A burglar who plays it safe: Doug...

A burglar who plays it safe: Doug Lyon of Calabasas sent along the crime log from a local newspaper, which included this item: “A bedroom was ransacked and a condom valued at 50 cents was stolen between 1 p.m. Aug. 7 and 1 p.m. Aug. 8.”

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Give us 2.2 minutes and we’ll give you the weird: John H. Hutchinson wrote KNX radio on a couple of occasions to object to the all-news station’s slogan, “All the news you need to know,” pointing out that he needed to know many other things not reported by KNX.

The station stubbornly kept the slogan anyway. Hutchinson, meanwhile, moved back to his native Wales, where he died. But he didn’t forget KNX. In what his grandson, also named John H. Hutchinson, termed “something of a private joke,” the elder Hutchinson had his tombstone engraved this way:

John Henry Hutchinson 1897-1993

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Ideal for weightlifters: During a visit here, Kathy Reschke of Stanford photographed a for rent sign for an apartment on the Westside that seems to offer a very large mirror.

A COW in Cerritos: No, it’s not a return to the early 1960s when the area still called itself Dairy Valley. This COW is not a bovine but an acronym--for Cerritos on Wheels, the name of the city’s new van system.

The residents chose COW over CAT (Cerritos Area Transit) and several other candidates in a contest held by the city.

City spokeswoman Michele Wastal said there were more than 900 entries in the van-naming competition, some apparently entered by children. “Obviously we couldn’t use something like ‘Joey’s Bus,’ ” she said.

Still, some Cerritos officials thought the COW acronym OUTDATED. But the 26-year-old, now-urbanized city doesn’t have a lot of tradition apart from its dairy past and its distinction as the site of Pat Nixon’s childhood home.

COW’s somewhat ambling symbol is not unprecedented--riders can catch SLO Transit in San Luis Obispo.

And Cerritos has shown in the past that it’s not afraid to move boldly. It once gained nationwide attention when it attempted (unsuccessfully) to force Toys R Us to turn around the reverse “R” logo on the theory it was a bad influence on school kids.

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One more fun activity that’s verboten: A sign in a San Fernando eatery’s restroom says: “Do not attempt to hang from towel or insert your head in the towel loop. Failure to follow these simple instructions can be harmful or injurious.”

miscelLAny:

The book, “There Are Alligators in Our Sewers,” points out that it’s a myth that comic W.C. Fields has a tombstone that says, “All Things Considered, I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia.” Fields, whose cremated remains were interred at Forest Lawn in Glendale, has no tombstone. The myth appears to date back to a 1937 interview that Fields gave in which he joked to a Vanity Fair reporter that he would prefer that epitaph. We thought that was news you needed to know.