Burial at Ski’s: Thomas (Ski) Demski fought...

Burial at Ski’s: Thomas (Ski) Demski fought for years with the Long Beach City Council before a judge ruled he could fly his 47-foot-by-82-foot American flag. The neighbors had complained that it flapped too loudly.

Now, the superpatriot has a new cause: Entombing his cremated remains in the base of the 132-foot-tall flagpole in his front yard.

“I called the state Cemetery Board,” said Demski, 63. “I asked them, ‘I heard J. Paul Getty’s ashes are in a cornerstone. How did he do that?’ A lady there said the cornerstone was declared a cemetery. That’s what I want to do with my flagpole. I have to pay $600 for license and put $35,000 in trust with the board.”

First, however, his property must be rezoned for cemetery status. He’ll ask permission for that change at a meeting of the City Council today.

One wonders whether his combatants on the council will turn down Demski by responding:

“Over your dead body!”

Remember the good old days of candidate potholders?L.A. City Council candidate Warren Furutani sent residents in the Wilmington-San Pedro area letters containing an empty bullet shell as well as a plastic ruler to show the two directions in life that youngsters can take. Not surprisingly, Furutani endorses the ruler alternative.

A myth frozen in time: Oscars host Billy Crystal cracked that the Mighty Ducks hockey team was a surprising development because, until now, “the only Disney on ice was Walt,” an allusion to a rumor that the company founder’s body was frozen at his request. Crystal (who has never met Ski Demski) drew a few a laughs and a few gasps with the line.

Actually, Disney was cremated, as Hal Morgan and Kerry Tucker, the authors of “Rumor!” discovered. But the erroneous yarn refuses to die. The authors speculate that it may stem from a coincidental flurry of stories about cryonics (body freezing) at about the time of his death (1966).

List of the Day: Some other whoppers discounted in “Rumor!”:

* A live telephone was placed in the coffin of L.A. evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in case she wanted to phone back from the hereafter.

* Fidel Castro “worked as an extra in Hollywood during the early ‘40s, and can be seen in several Xavier Cugat movies.” * Ritz crackers have the word sex embossed on them in tiny letters “to make them more subliminally attractive.”

* President Eisenhower secretly met with aliens who landed at Edwards Air Force Base in 1954 aboard five spaceships. (Shocking. We’re sorry to say that we can’t tell you how many times we’ve relayed this story to people at cocktail parties.)

* As an infant, actor Humphrey Bogart posed as the model for the baby in the Gerber baby foods ads. (Bogey was 29 when the company introduced baby foods.)

* Green M&Ms; “make you horny.” (There is no indication, by the way, that the M&Ms; people started this rumor.)

miscelLAny:

The smallest cities in L.A. County in terms of area are Hawaiian Gardens (one square mile), Cudahy (1.07), Maywood (1.18), Avalon (1.25) and Hermosa Beach (1.36). (Tomorrow: We tell you the largest city in L.A. County.)