Here’s someone looking forward to L.A.’s Big...

Here’s someone looking forward to L.A.’s Big One: Of course, she lives in San Jose. Joanne Jacobs, a columnist for that city’s Mercury News, summed up the Southland’s Jan. 17 disaster this way:

“The problem is that not enough of Los Angeles fell down.”

Jacobs goes on to say that a bigger quake would “make it possible to rebuild Los Angeles as a more livable city.”

Her theory is interesting, except for one small flaw. The bigger the quake, the more people tend to lose their lives. Experts warn that tens of thousands could die in the Big One.

We notice, by the way, that the drawing accompanying Jacobs’ article shows a collapsed--but empty--freeway. Guess the newspaper decided not to show a collapsed building, such as the Northridge apartment complex in which 16 people died.

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On thin ice: Ike Shatori thought that Tonya Harding was making a local appearance when he saw the title of a musical program at Long Beach City College--”The Lady Behind the Baton.”

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A crash course needed for traffic reporters?A USC study charges that the helicopter corps of L.A. radio stations tends “to reinforce the aggressive driving subculture that exists in Los Angeles.”

USC Prof. Sandra Ball-Rokeach asserted that the reports:

* Use “the word accident instead of crash . . . Accident suggests a fatalist attitude . . . something that can’t be avoided.”

* Are “framed in such a way that they convey a ‘fun and games’ attitude toward driving--i.e. there’s a hit-and-run over to the right shoulder.” Often there’s “fast-paced background noise.”

* “Send out the messages that cars get hurt--not people.” Coverage of a jackknifed truck, for instance, rarely deals with what “happened to the . . . truck driver.”

* Omit “many details of a crash, such as . . . the age or sex of the injured. This allows people to avoid emotionally reacting.”

* Use “terms such as ‘Orange Crush’ or ‘No. 4 Lane’ (which) confuse many drivers, especially visitors to an area.”

* Largely ignore “nonaggressive values.” Ball-Rokeach recommended that traffic reporters say of crash victims “something like: ‘I sure hope they make it home to dinner tonight,’ or ‘Moms, dads and kids were involved.’ ”

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Journalistic milestone: It’s long been a tradition of the press to reveal the contents of secret government documents that are in the public interest. Thus we were happy to see that Los Angeles magazine, in an act as courageous as the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, has reprinted the . . .

Well, let the cover of its February issue make the big announcement:

“DMV Test! Shhh! We’ve got the answers to the driver’s exam.”

At last--the truth about to whom you must yield the right of way “when you arrive at a corner without a traffic light or stop sign at the same time as vehicles on the cross street.”

L.A. magazine will be hard-pressed to equal this coup. Unless the publication chooses to be even bolder by printing the standard eye chart.

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We deserved that: We recently referred to the founding of a Southern California city by a religious group whose name has a sort of double meaning here in Seismic California. We asked: Aren’t we all quakers these days?

Replies Rich Reed: “I really thought you were Whittier than that.”

miscelLAny:

A comedy sketch group called Laughworks, which appears at Pasadena’s Ice House on Sunday, has a money-back guarantee, pledging it won’t make “one Menendez, Tonya Harding or Bobbitt joke.” Obviously, Only in L.A. can’t make the same offer.