A bigga bigga hunka interplanetary love: While...

A bigga bigga hunka interplanetary love: While NASA officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena continue to try to contact the Mars Observer, a psychics convention has offered some helpful thought waves of its own.

About 250 delegates to the National New Age, Alien Agenda and Cosmic Conspiracies Conference in Phoenix breathed deeply and pushed loving energy from their heads to their hearts for one minute. Then they beamed their psychic love notes to Observer, which lost contact with NASA on Aug. 21.

“Anything is really possible, if we put our minds to it,” explained former astronaut Brian O’Leary, one of the attendees.

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It didn’t go on ticking: Back on Earth, a Santa Monica College student sort of lost his cool when he observed his 1974 Porsche being ticketed on campus.

He took out a hammer “and smashed the windshield,” said school spokesman Bruce Smith. “And he began yelling and jumping up and down on the car.”

The resulting hunk of metal was impounded and taken to a tow company, where it is expected to be sold as scrap. “It apparently wasn’t in real good shape to start with,” Smith said.

He added that campus police did not give the student any additional citations because it apparently is not a crime to beat one’s car.

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List of the Day: We mentioned the other day that the downtown sandwich shop Philippe’s claims it invented the French dip sandwich in 1918. Other worldwide firsts:

First hot fudge sundae--C.C. Brown’s, Hollywood (founded 1906).

First cheeseburger--Pasadena short-order cook Lionel Sternberger, 1920s. (He is said to have thrown a slice--variety unknown--on a hamburger in a daring experiment, according to American Heritage magazine.)

First Shirley Temple cocktail--Original Brown Derby, mid-1930s.

First chili size--Ptomaine Tommy’s, Lincoln Heights, 1920s.

Some L.A. firsts:

First cafeteria--Helen Mosher’s, on Hill Street between 3rd and 4th streets, 1905. Her motto: “All Women Cooks--Food That Can Be Seen--No Tips.”

First pizza--Patsy D’Amore, Hollywood, 1940s.

First burrito--Victoria Arroyo, East L.A., 1930s. One day, Arroyo ran out of her “usual fare of hot dogs, hamburgers or taquitos. . . . She recalled a concoction made by her mother from chilies or beans and cheese wrapped in a tortilla,” Westways magazine said. Arroyo knew she was onto something when one customer left a sizable tip--15 cents.

miscelLAny:

Downtown Lives! No, really. That’s the title of an art show for which the Downtown Arts Development Assn. (DADA) is seeking proposals from artists. The show will get off the ground in December, though not quite so literally as a past show did in 1982 when artist Dustin Shuler hung an airplane on a wall with a big nail on Traction Avenue.

LARRY DAVIS / Los Angeles Times