Trick or tort?We told you several weeks...

Trick or tort?

We told you several weeks ago that Party City in West L.A. was going to come out with a Judge Ito mask for Halloween. We checked with the store Friday and, sure enough, the judge’s mug is its biggest seller. It’s far more popular than the mask for a guy linked to some gruesome slayings.

We’re referring, of course, to the horror movie character, Freddy Krueger. You thought we meant someone else?

HE’S TOO DROWSY TO OPERATE LIGHT EQUIPMENT: After Rick Perry sent us a photo that he snapped in Downtown L.A., we did some investigating. But we found that the world’s most famous ex-house guest is not moonlighting as a mechanic.

SPEED: Our piece about the recently placed signs that asked motorists racing along Beverly Glen Boulevard to ease up on the gas pedal moved Louis Mraz to recall some similar campaigns in the canyons.

“I used to drive Beverly Glen in the early 1980s,” he said, “and one Monday morning there was this whole series of crosses along the road between Mulholland and Sunset. They were different colors and a sign indicated that one color was for property damage, another for injuries and another for deaths.

“One house on a tight curve must have had 30 property damage crosses. I wondered if there was some poor guy living there who got hit every morning at 8:15 a.m. as he backed out of his driveway.”

A few years earlier, Mraz said, a sign that gave an electronic readout of each motorist’s speed was installed on nearby Laurel Canyon Boulevard. It was taken down, he read later in the newspapers. Too many drivers were trying to see how fast a speed they could register.

DUELING COWABUNGAS: Talk about nerve. Two years ago, Santa Monica’s Heritage Museum staged “Cowabunga: The Santa Monica Bay Surf Experience.” Now, Duke Wayne Airport in Orange County is showing “Cowabunga: California Beach Culture.”

The Santa Monica exhibition sought to prove that the Redondo Beach-Malibu area, not Huntington Beach, was “the real Surf City.” And the Orange County show, in turn, ignores L.A.’s contributions (i.e., there’s no mention of the fact that the first surfer in Southern California was George Freeth, who was brought over from Hawaii by land developer Henry Huntington to hang-10 for Redondo Beach tourists.)

The current show (it closes at Terminal One on Monday) does delve into some non-surfing areas, such as skateboarding, which caught on in the early 1960s before a series of accidents caused the sport to be condemned by the California Medical Assn. (“a new medical menace”) and banned in many public places.

“Thus began the Great Skateboarding Depression,” the display says. (Alas, the depression only lasted until the early 1970s.)

Ironically, while the Orange County exhibition used part of Santa Monica’s title, it does not answer one burning question: the origin of “cowabunga.”

miscelLAny Oh, yes. The first person to tell us by fax (213-237-4712) or by telephone (213-237-7083) the television show believed to have coined the term “cowabunga” will win our treasured copy of the new documentary about Angelyne the Billboard Queen.