Nothing more irritating than a back-seat poltergeist:...

Nothing more irritating than a back-seat poltergeist: The Jan. 17 earthquake seems to have spawned at least two urban folk tales.

The first, which has never died, is that the magnitude was actually 8-plus (not 6.8), a fact that has been covered up because the feds would be obligated to give victims cash grants, rather than loans.

Now comes a new one, which Jeff Bliss of Newbury Park has heard more than once in his neighborhood in the last few weeks. This tale holds that several motorists pulled over by suspicious traffic cops have explained that they were driving erratically because they had just had a scary experience. A “presence” in their back seat had warned them that a disastrous earthquake would strike soon.

A CHP spokesman, asked to check around, found one officer who had heard “secondhand” reports of “what appeared to be persons in the back seat predicting earthquakes. When the drivers turned around there was no one there.”

We can’t think of anything scarier than someone warning us about a coming earthquake, unless it’s someone warning us that there’s an overturned big rig up ahead.

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No sense of history: The plot of the new movie “Speed” turns on a Santa Monica bus that is wired with dynamite by extortionists so that it will explode if it slows to less than 50 m.p.h. (a terrifying prospect at rush hour).

Graham Yost’s screenplay originally had the bus “circling Dodger Stadium,” presumably when the team was out of town. But, he said, Dodger officials “didn’t want us to blow up a bus--they didn’t want to be associated with that.” So the scene was switched to LAX.

Obviously, the club’s brass has forgotten the team’s original nickname in its Brooklyn days--the Trolley Dodgers.

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Like the difference between nigth and dya: It appears that the sign painter for one L.A. establishment may have sampled some of its product before going to work.

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Godzilla’s latest battle: In Tuesday’s column, we joked that a certain movie monster’s lawyers might be suing over a scene in a new Kia car commercial.

That’s the last time we quip about such a serious subject.

Our item triggered the memory of Century City attorney Dan Mayeda, who sent us a summary of a recently filed federal lawsuit involving that very commercial.

“Godzilla v. an auto maker and its ad agency in a copyright battle,” begins the summary in the publication Central District Almanac.

The defendants, the suit charges, “have printed an ad with Godzilla crashing through electrical lines in a duplication of a famous film scene, and use the slogan, ‘There’s only one thing more frightening to Japan . . . a well-made car for under $9,000.’ ”

The suit alleges that the commercial uses “scenes from the 1961 film ‘Gorgo,’ a non-Godzilla movie, confusing the public.”

No word from Gorgo’s lawyers--yet.

miscelLAny:

The company used by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to negotiate licensing rights for businesses wishing to use the HOLLYWOOD sign or the Walk of Fame in advertising is Curtis Management--of Indianapolis. Yes, that Indianapolis.