A crash course in mouth-to-beak resuscitation: Tina...

A crash course in mouth-to-beak resuscitation: Tina Rosen’s blue parakeet has had a scary year (and it’s only June).

Apparently left homeless by the Jan. 17 earthquake, the bird first encountered Rosen four days later.

“When I came to work, she flew up and made a little nest in my hair,” Rosen recalled. “She could tell that I love birds.”

Rosen, who lives in Sherman Oaks, adopted the feathered refugee and named her Tremor. Then came another type of shock.

Rosen was washing some clothes in the kitchen sink while the parakeet was out of her cage.

“I went into another room for a few minutes and when I came out, there was water everywhere,” she said. “I looked into the sink and she was spread-eagled. I grabbed her out of the water but her claws were connected to some clothing. She must have gotten trapped. She was stiff but I could hear her just barely rasping.

“I put her little head in my mouth and blew air lightly into her mouth for five or 10 minutes. After a while there was less of the raspy noise and I could hear her breathing. Finally, she perked her head up, gave a high tweet and flapped her wings to get the water off.”

And now?

“She’s as good as new,” Rosen said. “She’s more vivacious than she ever was, especially when she sees me. The way she was looking at me when I was giving her air--she knew. She wouldn’t die.”

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Wouldn’t this practice reduce repeat business?Jerry Littman of Valley Village came upon an Amtrak brochure that spoke of the rules regarding trains crossing “boarders.”

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Postal paradise: United Press International columnist Cynthia Littleton, who has noticed our mentions about one local city’s uncanny way of popping up in national news items, has still another example.

A yearlong survey of 30,000 post offices by Price Waterhouse found that Long Beach has the best delivery record in the nation--a 91% success rate at getting first-class mail to customers within 24 hours of its arrival in the city. The national average is 79%.

So, obviously, Groucho Marx should have excluded Long Beach when he made this joke about one postal workers strike: “We give them a pay raise--but we mail it to them.”

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He left his cell in San Francisco: A kit sent by an L.A. tourist office to the San Francisco County Jail was returned because the interested inmate had moved to a new address. Sounds like slow mail service--unless the inmate departed without the jail’s permission.

miscelLAny:

Barnes & Noble Booksellers of Pasadena is holding a spelling bee at its store at 111 W. Colorado Blvd. at 8 p.m. Friday. It’s open to the public. Grand prize: A copy of “Standing Firm,” written, appropriately enough, by Dan Quayle.