What next--a Saigon Walk of Fame?While you...

What next--a Saigon Walk of Fame?While you quietly read this column, Ho Chi Minh City is busily at work, plotting to replace L.A. as the world glamour capital. The Vietnamese city, as we mentioned, recently opened a Spago restaurant, filled with paintings of Hollywood notables--and built without the permission of Wolfgang Puck. (We hope the owners at least import some of Puck’s frozen pizzas.)

Now, reports Times writer Lily Dizon, a neon-lit Planet Saigon restaurant has popped up on busy Nguyen Hue Street. With the trademark globe sign, of course. You wonder how Arnold and Sly, the part-owners of the Planet Hollywood chain, will react to this Planet Copycat. Sheesh. It’s one thing to defy Puck. But the Terminator and Rambo? As they say in Ho Chi Minh City, that’s chutzpah.

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We predict it’ll be Puck’s next pizza variety: Jean McTernan of L.A. came across a local menu that included among its “special cuisine” dishes a “Spam and Sausage Casserole”--and it costs just $18! “Maybe the place is run by a nostalgic G.I.,” offered McTernan.

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OK, so it wasn’t Architectural Digest: We always take pleasure in mentioning a local building featured in a publication. So our thanks to Manuel Calgulada for snapping a photo of a Reseda apartment that appeared in For Rent magazine. We expect it to be duplicated in Ho Chi Minh City any day.

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List of the Day: Jim Rawls, a Northern California history instructor and radio personality (“Dr. History”), has compiled some interesting trivia about the Golden State in “California Dreaming” (McGraw-Hill). For example:

* Spanish explorers, camped along a river in Southern California in 1769, felt several jolts beneath their feet. They dubbed the waterway El Rio del Dulcisimo Nombre de Jesus de los Temblores --the River of the Very Sweet Name of Jesus of the Earthquakes. It was later changed, for obvious PR reasons, to the Santa Ana River.

* A Filipino toy known as the “Little Return Top” is said to have been introduced to the United States in 1920 by Pedro Flores, a busboy at a Santa Monica hotel. Locals were so fascinated that Flores began selling the gizmos. Later, he was bought out by Donald Duncan. The toy is known today as the yo-yo.

* Horticulturist Luther Burbank made his home in California--in Santa Rosa.

* The first drugstore in L.A. County was opened in 1850 by John Downey, who developed the city of the same name. The area, by the way, was formerly the Rancho Santa Gertrudes. Perhaps, if Downey had never come along, the city would be known today as Gertrude, which sounds more romantic to us.

miscelLAny Here’s another reason to move to the Northwest--for the climate, we mean.

WeatherData Inc., The Times’ meteorological service, notes that as of late Friday, the L.A. Civic Center had received 3.69 inches of rain this year, compared to less than one one-hundredth of an inch in dry, sunny Seattle.