George Washington, matchmaker: Joe Jasgur of West...

George Washington, matchmaker: Joe Jasgur of West L.A. noticed that a dollar bill he received at a store bore this handwritten message: “40-year-old man looking for a cute lady.” It included a post office box number in Auburn, Calif. We hope that the writer of the personal ad--and anyone who was tempted to respond--remembered that a dollar doesn’t get what it used to. Especially if you believe the figures you read in the Heidi stories.

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Maybe smoke got in his eyes: Dana Reed is the attorney for the L.A. Hospitality Coalition, a group of restaurant and hotel owners who are challenging the city’s no-smoking law. Ironically, an Orange County restaurateur felt that his establishment was the victim of some inhospitable remarks by Reed earlier this year.

Reed, who was then representing former Orange County Supervisor Don Roth during an influence-peddling investigation, said of a $1,172 bill run up at a Roth lunch: “This is not an expensive restaurant. It’s a cheap dive. I’ve eaten there and I would be horrified if I thought it was a $50 meal. It’s in Garden Grove for heaven’s sake.”

Reed has since apologized, which was only appropriate inasmuch as the Garden Grove eatery welcomes smokers--in fact, it doesn’t even have a designated no-smoking section.

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Lunar probe? When we came upon the accompanying sign (at left) on 3rd Street in L.A., we couldn’t help but wonder if it was a NASA map.

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Buy Western Hemisphere! Sal Barone of the City of Commerce is in complete agreement with the theme of the city’s Industrial Council, “Buy and Sell in Commerce.” What he can’t understand is why the programs for the council’s monthly meetings are published in San Diego and printed in Mexico.

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Shifty L.A.: We mentioned previously that geologists calculate that the Earth’s Pacific plate is moving north at a rate that should put Los Angeles alongside Anchorage in about 50 million years.

But what about in the short term--say, 15 million years? At that point, Jonathan Weiner wrote in “Planet Earth,” L.A.--”if it still exists--will be a suburb of San Francisco. The Giants and the Dodgers will again be cross-town rivals.” Just a minute. Who will be a suburb of whom?

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The sacking of Troy: You have to say USC’s football team has nerve opening its season tonight in Anaheim Stadium. Not only did the Trojans lose their 1992 finale in the same arena to Fresno State, of all schools, but they lost part of the end zone as well. The rampaging Fresnoids dug up the sod that contained the letter F, lugged it home and planted it outside the stadium. At least they didn’t take USC’s equine mascot, Traveler.

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The Valley’s devilish heat: In her autobiography, actress Lillian Gish writes that during the filming of “Home Sweet Home” in Southern California early this century, one scene called for a character to die and go “to hell for his wickedness.” After a brief search, director D.W. Griffith decided to portray hell among “rocks and smoke pots in Chatsworth.”

miscelLAny:

The breakfast cereal Fingos, which is donating $5,000 to the Muscular Dystrophy Assn., hopes to call attention to the MDA campaign by gathering enough bathers Sunday to link fingers from the Santa Monica Pier to the Venice Beach Pier.