If you thought car phones were irritating...

If you thought car phones were irritating . . . USC has announced that “as an added benefit for Trojan football season ticket-holders,” PacTel Cellular has designed “an Emergency Game Day Notification Program.” Ticket-holders can “register to receive emergency messages at their seats in the Coliseum. . . . PacTel Cellular will provide usage of a cellular phone to return the urgent call.”

After all, there’s no telling when your stockbroker is going to have a hot tip.

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Something for Socks to chew on?About 15 years ago a gray and white cat named Roscoe adopted Redondo Beach’s City Hall, eventually gaining overnight privileges.

Then one day he jumped on the desk of Eugene Cornelius, the newly hired risk manager in the Personnel Department. Cornelius said he suffered a severe allergic reaction.

“I got really deathly ill,” Cornelius said. “My eyes blew up. My face got swollen.”

Another employee made a similar complaint. And Roscoe was fired as First Feline.

“It wasn’t solvable to confine him to certain rooms because when a cat passes a room it leaves hair or dander that can cause reactions in allergic people,” said Assistant City Manager Ken Simmons.

Fortunately, a city worker was willing to adopt the City Hall-broken Roscoe. But Ele Steger, another friend of Roscoe, said the feline will be missed. “Some days, there’d be a big argument in a council meeting and Roscoe would walk in, lie down and start to lick himself or something, and it would break the tension,” she said.

Councilman Stevan Colin put it another way: “We ought to throw (Cornelius and Simmons) out and keep the cat--he probably does more for mediating disputes at City Hall than either one of those two ever have.”

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Now here’s a novel tagger: A Fairfax-area building owner is displaying an announcement for other spray-painters (see photo).

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Tempting Fate Dept.: “This month’s killer heat wave on the nation’s East Coast and devastating floods in the Midwest were reminders of how blessed Los Angeles is by its climate,” the L.A. Business Journal editorialized this week. “ . . . L.A. well may benefit from those distant disasters as affected people there decide, as so many of us did before, to move to the friendlier climate here.”

Let’s wait until brush-fire season is over.

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Mystery caller: “Who is Jimmie Jane? And why is he calling me?” writes Ron Butler of UCLA.

Butler recently received a message on his answering machine “from someone speaking in a falsetto, professing to be ‘Jimmie Jane’ and threatening to kill me for messing around with his girlfriend.”

“The same day, my friend Drew received the exact same call on his machine. The calls were threatening but in a humorous way, and with that high-pitched voice, we knew it had to be a joke. . . . Now I find out that ‘Jimmie Jane’ has made dozens of prank calls to dorm residents at UCLA, and that a tape of these calls is circulating around campus.”

Wait till Jimmie Jane hears about USC’s Emergency Game Day Notification Program.

miscelLAny:

There’s no caption for the large photo on Page 4 of the 1993-94 Los Angeles Valley College catalogue, which shows a visiting Bill Clinton speaking to students. By coincidence, the paragraph directly underneath is labeled “Accuracy Statement.” It’s a disclaimer saying the college reserves the right to alter programs promised in the catalogue. Maybe presidential candidates should be forced to make a similar statement.