The Year in Review

Who said the ‘80s are over? One UCLA student, asked about having paroled financier Michael Milken as a guest lecturer, said, “He made $550 million in one year. It blows your mind.”. . .

The White House press staff identified General Electric Chairman John F. Welch Jr. as head of “General Elections.”. . .

A Beverly Hills company sold a calendar counting down the remaining days in President Clinton’s term. . . .

A company sold a Clinton commemorative pipe built so users can’t inhale. . . .

A Clinton bashing newsletter in Seal Beach billed itself as the only publication that wants to go out of business in four years. . . .

Clinton critic Ross Perot said the president is at best middle-management material. . . .

United Colors of Benetton founder Luciano Benetton offered Cuban President Fidel Castro a job heading the company’s study and research center. . . .

Great Western Bank put its former Beverly Hills headquarters up for sale, but decided to retain ownership of the six-ton statue of the late actor John Wayne in front of the building. . . .

The Learning Annex canceled a real estate investment seminar by Los Angeles financier Stephen Murphy after federal authorities charged Murphy with defrauding investors. . . .

I sue you, you sue me: The company behind dinosaur phenomenon Barney went to court to stop another company from selling a purple and green toy dinosaur. . . .

An El Cajon firm sold what it said were “eyewitness accounts” of the Spanish conquest in Peru in the 1500s from people claiming to have been there in a past life. . . .

General Electric asked reporters to quit calling its National Broadcasting Co. unit “beleaguered” or “embattled.”. . .

The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Birthplace published a gift catalogue that included a $45 bird house made to look like Nixon’s boyhood home. . . .

Florida officials trying to recruit companies to move to their state inadvertently solicited their counterparts in Los Angeles County to see if they wanted to relocate. . . .

To mark the 30th anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination, a Florida company marketed 100 commemorative bullets shot by Earl Ruby from the same gun his brother, Jack, used when he killed Lee Harvey Oswald. . . .

The Pacific Palisades-based UFO Expo featured a discussion on “mind control aspects” of the Kennedy assassination, including the “driver did it” theory. . . .

A New Age service offering to help people relocate from Southern California provided a “sanctuary map” showing nuclear power plants and “power vortices” as well as locations for acupuncturists, meditation groups and New Age bookstores. . . .

A parody North American Free Trade Agreement map showed the post-NAFTA continent with Mexico as a manufacturing zone, the United States as the retail area and Canada as a parking lot. . . .

Cliches of the year: “Re-engineering,” “reinventing,” “empowerment,” “wake-up call,” “level playing field” and “information superhighway.”