Not stupid enough:David Coher of Lakewood, whose...

Not stupid enough:

David Coher of Lakewood, whose act we’ve been promoting Walter Winchell-style, failed once again to qualify for the David Letterman show. Guess we don’t own this town yet.

Coher, you may recall, has trained his faithful pet rat, Champagne, to walk up a wooden plank, crawl into Coher’s mouth and extract a pink marshmallow. We’re sure Champagne would do the same for Letterman, but Dave won’t bite.

Anyway, if it’s any comfort to the talented rodent, several other critters also failed to make the grade for the Stupid Pet Tricks segment, including:

* A dog that responds to commands in German to tear up a couch. The show reportedly spent $4,800 on three pieces of furniture before turning down poor Fritz--although he did get a separate cameo.

* A dog that flies a kite. Problem was, when giant fans were turned on during the audition, they nearly blew down the set.

And, finally:

* A dog that throws a magazine on the floor, tears out the pages containing the perfume ads and rubs the ads all over himself. Big deal. Didn’t Charlie Sheen already do that trick on Leno?

DEATH AND ALL THAT JUNK: When Merilyn Walker’s husband died last year, she attempted to delete his name from some mailing lists by returning the letters with the notation, “deceased.”

So what happened? She just received a computerized letter addressed to: “Monty W. Deceased.”

She’s also been having some trouble communicating with junk phone-callers--as you can tell from this conversation with a solicitor:

He: “May I speak with Monty Walker?”

She: “Monty Walker is deceased.”

He: “When will he be available?”

Walker concludes: “I guess ‘deceased’ belongs to a different era. By the way, my late husband [another archaic term?] would have been most amused by all this.”

miscelLAny Richard Casey of Palos Verdes Estates saw an article in The Times on “the cleaning and / or sterilizing of stethoscopes” and was reminded of his former doctor. “While giving me a physical,” Casey says, “he commented that he was using a new stethoscope with his patients and was hearing sounds he had never heard before.”