Talk about eye-openers!”Wow! You guys really know...

Talk about eye-openers!

“Wow! You guys really know how to make a Rob Roy,” a reader wrote the Ventura County Star after seeing the newspaper’s recipe for that drink. “Eleven ounces of Scotch and one ounce of sweet Vermouth--a 12-ounce drink! That should get the day off to a start.”

The newspaper replied that the drink actually consists of “1 1/2 ounces of Scotch and 1/2 ounce of sweet Vermouth” and that the original recipe was “flawed by a typesetting error.”

Wonder what the typesetter’s favorite drink is.

IT’S ENOUGH TO TEST YOUR FAITH: During a discussion of memorable graffiti last year, George Bentley of La Puente sent us a photo he took in the 1980s near the Music Center. You’ll notice that the original message was lengthened by a second individual who seemed haunted by one particular play. We forgot about the photo until we read that Carol Channing is starring in a production of “Hello, Dolly!” Again.

RUMOR HAS IT: The Redondo Beach Pier Assn. recently sent out press releases saying that the city was named for a swashbuckling pirate named Juan Rodriguez Redondo. Some media outlets treated the tale seriously; we didn’t run it (mainly because we lost the press release).

Anyway, it was a hoax. (The city’s name derives from the Spanish word for circle.) The saga reminded us of some other tall tales concerning the Southland:

* Walt Disney’s body is frozen in a state of suspended animation until the day a cure for cancer is discovered. (Actually, Disney was cremated and his ashes are at Forest Lawn Memorial--Park in Glendale.)

* Officials said the Northridge quake was 6.6 magnitude instead of 8.0 because the law requires the government to give cash grants to victims of magnitude 8 quakes. (There is no such law).

* The man who designed the Long Beach Traffic Circle near Cal State Long Beach was killed in a car accident in the circle.

* A live telephone line was installed in the casket of Aimee Semple McPherson, an evangelist in the 1920s and ‘30s.

* L.A. was attacked by Japanese planes in February, 1942. (It was a false alarm believed to have been caused by the sighting of some off-course weather balloons).

* W.C. Fields tombstone says, “All Things Considered, I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia.” (Fields, whose cremated remains were interred at Forest Lawn in Glendale, has no tombstone.)

But . . . Fields would have voted for the Ventura County Star’s first Rob Roy recipe, all things considered.

miscelLAny:

Hank Rosenfeld writes that “with the Rams packing up this week, it is interesting to recall how prescient Neil Simon was in his play, “Plaza Suite.” Simon has one of his lead characters admonish another: ‘Muriel, forget about the Los Angeles Rams!’ ” And the Raiders, too.

miscelLAny