Turning LAX into LAF: Feisty Southwest Airlines...

Turning LAX into LAF: Feisty Southwest Airlines encourages its agents to ad lib in their spiels to passengers. And Jim Webb of Long Beach gives a thumbs-up review to the stand-up airline comic he heard at LAX’s otherwise grim sounding Terminal One.

“A (Southwest) clerk was telling waiting passengers things like, ‘Please remain uncomfortably seated,’ and, ‘If you don’t understand what I’m saying, please pay particular attention,’ ” Webb said.

The rep had “the terminal in hysterics,” Webb continued, when he announced that “the FAA prohibited certain people from sitting in the exit rows. He said you couldn’t sit there ‘if you have purple socks on. . . . if you have eaten your plastic boarding card . . . if you dress like Elvis Presley . . . (or) if you saw the ‘Twilight Zone’ episode with William Shatner and believe there was a monster on the plane’s wing.”

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Unexpectedly timely: The made-for-television movie “Hart to Hart,” based on the old TV series with Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers, premiered the other night with one eerie twist in the plot--the Harts lose their Southern California home in a fire. The Castaways restaurant above Burbank, which burned to the ground during the summer, played the part of the ruins.

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Dueling holidays: We don’t know whether we’re too early or too late with this photo by Hal Horne, who snapped it in mixed-up Playa del Rey.

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A fire hero of a previous generation: Fifty-four years ago this week, one of the L.A. City Fire Department’s most famous veterans died. Blackie, who was 37, was the last of the city’s fire horses, “a herd . . . whose willing sinews had times without number staved off disaster when the fiery demon raised its head,” as one writer at the time put it.

Put out to pasture in Griffith Park in 1929, the horse was nearly blind when a big fire broke out in Downtown L.A. 10 years later.

“He sniffed the air excitedly and cantered quickly to the fence, gazing at a distant plume of black smoke,” one newspaper account said. “He knew that the firemen were at grips with his ancient enemy. . . . Blackie’s old drivers would have known that this was something the brave old horse could hardly withstand.”

He died, it was said, from the excitement of the fire. Blackie’s photo is on display in the Downtown Plaza Firehouse museum.

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Well, that takes the prize: We recently shipped Seaman Jacobs of Beverly Hills our uncorrected, un-autographed manuscript of “The Rock & Roll Cookbook” as his prize in our Rename-the-Chevy-Chase-Theater contest. Jacobs’ nominee, you may recall, was the Chevy Chased Theater.

Now, Jacobs writes back: “You weren’t kidding. . . . I hope I don’t sound unappreciative when I tell you nothing could be more inappropriate for an 81-year-old retired writer (Hope, Burns, Lucy, Carson, Skelton, Bergen, etc.) who hates rock ‘n’ roll. However, I have a tone-deaf son and daughter-in-law who will eat it up.”

Surely it’s tastier than a plastic boarding card.

miscelLAny:

Long Beach super patriot Ski Demski is listed in the 1994 Guinness Book of World Records as possessing “the world’s largest flag, measuring 505 by 255 feet and weighing 1.36 tons.” Demski, who unfurled the flag in Washington, D.C., in 1992, flies a slightly smaller Stars and Stripes in front of his house, despite the complaints of neighbors that it flaps too loudly during the night.