Let’s hope they have no field trips:...

Let’s hope they have no field trips: The Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica is offering this summer course:

“Graffiti Art Workshop.”

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Only in L.A., Maker of Stars: The Santa Barbara French Festival, no less, phoned us to ask how to contact the curator of the Museum of Modern Poodle.

Spokesman Steve Hogerman said he had read in this column about Doren Garcia, a Downtown L.A. artist who has amassed a collection of more than one thousand knickknacks exemplifying “bad taste in poodles.”

“Sounds like a natural for us,” said Hogerman. The event is July 17.

Garcia wasn’t home when we phoned to notify him of the honor. Perhaps he was out walking his two poodle boot trees.

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The real estate market is even worse than we thought: Richard and Helena Marsh of San Marino received a computerized letter from a financial institution that seems to think that the couple bought their house at a rock-bottom price.

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Wheredunits: In our recent discussion of Harry Bosch, author Michael Connelly’s fictional homicide cop, we meant to point out that Bosch lives in Studio City (where he has a fine view of the tourist trams at Universal City). His hometown is significant because the San Fernando Valley is a region largely ignored by mystery writers until now.

After all, you can already find detectives, private eyes, shamuses, sleuths, and flatfoots stalking through:

* Los Feliz: “Double Indemnity” by James Cain.

* East L.A.: “Zoot Suit Murders,” by Thomas Sanchez.

* South-Central: “Devil in a Blue Dress,” by Walter Mosley.

* MacArthur Park: “The Choirboys,” by Joseph Wambaugh.

* Venice: “The Big Fix,” by Roger Simon.

* Elysian Park: “Bleeding Dodger Blue,” by Crabbe Evers (in which a member of the Dodgers is a serial murderer--a real dilemma for the club since he has a long-term contract!).

* Little Tokyo: “Rising Sun,” Michael Crichton.

* Laurel Canyon: “The Long Goodbye,” by Raymond Chandler.

* Times Mirror Square: “L.A. Times,” by Stuart Woods. (Just kidding--actually it’s a non-newspaper yarn set in Hollywood.)

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Out in the ‘burbs, meanwhile: Literary crime can be found in “Poodle Springs,” (Raymond Chandler/Robert Parker), “Last Dance in Redondo Beach” (Michael Katz), “Horse Latitudes” (Robert Ferrigno’s salute to Belmont Shore) and “Pomona Queen,” and “Tapping the Source,” both by Kem Nunn.

“Tapping,” by the way, is a look at the dark side of Huntington Beach’s beach culture. Suffice it to say that Nunn is unlikely to be inducted into the city’s Surfing Walk of Fame.

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The lure of the outdoors: A Glendale man found the restroom lines so long during an Eagles concert at Irvine Meadows that he crept over to a secluded area to answer the call of nature. When he turned around he saw, to his surprise, more than a dozen other men waiting in an orderly line behind him. Talk about the herd instinct. . . .

miscelLAny:

Among the items that residents brought to city dumpsters during Thousand Oaks’ annual clean-up day was a 2-foot-tall ceramic Miss Piggy.

Form letter to homeowners: Further proof of the lousy real estate market?