TOON TOWN: Finding a home for the...

TOON TOWN: Finding a home for the animation division of DreamWorks SKG has been a major production. Now it looks like Glendale has the inside track. . . . City officials say the show business firm founded by industry icons Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen is negotiating to build a $50-million complex near the L.A. River. Plans call for two office towers as part of a 500,000-square-foot animation studio at a site not far from Disney’s cartoon headquarters. Potential employment: 1,000 characters (B1).

WING CLING: Nightgowns and airplane wings have something in common. Both suffer from static cling. Bummer. . . . On airplane wings, a thin layer of turbulence cleaves to the surface, slowing it down. At Edwards Air Force Base, NASA is testing the equivalent of a clothes dryer’s anti-cling sheet. The gizmo is like a sheet of metal cheesecloth drilled with thousands of holes. Affix it to the wing, turn on the fan and that clingy stuff is sucked away. If it works, spokesman Don Haley says, we could all zoom across the country at Concorde-like speed and coach prices.

DOTTED LINES: Columnist Scott Harris again helped judge the Funniest Person in the Valley contest. He reports on the winner, Keith Nelson, above, and has an update on last year’s champ, Chris Sylbert (B1). . . . And Harris, inspired by it all, writes the column he’s always wanted to write. All it took was . . . quite a few dots. . . .

THIN BLUE LINE: A line of blue tape outside the Van Nuys courthouse tells the tale. TV reporters had been naughty. . . . A roaming camera crew nudged too close to a staging area for jurors in the Menendez murder retrial. Despite pleas of innocence, justice was swift--if not kind. Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg placed the area, a public street, off limits and laid down the tape near the courthouse to keep news crews at bay. . . . The judge had earlier nixed cameras in the courtroom.