A courtship interpreter: “The enclosed was left...

A courtship interpreter: “The enclosed was left behind on a desk in a math class at Belmont High School near Downtown L.A.,” says the accompanying letter. “It’s too charming not to share.”

The letter contained a lined sheet of notebook paper that had this request in pen, apparently made from one student to another:

“Can you write in Thai, I need you please and I can’t live without you, please?”

The Thai translation is dutifully written underneath in pencil.

Beneath that, there is a somewhat shaky pen version of the Thai translation--as though the infatuated student had practiced it before dispatching the real thing.

In multicultural L.A., writing a love letter can entail extra complications.

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We always knew the UCLA campus was sprawling: By coincidence, we heard from former Times staffer John McCafferty, who writes that on a bus trip through Seoul, South Korea, he saw an eye-catching, non-Korean sign--something you’d be more likely to see in Malibu, or Munich. It said: “UCLA Coffee Hof.”

Which reminds us that there’s a sign off the Santa Ana Freeway that is in Korean--as well as English--advertising furniture made on still another continent (see photo).

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A plea to our readers: In announcing plans to form a new studio, moguls Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen omitted any mention of its name. We suspect the issue may be stalled in delicate negotiations.

The most obvious name for the trio has already been taken by another studio: TriStar. Daily Variety’s headline on the venture hinted at still another possible name: “Three Men & Their Baby.” We also think The Three Rich Guys Studio has a nice ring.

But we’re sure you readers can come up with some superior suggestions. So, please, for the sake of Hollywood, send them to us--by mail only to Only in L.A., L.A. Times, Times Mirror Square, L.A. 90053.

The best idea will receive a manuscript edition of Laurie Jacobson’s “Hollywood Haunted,” about the ghosts of defunct studios.

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The 405, then and now: Lee Gottlieb of Studio City sent along a page from the 1980 book “Mind at Play” by Jerome Singer and Ellen Switzer, which contains a quote from a Playboy interview. A football player had told the magazine how he visualizes spectacular athletic feats in his mind: “Cats come up to me afterward and say: ‘How’d you know to do that?’ I tell them, ‘Hey, I’m in my car diving down the San Diego Freeway or a freeway somewhere else, and I’m always running all kinds of plays in my mind.’ ”

The speaker was O.J. Simpson.

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Celebrity intersection: The City Council renamed Alden Drive as Gracie Allen Drive so that it intersects George Burns Road near Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Uniting famous names on Southland streets is not unprecedented.

After all, in Beverly Hills, Gregory Way crosses Peck Drive.

miscelLAny Still another first for L.A.--the Guinness Book of World Records says the highest advertising sign on a building in the world “is the logo ‘I’ at the top of the 73-story, 1,017-foot-tall First Interstate World Center building.”