Kato in deep water?”Just because a guy...

Kato in deep water?”Just because a guy has bleached hair, a winter tan, speaks slowly and is pleasant to the point of being vacuous, does that mean he’s a surfer?” Surfer magazine asks in its next issue.

The Dana Point-based publication decided to find out in the case of Kato Kaelin, who has been described by the media as a surfer-type.

After all, he had appeared in the movie “Surf, Sand and Sex.” And when a local radio station played excerpts of Marcia Clark’s interrogation of the famous house guest, it replaced Kaelin’s words with those of Spicoli, the spaced-out surfer in the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”

Surfer magazine asked his publicist, David Crowley, if Kaelin--a Milwaukee transplant--had ever ridden a board.

“Kato said no,” Crowley tells the August issue of the magazine, due out in May. “But he had done some bodysurfing. Does bodysurfing count?”

Sounds like the kind of question Kaelin might ask.

Surfer magazine editor Steve Hawk took it personally when one network referred to Kaelin as the “quintessentially aging surfer.”

“I’m an aging surfer,” Hawk explained. “He’s not nearly weathered enough.”

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But what’s his symbol?In a recent episode of “The Simpsons,” the family found itself in possession of a couple of dozen puppies, each of which was named and given a doggie bowl. One bowl said “Rover,” another “Fido,” another “Duke,” and so on. Then there was the one that said: “The Puppy Formerly Known as Prince.”

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Closed-door policy: The inhabitants of the 12th-floor pressroom had kept one locked hallway door propped open during the Simpson trial so they could scoot up a staircase to the all-important 13th floor, site of the snack bar. That way, they could avoid the crowded elevator.

But the other day, a sheriff’s deputy appeared and said: “You people have to keep this door closed.” Asked why (you knew the press would ask), he responded: “A prisoner could escape through that door.”

It made some of the literary types in the room recall the newspaper play and movie “The Front Page.”

“I wonder if they think we’re going to hide the prisoner in our desk,” mused Linda Deutsch of the Associated Press.

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Kids, don’t try this: Jane Benz of Tarzana thought she had seen everything until she came upon a door that appears to wait for small children to appear, whereupon it lashes out at them. Will it act the same way toward members of the media?

miscelLAny We mentioned the urban folk tale that El Segundo was originally named “El Segundo de Nada,” because its founders thought it was “second to none.” There’s also a myth about Azusa. The city, so the story goes, was so named because it had “everything in the USA, from A to Z.” Actually, it derived its name from an Indian village. Azusa translates roughly as “skunk hill.”