See no evil, hear a bit: We...

See no evil, hear a bit: We noticed that the Beverly Hills-based Playboy TV channel is the target of a protest by some high school students who plan to deliver letters to the Orange City Council. The letters will demand that “unwanted Playboy channels (on the local cable service) be blocked completely from their TV before the holiday break.”

It reminds us of a previous protest by a minister who complained that even when the Playboy channel was scrambled on his set, he could hear the moaning if he listened very carefully.

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George Washington drove here? Peter Small of Whittier found an ad for a sturdy car engine that may well have helped carry Colonial troops into action. Or, given the make in question, Hessian troops, perhaps.

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Hollywood from a safe distance: If you’re avoiding a visit to Tinseltown out of fear that the sidewalk will collapse under your feet, you might turn instead to Stephen Schochet’s new tape, “Tales of Hollywood.” Some of his anecdotes:

* L. Frank Baum, author of “The Wizard of Oz,” reportedly came up with the name for that distant land from “the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet, letters O-Z.”

* At the height of child actress Shirley Temple’s fame, her father received numerous letters from women wanting to have children with him.

* Carl Laemmle is said to have come up with the name for Universal Studios after seeing a parked truck with the name, “Universal Pipe Cleaning.”

* After purchasing property in Beverly Hills for his dream home, Charlie Chaplin, “a known skinflint . . . used studio technicians rather than real architects to build the home to save a few bucks. The studio men were used to building things that would be taken apart later, and Chaplin’s house used to fall apart from the inside. The neighbors called it Breakaway. . . .”

* When Hollywood producer Samuel Goldfish changed his last name early in life, he combined Goldfish and Selwyn (the name of a former partner) and came up with Goldwyn. Naturally, Schochet points out, “he didn’t want to be known as Selfish.”

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Quake signs: You may recall the photo we published of Quake City Bank in Whittier--the “r” having been clipped off the end of the first word, possibly during a shaker. Well, Mike Grundmann of Burbank found another sign symbolizing Southern California’s not-so terra firma on the UCLA campus.

In this case, though, we suspect the front letter fell off not through an act of God but through an act of a USC Trojan.

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Maybe he mistook Santa Clarita for Santa Clara: The traffic was so backed up on the Long Beach Freeway on Tuesday that we fell into conversation with the driver of a passenger-less taxi in the next lane. “I got on the wrong freeway,” he groused.

That was an understatement, considering that he was driving an orange San Francisco cab. But before we could ask for further explanation, the freeway suddenly cleared and the hack cut across three lanes to an off-ramp. We hope he escaped this Oz.

miscelLAny:

El Vez, the Mexican Elvis impersonator, is performing in a “Merry Mexmas” celebration with his faithful Memphis Mariachis at 10:30 p.m. Friday at Luna Park in West Hollywood. Then, on Sunday afternoon at 2, the Wadsworth Theater in West L.A. is staging a production of “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.” Next up: Santa Claus vs. El Vez? Mexmas, indeed.