--the Movie,” a 30-minute short, has been shown in Europe. And “The Chicken Boy Polka” has been recorded by Those Darn Accordions.

Oddly enough, Chicken Boy himself lives anonymously in a Monterey Park storage yard--in two pieces. “We had to take off his head and put it between his legs to fit him in there,” said Future Studio’s Amy Inouye.

Of course, Inouye does hear adoption offers.

“My auto mechanic once offered to fix my power steering for free,” she said, “if he could put Chicken Boy on his roof.”

You mean you don’t comb your hair with it?Alex Urbach wonders whether the Santa Monica Courthouse thinks it has found a unique use for the telephone.

It’s a good thing the mayoral race isn’t a TV series: When several of L.A.’s dynamic mayoral candidates gathered for a forum Saturday afternoon on Channel 2, they finished as sorry also-rans in their time slot. The politicos’ 1.1 rating was dwarfed by reruns of “Family Ties” (5.5), “I Love Lucy” (4.8) and “Diff’rent Strokes” (3.9). They even threw a gutter ball against a pro bowling tournament (3.5).

A fan of Madam Joy: After appearing on CNN to discuss the rumor-control hot line she established, City Councilwoman Joy Picus received a letter from 21-year-old Ackah George of Ghana. The note was addressed to “Dear Madam Joy” and voiced the hope that “circumstances are under control” in L.A.

Or, putting it another way: A poster spotted on a telephone pole in Hollywood said: “Don’t Riot, Have Sex.”

But everything’s calm in the Amazon rain forest: One of the “midday headlines” issued Monday by L.A.’s City News Service said: “Police, sheriff’s deputies and several hundred National Guardsmen remain on alert in the area as the city, state, nation and parts of the industrialized world await the verdicts.”

miscelLAny:

L.A. County’s network of 400 air-raid warning sirens was unplugged in 1985 after it was discovered that more than 30% of the devices were broken. Many of the silent sirens remain in place, officials say, because it would be too costly to remove them.