The agency that came in from the...

The agency that came in from the cold:

Ben Warner of L.A. spotted a legal notice in the Beverly Hills Courier announcing that a husband and wife were going into business as . . .

Central Intelligence Agency.

“Now that’s what I call ‘privatizing’ the U.S. government,” Warner observed.

We tried to get more details on Beverly Hills’ Central Intelligence Agency but it doesn’t have a listed phone number.

Which figures, we suppose.

*

THE POSTMAN ONLY RINGS 13 TIMES: Mary Rouse of West L.A. was surprised when she began receiving other people’s junk mail--letters that bore her address but the names of strangers.

But she soon noticed certain clues. The strangers--all 12 of them--had something in common: last names starting with the letter R.

And there was another similarity.

“Because several of the address labels mention UCLA and because the names on some of the others appear on the same page of the UCLA campus phone book,” said Rouse, a university employee, “it looks as though the glitch occurred when UCLA sold an address list of its employees to a commercial buyer.”

And, somewhere, a computer gave Mary Rouse’s address to all the names on the page.

The final absurdity, Rouse said, was a letter addressed to one of her phantom residents that proclaimed on the outside:

“Free personalized address labels enclosed!”

*

DO YOU HAVE, ‘GET ME TO THE CHURCH ON TIME’? A colleague was in Tower Records in West Covina on a Saturday afternoon when a limo pulled up. Out stepped a man in a tuxedo and a woman in an ankle-length bridal gown. They entered the store and asked the clerk to point them toward the wedding music.

They walked down the aisle to a bin, selected a CD, paid for it and left in the limo.

No one threw rice.

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NO ONE’S PERFECT: Norman Maibaum of Santa Monica sent along today’s photo with the comment: “Guess you can’t expect all your garments to be beautifully dry-cleaned.”

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THOSE LABOR DAY SPECIALS: David Kestenbaum of Van Nuys saw a botched store ad that trumpeted this bargain on socks: “Reg. $2.49, sale $2.99.”

Adds Kestenbaum: “It reminds me of my grandfather, who had a small grocery store and had the following sign on the barrel of pickles: ’10 cents each, 2 for 25 cents.’ Believe it or not, people would often ask for two!”

*

CITY OF HEADLIGHTS? In the L.A. Downtown News, author Lionel Rolfe (“In Search of Literary L.A.”) writes that in the early 1940s novelist Henry Miller liked to hang out here in “Bunker Hill at the apartment of close friends.” Rolfe said Miller “loved the area because the lights of downtown reminded him of Paris.”

Paris? Or Perris?

miscelLAny:

When Westways magazine asked its readers to reveal the most unusual souvenir they’ve picked up abroad, William A. Jones responded: “A white rabbit fur athletic supporter.” Wasn’t there one of those in a Henry Miller novel?