NO GAP HERE: Folks at the Ronald...

NO GAP HERE: Folks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library have borrowed Edward Sorel’s presidents-in-caricature art to promote a new exhibit. It shows, for example, Washington checking out LBJ’s scar, Reagan with jelly beans, Truman at the piano, and Nixon playing the Watergate tapes. . . . But wait! The Reagan library reprint shows Nixon, same pose, reading a book--his tape machine gone. The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace people say it didn’t matter to them, but Spy magazine, running both illustrations this month, cries “cover-up.”

NATURAL CLEANER: Clean-image Irvine got a little cleaner this week. Sunset Property Services, which cleans streets for many major developers there, as well as John Wayne Airport, has put in its first natural gas street sweeper. . . . Its gas will come from the city’s new natural gas fueling station, which opened last week. Says a delighted Irvine Mayor Michael Ward: “The city is committed to cleaning up our air. But we can’t do it alone.”

CLIMB SOFTLY? Mountain climbing has become such a popular sport that environmentalists and national parks people worry about the damage it is causing rock surfaces. This has Randy Vogel, a Laguna Hills attorney and climbing guidebook author, a little bothered. . . . Today’s mountain climbers, he says, have been exemplary in their environmental care. Vogel calls his sport “an easy target, because we don’t have political clout or huge sums of money to throw around.”

CULTURE SHOCK: It was supposed to be a funny scene in Sylvester Stallone’s new “Demolition Man,” where he wakes up in the future and discovers that all restaurants are now Taco Bells. But folks at Taco Bell headquarters in Irvine didn’t think it was funny; they thought it was great . . . . In fact, each Taco Bell employee in the county got two free passes to a special screening of the top box office movie, which happens to include scenes shot at Irvine’s Taco Bell.