An inadvertent kick in the buns: Let’s...
An inadvertent kick in the buns: Let’s begin by apologizing to the Weinermobile. (What a way to start the day.) As you might recall, we reported that one of Oscar Mayer’s motorized frankfurters had been spotted on the Harbor Freeway, receiving a ticket from a Highway Patrol officer.
But Weinermobile pilot Denise Schroeck phoned to say the officer was only giving her a warning. “We didn’t have our front license plate on,” she explained.
And was she relieved.
“We thought we were in a real. . . .”
No, Schroeck, don’t say it. . . .
“A real pickle.”
We’re getting indigestion.
Up to no good: Former state Sen. Paul Carpenter’s apparent flight from the country to avoid a jail sentence prompted Thomas Pleasure to recall the colorful story of a Venice city official who went on the lam.
Yes, Venice was once a city. The fugitive was City Treasurer James Peasgood, whose downfall began when an independent audit of the city’s near-bankrupt government was ordered in 1923.
Peasgood was soon reported “overdue on a fishing vacation to Oxnard,” historian Jeffrey Stanton wrote. Suspicious authorities “opened his safe deposit box and found $28,500 in securities.”
Peasgood surrendered and confessed to embezzling “to supplement his $135-per-month salary and pay his gambling losses,” Stanton wrote. An audit found $19,000 missing and he was sent away to San Quentin.
Peasgood is memorialized in Pleasure’s 1994 Venice of America historical calendar. And why not? Dissatisfied with officials such as him, Venetians voted in 1925 to become a part of L.A., skateboard paths and all.
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Chimney heap: “What better way to rebound from the quake than through humor?” writes Peggy Edwards of Valencia, who lost the front wall of her house, including the chimney.
Edwards has been carrying around two cheery items in her briefcase. One was an Only in L.A. photo of a sign outside a flattened home that said, “We Should Have Used Lego!”
The other, which she sent to us, was a flyer left on her doorstep the day of the quake. It said: “$39 Special for a Chimney Sweep . . . Joseph Perez’s Top Hat Chimney Service.”
Edwards phoned the company and found out that it also performs chimney inspections.
“I told them if they inspected a little closer,” she said, “they’d find there was no chimney.”
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Now just a second . . . June Lockhart of Santa Monica found what would have made the ideal Valentine’s Day revenge gift for an ex-lover--the Personal-Life Clock, which displays “the time (as well as) the number of hours, minutes and seconds remaining in your statistical lifetime. . . .”
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Otherwise it’s hard to operate a cash register: Will Harriss noticed that the classified section of UCLA’s Daily Bruin advertised an opening for a manager of an espresso bar. “Responsible, punctual and quality,” it said. “Conscious (sic) a big plus.”
miscelLAny:
Did the earthquake knock the post office’s vending machines out of whack? Stanley Blumenthal of Sherman Oaks noticed that he has been receiving strange coins in his change. It turns out the new machines were designed to dispense the unpopular Susan B. Anthony dollars, which the government has been trying to circulate for two decades.