What ever happened to USC’s defense?While all...

What ever happened to USC’s defense?While all those 290-pound Trojan football players were apparently looking the other way, a strange thing happened during one of the team’s recent workouts.

The Daily Trojan crime report put it this way: “At 3:13 p.m., the theft of 12 footballs was reported at Howard Jones Field.”

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I’m the Chevy Chase Theater and you’re not: Chevy Chase’s new talk show on Channel 11 received blistering first-night reviews this week. Should the gabfest fail, will its home--the Chevy Chase Theater--need to be renamed? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time for the venerable landmark at 6230 Sunset Blvd. Some of its other aliases:

* Earl Carroll’s Vanities (1938-53) (featuring “Hollywood’s Most Beautiful Girls”).

* Moulin Rouge (1953-65).

* Hullabaloo (1965-68).

* Kaleidoscope (1968-69).

* Aquarius Theater (1969-93).

* Chevy Chase Theater (1993-?).

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Free the dolphins!After Marineland folded six years ago, the fiberglass figures at the park’s entrance--a whale and two dolphins--were donated to the city of Rancho Palos Verdes.

The city treated them as though they were white sea elephants, placing them out of sight in a storage building. Then, someone broke through a boarded-up window and set the nine-foot-long, 250-pound dolphins free. But not for long.

The creatures were found in the amphitheater of Palos Verdes Peninsula High, one bearing a “Class of 94” marking in ink, the other a “Class of 95” marking. Even Sherlock Holmes’ assistant, Dr. Watson, could have deduced that a school prank had been involved.

“I have a sense of humor, but the difficulty is when a prank gets out of hand,” said Principal Kelly Johnson. “Someone did some vandalism and that’s a criminal act. It might be if the kids involved went down to City Hall and offered to board up the window, nothing would happen to them. But they haven’t done that.”

In the meantime?

L.A. County sheriff’s deputies are investigating. “They took fingerprints off the dolphins,” Johnson said.

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They’re In the book but Out with the pols: In “Hamburger Heaven: The Illustrated History of the Hamburger,” Jeffrey Tennyson ranks In-N-Out among his favorite brands, for which Southern Californians can all be proud. The first In-N-Out stand sprouted up in Baldwin Park in 1948. And, to think, the local City Council once refused to change the name of the street graced by the corporate headquarters from Virginia Avenue to Hamburger Lane.

miscelLAny:

In 1960, actress Shirley MacLaine prepared for her role in the movie, “The Apartment,” by spending a day working as an elevator operator in the Times building.