Just another day in L.A.: Eleanor Van...

Just another day in L.A.: Eleanor Van Natta of Hawthorne found the accompanying checklist on a parking receipt lying in the street and--good Samaritan that she is--sent it along to us.

We hope to find the owner. But judging from the enumerated chores, the list could have belonged to almost any 1990s Angeleno.

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Grateful living: We mentioned a Fox TV producer’s search for people who have been mistakenly declared deceased. The show will be called, not surprisingly, “I’m Not Dead.”

That prompted a phone call from author Ib Melchior, who read us this 1987 blurb from a publication for book buyers: “ ‘Code Name: Grand Guignol,’ by I. Melchior, publisher Dodd Mead, has been canceled due to the death of the author.”

Melchior, who has written several subsequent books (“Case by Case” is his latest), suspects the error may have been made because his editor had just died. Oddly enough, Melchior’s father, a famous opera singer, had a similar surprise.

“In 1967 I was sitting at a TV set with my father, Lauritz,” he recalled, “and we heard an announcer say: ‘We regret to inform you that the great Wagnerian tenor Lauritz Melchior has passed away.’ My father called up the station and said, ‘This is the corpse speaking. . . .’ ”

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Close but one banana: It’s sad that Downey’s Hopalong Cassidy Museum will close at the end of this month, as The Times reported Friday. But the shrine didn’t even merit a “so long” from Sunset magazine, whose January issue pays tribute to “Southern California’s most unusual museums.”

Instead, Sunset confines its salute to the Banana Museum of Altadena (run by Ken Bannister a.k.a. Bananaster), the Ralph M. Parsons Insect Zoo at the L.A. County Natural History Museum and West L.A.’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, which has nothing to do with dinosaurs or Jurassic technology.

The Jurassic does boast such exhibits as “a horn that grew from a woman’s head, a display devoted to the Deprong Mori bat . . . and a diorama of a Cameroon rain forest where crazed stink ants cling to vines.”

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We always like surprise endings: Keith Harmon photographed a sign at a Northridge cleaners that proves that nothing in this world is absolute.

miscelLAny:

The city of Hawaiian Gardens, which is about 2,500 miles east of Honolulu, took its name from a bamboo-and-thatched-roof food stand that served travelers along the old Coyote Creek Trail in the 1920s.