Dueling Quakes: It could happen, if the...

Dueling Quakes: It could happen, if the students at Cal State Northridge vote to change the school’s nickname to commemorate the 6.8 shaker. The Rancho Cucamonga Quakes baseball team says the region ain’t big enough for them and the Northridge Quakes.

“We’re 70 miles away (from Northridge),” said Greg Scharlach, a spokesman for the San Bernardino County minor league team. “Our lawyers tell us that because of the close proximity there is legal ground for us to take action. We have trademarked the names Quake and Epicenter (their stadium).”

The dispute could be academic, so to speak, if Northridge’s Student Senate votes not to place the name-change issue on the ballot. The school’s teams are now called the Matadors.

Northridge’s Paul Bubb, an associate athletic director, questioned Rancho Cucamonga’s exclusive rights to a name. “Fresno State is the Bulldogs; Drake (University) is the Bulldogs,” he pointed out.

Meanwhile, Rancho Cucamonga’s Scharlach noted, with some irritation: “We hear they (Northridge) have already put up a banner that says Epicenter inside their gym.”

Actually, the banner has been removed from the gym. It’s now being used by the school’s softball team.

Bubb says there are no current plans to paint a fault-line on the gym floor, as one athlete suggested. “But it could be an interesting intimidation factor against opponents,” he added.

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The grammar wasn’t worth a plugged nickel: Bill DeBussey bought a toy at one of those everything-under-$1 stores and found the directions even more confusing than usual.

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The winner, truly: Showing that bad writing is not limited to one sex, Bernice Richmond became the first woman to win the annual International Imitation Hemingway Competition.

“Short and sweet and wonderfully clever,” one judge, Ray Bradbury, said of “Here’s to You,” the title of Richmond’s submission.

Perhaps her most moving passage reads: “Then she smiled. She did not have to smile. She did not have to lick her lips with that tongue, the kind that would not quit. What was she trying to do? Was this her way of being coy at 1 a.m., or was there a poppy seed caught in her teeth?”

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“Big Too-Hardened Liver”: That’s the title of our all-time favorite piece of ersatz Hemingway, which was penned by Ken Bash a couple of years ago--and set in romantic Century City.

“It was early morning,” Bash rhapsodized, “and the sun was bright and painful and rising on the tall glass towers when the rocket exploded to announce the release of the bulls and we all rushed out to see the big, brave, mature and viciously horny bulls toss the TV executives as they came up the escalators.”

It just doesn’t get any worse than that.

miscelLAny:

We noticed in a press release from USC spokeswoman Zsa Zsa Gershick that the school’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences now has a Streisand Professorship in Intimacy and Sexuality. Yes, that Streisand.