Smoker alarm: A new voice will soon...
Smoker alarm: A new voice will soon enter the debate over clean air--a talking cigarette detector.
“This is a no smoking area,” blares a demonstration model. “Please extinguish your cigarette.”
“It’s ideal for the person who doesn’t want to confront a smoker personally,” said Michael Kaufman of Cleveland-based Voice Products Inc. Kaufman was in Los Angeles publicizing the cigarette-buster because “L.A.’s in the forefront of the controversy over banning smoking in restaurants. We think it will be a very popular item here.”
The gizmo, which will go on sale ($199) on a mail-order basis next month, looks like the average smoke detector but is 100 times more sensitive, according to Kaufman.
He asserted that it is sophisticated enough to discern tobacco smoke, meaning that a restaurant-goer with burnt toast won’t set off the alarm and draw hostile stares from other diners.
“It can be programmed to play any message, in any language,” Kaufman said. “And the tone can be as polite--or impolite--as you want.”
And don’t do either while driving: With Halloween creeping closer,
Beverly Hospital of Montebello has issued a set of pumpkin-carving precautions, including:
“Don’t drink and carve.”
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Spit happens: Two drivers--one in a shiny late-model Lexus, the other in a battered old coupe--were screaming at each other near the corner of 5th and Hope streets. The Lexus veered to the right, forcing the coupe, which was in the inside lane, to stop.
The motorists jumped out into the street, the Lexus driver in a pin-striped suit, the coupe driver in workingman’s garb.
Suddenly, the coupe driver performed the ultimate act of disrespect toward a Southern Californian--he spit on the Lexus. The pin-striped suit whirled and said to the assembled crowd in disbelief: “Did you see what he did? Did you see what he did?”
And he began taking names and addresses of witnesses to the spitting.
Carving up L.A.’s landmarks: Yup, 20 of them are scheduled to disappear Sunday, including the Bradbury Building, the Biltmore hotel and the Tail o’ the Pup hot dog stand.
Fortunately, these landmarks are made of cake, created by Rosebud’s of Beverly Hills. They’ll be part of “Crossroads L.A.,” a 15th birthday party at Union Station for the L.A. Conservancy, a nonprofit group that has helped save several architectural treasures, among them the Central Library.
The celebration, which will also include live entertainment, historical exhibits and tours of the train depot, will be held from 4 to 7 p.m. Admission is $15.
Maybe you can’t fight City Hall. But now you can eat it.
miscelLAny:
Spotlight, a publication of the L.A. Convention and Visitors Bureau, recommends several cemeteries for “celebrity grave gawking” on Halloween, including Hollywood Memorial Cemetery (final resting place of Rudolph Valentino), Forest Lawn in Glendale (W.C. Fields and Walt Disney) and Westwood Memorial Cemetery (Marilyn Monroe).
