SAFE PEDALING: Bicycle thefts are going down...

SAFE PEDALING: Bicycle thefts are going down here. Huntington Beach Police Officer Mike Corcoran attributes that partly to aggressive enforcement. But he also agrees with others that more cities requiring bicycle registration helps too: “You put a little sticker with your number on your bike’s frame. Anyone stealing it has a heck of a time trying to get that off, so it’s a deterrent.”

ANYBODY HOME? Sometimes it does pay to answer your phone. . . . As a good-neighbor gesture, the people at the new Jack in the Box on Katella Avenue in Orange wanted to contribute $250 to a needy local group. So they called City Hall on a Friday for a recommendation. But city offices in Orange are closed on Fridays. Only the firefighters answered the phone. Who got the money? The firefighters. They promptly sent it on to the Orange County Burn Assn.

SUNRISE SERVICE: Even if you’d like to clean up your downtown, would you show up at 5 a.m. to do it? In Huntington Beach, downtown merchants plan to show up before sunrise today, armed with hoses, scrapers and scouring powder to clean off the dirt, old chewing gum and surfboard wax from the sidewalks and walls of Main Street. The public is invited to join in. . . . Says Councilman Ralph Bauer, who’ll be there: “Downtown, like it or not, historically represents old Huntington Beach.”

SPIRALING PROBLEM: Who dumped those thousands of little plastic blue spirals all over the sand in Seal Beach this summer? Both Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power--directly across the nearby San Gabriel River from each other--use them in a cleaning process. But each points a finger at the other. . . . Now Edison will chance finding out. It will spend $30,000 to change the color of its spirals. Then if it’s not the blue ones washing ashore, admits Edison spokesman Jerry Dominguez, “it could be embarrassing.”

Bike Thefts

Police attribute the one-year county decline in stolen bicycles to an overall increase in bike registration. Number of thefts:

1993: 5,327

Source: State Department of Justice, Bureau of Criminal Statistics