Plenty of drops to drink: Robert McCullough...

Plenty of drops to drink: Robert McCullough of Sun Valley observed a truck pull into a parking lot and dump several dozen cardboard cases containing six-packs of drinking water. The cans, apparently from the quake-relief effort, seemed to have been left up for grabs.

Several onlookers then “converged on this small mountain of cardboard and proceeded to start ripping apart the six-packs, pouring the water on the ground,” McCullough said. “What the hell was going on?”

The answer became clear when the onlookers began stomping the cans flat. They meant to cash them in at a recycling center.

“And,” McCullough asks, “what of the water, that life-saving vital liquid taken too much for granted, as the rationing during the quake revealed? Poured on the asphalt, it perhaps trickled down some drain, maybe to eventually join the Los Angeles River, briefly leaving it slightly less foul.”

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Get out of the sun, dudes: Mark Basford of Redondo Beach spotted a magazine ad that listed the membership rates of the California Beach Volleyball Assn. as $20 for “California residents,” $25 for “non-California residents”--and $45 “for all others.”

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An invitation or a warning?

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) sent The Times a press release regarding his bill to stem the flow of illegal immigration.

Reid, the release said, stresses that those seeking “genuine persecution” would still be able to settle in the United States.

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Saluting the Mick: After reading about the Fontana Historical Society’s tour of a home linked to Al Capone, Val Rodriguez wonders why L.A. doesn’t fashion a tour dedicated to Mickey Cohen (1913-1976).

After all, the fedora-clad hoodlum, who received prominent mention in the movie “Bugsy,” grew up in Boyle Heights and was later dubbed Public Nuisance No. 1 in Angeltown. And L.A. needs to come up with some innovative ways of attracting tourists.

The Cohen tour could stake out:

* The corner of Soto Street and Brooklyn Avenue in Boyle Heights, where 5-year-old Mickey hawked newspapers--his last honest profession.

* The former Michael’s (now an office building), 8804 Sunset Boulevard, where Cohen ran a men’s clothing store that was really a front for bookmaking. On Aug. 18, 1948, it was invaded by gunmen who killed one of his henchmen but missed Cohen.

* The former Sherry’s (most recently Gazzari’s), 9039 Sunset Boulevard, a nightclub that Cohen’s entourage was exiting at 4 a.m. on July 19, 1949, when gunmen opened fire, wounding Cohen and killing another of his henchmen.

Our favorite Cohen utterance, quoted in “Fallen Angels” by Marvin Wolf and Katherine Mader, was: “If I see a guy a couple of times (the press calls him) my ‘henchman.’ What the hell is a henchman, anyway?”

A risky job title.

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Oh, Lord: David Kramer saw a cop ticketing a pickup truck that was parked in the red on Santa Monica Boulevard. Its owner, who had been painting a parking structure at the Beverly Hilton, was protesting that he had put out “his version of traffic cones to warn oncoming cars,” Kramer said. “They were a red plastic gasoline can and, standing on end, two red-covered Gideon Bibles.”

miscelLAny:

Russ Snyder noticed in UCLA’s spring extension catalogue that one journalism class will be held in the Geology Building. The title: “Rock Reporting.”