Hanging 5.3: Surfer magazine contains a letter...

Hanging 5.3: Surfer magazine contains a letter from Scott McKinley of Ventura, who writes about an especially choppy ride he had during a 5.3 aftershock in March.

He estimates he was a good 30 feet in the air at the time. In front of him, he saw a girl scream and run for cover “and a dozen people followed.”

Adds McKinley: “OK. I was born and raised in California, and so an earthquake is just, well, an earthquake. . . . But this time, I was dropping through space as (the) nasty one rumbled in.”

Not that McKinley was in the water. He was in the Topanga Plaza Mall, descending on an escalator. He says he rode the land wave to the bottom--and he didn’t grab the rail, which would have been bad form.

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Nothing scares off L.A. parking cops . . . : “Not even messing with the Grim Reaper,” points out Rick Brown, who took this snapshot of a hearse in Playa del Rey. Brown reports that the telltale citation flapping under the windshield appeared to be the only thing moving in the car.

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That city again: We continue to be amazed at how often national stories make a mention of Long Beach. A film biography of Amelia Earhart on KCET the other night disclosed that she first became thrilled at the prospect of flying when her father took her to an airport in Long Beach.

We wonder if kids who visit the Queen Mary these days become thrilled at the prospect of piloting ships that don’t go anywhere.

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Or during a 5.3 earthquake: Jeff Bliss of Newbury Park bought a hair dryer, whose safety instructions include this no-no: “Never use while sleeping.”

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A screenwriter?John Cassidy of Simi Valley was driving through Hollywood when he noticed a woman on Cahuenga Boulevard who appeared to be “pushing along all her belongings in a shopping cart laden with the requisite plastic bags of aluminum cans, clothes and whatnot.”

A depressingly common sight, except for one thing. “As she pushed the cart along with both hands, she was speaking into a cellular phone she was balancing between her shoulder and her ear.”

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We knew the face but not the name: In our list of people who have names with unusual spellings, we misidentified actor A Martinez, who appeared in the TV series “L.A. Law.”

We try to make it a rule never to mangle the names of lawyers, even TV lawyers.

miscelLAny:

Another salute to the 25th anniversary of the moonwalk? We noticed that a local Kinko’s store is holding a sale on two brands of paper (3 cents off per sheet)--”Planetary Purple” and “Pulsar Pink.” But what about “Green Cheese”?