City overhaul: The good news: Floors four...

City overhaul: The good news: Floors four through 27 of City Hall will be shut down over the next several months for earthquake renovation. The bad news: The mayor and the City Council are housed on the third floor, which is considered structurally safe, if not fiscally so.

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The national pastime (closed): The Short Stop, a Sunset Boulevard bar, has taken sarcastic note of the baseball strike, trumpeting the availability of a stadium once used by a team called the Dodgers.

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Set ‘em up, Joe: Incidentally, the Short Stop, long known as a cop joint, has provided material for a couple of novels by Joseph Wambaugh, the bard of the black and whites. In “Delta Star” (1983), it’s called The House of Misery--”dark, as every cop’s bar must be (they don’t want to see too much when they’re off duty),” with a dance floor “exactly the size of three coffins,” and outrageous bumper stickers “that said, ‘Our Cops Eat Their Dead.’ Or ‘Conan the Barbarian for Police Chief. . . .’ ”

In the most dramatic scene in the bar, a drunken police dog named Ludwig, who has “goat-like eyes” of amber yellow, commandeers a pool table and refuses to surrender it.

Then in “Fugitive Nights” (1992), Wambaugh tells a tale associated with a Short Stop bumper sticker of years ago (though he transplants the locale to Palm Springs).

The bumper sticker, so the story goes, referred to a holdup by a man who appeared to have a gun under his coat. What the intruder didn’t realize was that half the rumpled guys hunched over drinks at the bar were plainclothes cops. One of them shot him to death. And afterward it was discovered that the dead man was holding a plastic object.

Hence the bumper sticker: “Use a Comb, Go to Heaven.”

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Without a song: Despite numerous contests and thousands of entries over the years, L.A. still has no official song. Perhaps it will be “Los Angeles, My Los Angeles,” by Rudy Kovar, who recently unveiled his composition in a full-page ad in Variety.

It’s the tale of a would-be actor who gets off to a rocky start here:

At night I walk the Boulevard of Terror.

The Santa Anas blowin’ in my soul.

I slept in gutters. Traded bullets all for sick lies.

O God the angels cried from Planetarium skies.

Don’t worry--the song has a happy ending. And Kovar hopes for a bit of good luck himself. His ad carried the tag line: “Looking for the right singer. Looking for the right motion picture.”

miscelLAny Petco and PetsMart are asking customers not to forget the homeless--the homeless animal population, that is. Those stores have set out barrels to collect trinkets, which will be donated to local animal shelters. Perhaps the city could arrange to have a big party for the critters at empty Dodger Stadium.