Sperm wars:L.A. and New York are rivals...

Sperm wars:

L.A. and New York are rivals in just about everything, so why not sperm counts?

The New York Observer, a weekly newspaper, reported that a study by a New York fertility specialist found that samples submitted to a New York sperm bank have a higher sperm count than those donated to a competitor in Los Angeles.

But Dr. Cappy Rothman, director of the California Cryobank in Westwood, the L.A. repository, called the story “a big to-do about nothing.”

Rothman pointed out that “a very select population” was used in the study by Park Avenue urologist Harry Fisch--men who wanted to deposit their sperm before having a vasectomy. “This,” he said, “is not the sperm we sell to women who want to get pregnant.”

Sperm counts, Rothman added, have a 20% margin of error. Besides, he said, “Say a guy has 250 million sperm [per ejaculation] and another guy has 400 million. It only takes one sperm to negotiate a pregnancy. The second guy is just a spendthrift.”

IF AT FIRST YOU DIDN’T SUCCEED. . . . You might have won a place in “Forgotten Fads and Fabulous Flops,” by Paul Kirchner.

A moment of silence, please, for:

* Nude Beer, a mid-1980s beverage of an Irvine firm with labels bearing “photos of women whose bikini tops could be scratched off.” Nude Beer faded from the scene before the company could branch out into Nude Cigarettes.

* Here’s Johnny restaurants, which tried to capitalize on Johnny Carson’s fame. Carson hosted the opening of the first branch on Johnny Carson Day in his hometown of Omaha in 1969. Carnak the Magnificent couldn’t see that the chain would flop?

* Doggie Dent, “a beef-flavored toothpaste developed especially for dogs” by a California dentist.

* “Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky and Me,” an album by Jayne Mansfield on MGM Records.

* Banana-skin smoking, which owed its origins to a 1967 article in the Berkeley Barb (later reprinted in the L.A. Free Press). Readers were advised to “scrape out the white fiber from the inside of the banana peel, boil it into a paste and dry it in an oven at 200 degrees, then smoke the resulting residue in a pipe or joint.” While many “admitted to getting little out of the experience besides an intimate acquaintance with the taste of burned compost,” Kirchner writes, others never did catch on that the Barb article had been a hoax.

* Topless swimsuits, the rage of 1964. Quipped Phyllis Diller, “When I wore one, everyone thought I was Albert Schweitzer.”

YEAR-END TRIBUTES: Parade magazine gives “Weirdest Harassment Case” honors to a former Santa Paula anesthesiologist who “was sentenced to a year in jail after pleading guilty to mailing a Camarillo attorney about 90,000 unsolicited magazines in the past 12 years.”

EASY FOR THEM TO SAY: Two dishes on a Santa Monica restaurant menu seem to be oxymorons. After all, a true spicy sauce should make a diner writhe in the chair or maybe slam a fist on the table, or at least grab the throat. Nothing calm about the experience. By the way, we apologize for misplacing the name of the reader who sent us this item. Maybe we should lay off those banana skins.

miscelLAny In its “Love Life” section, the newsletter for the Palm Springs Desert Resorts Convention & Visitors Bureau announced that the Westin Mission Hills Resort had hired a wedding director. Mike Peck points out that readers might have initially expected something a bit more risque, since the words “Love Life” were immediately followed by the subsection, “New Position.”