Maybe you’ll take “Baywatch” more seriously now:...

Maybe you’ll take “Baywatch” more seriously now: Less than 15 minutes after Monday night’s 4.5 aftershock, KCOP’s “Baywatch” came on the air with an episode entitled, “Living on the Fault Line,” in which a massive quake strikes the beach area.

The magnitude? Big enough to shake a shapely lifeguard out of his or her bathing suit.

“Fault Line” was written by executive producer Michael Berk, who lost his home in the real-life Jan. 17 quake. Berk still reports to work at the show’s offices near Marina del Rey. Only now he commutes from his new home--in Las Vegas.

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Got an angel on my freeway shoulder (cont).: “Haunted Highways in America” will be the theme of a future episode of the new TV show “The Other Side.” A producer phoned us to ask about an urban legend that made the rounds earlier this year--the one about the motorist who was pulled over on Pacific Coast Highway for driving erratically.

The (sober) driver tells a CHP officer that he swerved after an angel appeared in his back seat and warned him that a disastrous quake would strike.

We told the producer that in the true nature of urban myths, we never were able to track the story to its source. Anyway, the only Nostradamus around here seems to be “Baywatch.”

Which, of course, is shot at beaches off Pacific Coast Highway.

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We scooped Kate Hutton on this one: By the way, prepare for at least one massive aftershock this Monday night--on “Baywatch.” It’s showing Part II of “Living on the Fault Line.”

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List of the Day: Here are some of 1994’s “pratfalls, punch lines and punitive damages,” as recorded by California Lawyer magazine.

* Convicted murderer Joe Hunt, founder of the Billionaire Boys Club, “set up a 900 number supplying listeners with his version of his case and details of his life within prison walls.”

* An L.A. Superior Court jury awarded lingerie inventor Mark Graham $175,000 in compensatory damages after Graham alleged “that underwear maker Joe Hara had stolen his idea for luminous lingerie.”

* John D. Leslie, who interrupted his bar exam in 1993 to aid a fellow test-taker stricken by a seizure, opened his own practice this year “after no firm would hire him.”

* The lawyers on Rodney G. King’s defense team “billed the city of L.A. for $4.4 million (including) television appearances with Sam Donaldson, Larry King, Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey. The attorneys also billed for their attendance at King’s birthday party.”

* An L.A. man sued Geraldo Rivera and his production staff, contending “he was reunited with his birth mother on the tabloid show against his will.”

We’ll leave the light on for you at the Motel 40: In his latest commercial, folksy Tom Bodett quips that Motel 6 must be in “vogue” because it began in California. Indeed, it was founded in Santa Barbara in 1962. What Bodett doesn’t say, of course, is that the company’s name referred to the fact that rooms cost $6 per night back then. In the L.A. area now, the cost is in excess of $40. Still, that’s probably less than a pair of luminous lingerie.

miscelLAny Scrooge isn’t the only person who would say that some of the carols heard this time of the year are dogs. But Sling Shot records would take that description as a compliment for its album “Top Dog,” a collection of barking sounds with such names as “Santa Claws,” “Fetch All Ye Faithful” and “Odoriferous Joy.” Does the album know how to play dead?