Eat a chocolate, go to court: A...

Eat a chocolate, go to court: A downtown jewelry salesman popped a small piece of candy into his mouth aboard the Blue Line and was promptly asked to disembark at the next stop by two men in civilian clothes. Undercover officers.

The vigilant sheriff’s deputies wrote the salesman a ticket for violating Metro Rail’s no-eating policy, an infraction that carries a $104 fine.

The suspect, who understandably prefers to remain anonymous, shared the ticket with Only in L.A. in a clandestine interview. He also showed us a sample of the offending goodie--about a half-inch wide--which he had taken from a candy bowl at work.

“The officers shouldn’t go by the letter of the law,” he declared, adding that a $104 fine for eating one candy is “not fair.”

Sheriff’s Lt. Gary Schoeller replied that the officers are trying to keep the “environment on the train clean and pleasant.” Chocolate, he pointed out, can get “all over the floors and seats.” And, he added, until he talks to the officers, he’s not ready to concede that the suspect consumed only one piece of candy.

The case could conceivably be dismissed on a technicality. The ticket says the suspect ate “chocolate-covered candy.” It was actually a caramel confection.

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Or you can call it El Lay: Commenting on the Delta Airlines ad, which pronounces this city’s name as Los An-juh-leez, we said that that version hadn’t been heard since Teddy Roosevelt visited fashionable Pershing Square early this century. But readers Barry Tunick and Lee Gruenfeld, among others, point out that another visiting dignitary, Arlo Guthrie, rhymed Los Angeles with “a couple of keys” in a ‘60s song. Those weren’t keys to the city, either.

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Euphemisms r us: Remember the old wisecrack that often accompanied photos of Richard Nixon? If the ads of a Pomona-area car dealer catch on, the line will have to be rephrased this way:

“Would you buy a ‘previously enjoyed car’ from this man?”

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Great moments in medicine: Marilynn Kirchner of Needles was unpacking an old tea set when she noticed that it had been wrapped in some pages from a 1952 issue of The Times. She sent along the time capsule to us (while keeping the tea set).

The article that caught our eyes reported an interview with a San Marino physician who opined that the brownish-orange stuff in the sky--smog--was more of a nuisance than a real danger to health. “I doubt,” he concluded, “if smog causes any more permanent injury than does tobacco smoke.”

Well, good day. Time to take the lungs out on the freeway.

miscelLAny:

Filmmaker George Lucas says the hum of Luke Skywalker’s speed bike in the “Star Wars” movies was produced by recording the sounds of rush-hour traffic on the Harbor Freeway through a vacuum tube.