Sometimes it seems health insurance doesn’t cover...

Sometimes it seems health insurance doesn’t cover anything: Michael Axelrod of Redondo Beach reports he was driving down Melrose Avenue when he “saw what has to be the quintessential ‘Only in L.A.’ piece. A young man was holding a cardboard sign that asked for “spare change so I can get my nose pierced.”

A prankster? Performance artist? Fraternity pledge? It’s times such as this that we appreciate the directness of the panhandler with the sign, “What the hell? I need a beer.”

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Trying to sell LAX is one thing . . . : But when we saw the sign that Steve Rosenberg snapped, we figured Mayor Riordan was going a bit far in his search for revenue. Peddling the entire city? (Then again maybe the new owners would do something about that depressing black armband around the City Hall tower.)

Anyway, we phoned to see if L.A. had been purchased by Disney or Bill Gates or Donald Trump. But we were informed that the sale merely involved a few parcels of vacant land by the city’s Bureau of Engineering. Another auction is set for May, by the way, at which time the pickings will include a real fixer-upper, an old fire station on Pico Boulevard.

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Hasn’t Orange County suffered enough?Ken Rhinehart of Pasadena, meanwhile, shot a photo of the Big A that contained an obvious reference to the sad fact that the L.A./Anaheim Rams have bugged out to St. Louis. Geez, Great Western, how about a little more sensitivity?

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More on the Masked Man’s sore jaw: We commented it was about time when we heard that the Lone Ranger is punched out by Tonto, his former faithful companion, in a new Topps comic book. After all, the masked man was always sending his Indian scout into town on some mission that would invariably end with Tonto being beaten up by a bunch of bad guys.

Well, Geno Perez-Selsky of San Pedro speculates that perhaps Tonto consulted a Spanish dictionary recently.

“I remember going to the movies in my youth in Barranquilla, Colombia, wondering why this Indian follower was called Tonto since in Spanish its means ‘fool, stupid, dolt. . . ,” Perez-Selsky wrote.

He was also intrigued about the derivation of another phrase in the show. What exactly did Tonto mean when he called the Lone Ranger “Kemo Sabe”?

While some have said it was an Iroquois Indian phrase for “trusted scout” or “faithful friend,” radio historians generally agree that it had no meaning at all and was invented by creators of the old Lone Ranger show in the 1930s because they liked the sound of the words.

We do, too. But if someone addresses us as Kemo Sabe, we’ll remember to duck.

miscelLAny According to the people who make Ruffles garbage bags, Philadelphia leads the nation when it comes to average amount of trash dumped per person--974 pounds per year. L.A. is a poor eighth at 776 pounds. Yeah, but L.A. is still first when it comes to the city that’s trashed the most by critics.