No wonder the song “We Love Lake...

No wonder the song “We Love Lake L.A.” never caught on: With all the recent turmoil, we weren’t sure whether you’d noticed that residents in Lake Los Angeles had voted to change the name of their town.

Lake L.A., which has no lake and is more than 60 miles from City Hall, will now be known as Desert Buttes. Runners-up in the Antelope Valley town’s election were Desert Springs and Saddleback. Our personal choice, Barking Dogs, received nine votes.

The question now is whether this election will have a domino effect on other literal-minded communities. After all, no seals have been seen in Seal Beach in years. Antelope Valley doesn’t have any antelopes (or seals, for that matter). Thousand Oaks is actually home to more than 3,000 of the trees, one survey determined. Cerritos, which means “little hills” in Spanish, is almost completely flat, except for one landfill.

Even if those communities stand pat, we’re certain that the election will pressure one pro basketball team into changing its name. The L.A. Lakers, indeed.

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Junk-mail humor: Apparently, there is such a thing. We don’t want to encourage purveyors of mass mailings, but Gary Freund of West L.A. did receive a solicitation that had a funny warning on the envelope (see excerpt).

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Good day!You may recall us mentioning that when the Malibu fire was endangering the Pepperdine campus, President David Davenport agreed to talk with KRTH-FM disc jockey Robert W. Morgan. But he turned down a producer’s request to utter the show’s trademark greeting --”Good Morgan,” pointing out that it really wasn’t a fun day at the school.

A KRTH listener has since phoned us to point out that the show did do a good deed that day--it started a fund-raising drive that brought in more than $70,000 from listeners.

So it wasn’t such a bad Morgan, after all.

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Go Tirebiters?USC alum Cliff Dektar, watching his school play Stanford on Prime Ticket, was shocked to hear the announcers casually mention that the Trojans were once known as the Tirebiters.

Perhaps to a few rival fans. True, USC did boast an unofficial mascot named George Tirebiter for a few glorious years in the 1940s and 1950s. But the athletic teams weren’t named in his honor.

Tirebiter, a scraggly mutt who wandered onto campus after his owner died, grew to be beloved for his nasty temper, which often manifested itself in chases after automobiles.

So treasured was Tirebiter that miscreants from a rival school once captured him and shaved the letters “UCLA” into his coat. Alas, the hound tried to chew on one too many Firestones and was run over in 1950.

The school newspaper eulogized: “Gone to heaven, where he will have cushion rides for breakfast, white sidewalls for lunch and cold rubber recaps for dinner.”

Bon appetit , wherever you are, George.

miscelLAny:

USC’s athletic teams were known as the Methodists and the Wesleyans until the second decade of this century when a Times sportswriter persuaded the school to call them the Trojans.