A big win for Brooklyn:Things haven’t been...

A big win for Brooklyn:

Things haven’t been the same since Bob Dole’s reference to the boys from Chavez Ravine as the “Brooklyn Dodgers.” Now the fledgling cable news network MSNBC has gotten into the act, bungling the name of the San Diego Padres.

Reader Lance Hill noticed that the local news section of MSNBC’s Web site reported, “The Dodgers won the first game of their four-game set against the San Diego Pirates Thursday.”

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, JOE DI MAGGIO? Let’s bring Bob Dole up to bat once again. North Hills political activist Howard Cohen recalls seeing an episode of CNN’s “Inside Politics” in the spring in which Dole asked a resident of a Florida city if the “Philadelphia A’s” still trained there.

The Oakland A’s, like the Dodgers, haven’t been based in the East since the 1950s.

All of which prompted Paul Ecker of Diamond Bar to write: “I hear Dole can’t wait to debate Harry Truman on the real issues.”

DUELING SIGNS ON THE HIGH SEAS: Dale Johnson of Fontana was on an ocean cruise when he spotted a door that seemed to be arguing with itself. From the looks of it, Johnson must have been on the USS Schizophrenia.

LIST OF THE DAY: Some excerpts from the new book “The Greatest Rock & Roll Stories,” by Art Fein:

* Audiences “weren’t straining” to see the Rolling Stones on their 1964 tour of the nation. When they were booked in San Bernardino, “they followed performing seals.”

* Van Halen’s contract once required that the group’s “meals always include servings of M & M candies--with the brown ones removed.”

* To foster “a leering sexual image,” Alice Cooper and Warner Bros. “decided to wrap each copy of his 1972 album, ‘School’s Out,’ in disposable panties.” The Federal Trade Commission objected, charging that the panties were flammable.

* Plagued by drug problems, singer Sly Stone “failed to show up for about one third of his shows in 1970.” Stone explained at one point, “Sometimes you don’t feel your soul at 7:30.”

* Ozzy Osbourne once “bit the head off a live dove” at a marketing meeting of Epic Records in L.A. (Fein has a photo sequence of the beheading, complete with frowning publicist.) Later, the singer “employed a dead bat in one stage show, which led to Osbourne enduring a painful precautionary series of rabies shots.”

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We’ve mentioned geographical sites that have surprising translations. Verdugo Hills (Executioner Hills), Laguna Niguel (Chigger Lagoon), and Las Pulgas Road (Fleas Road) come to mind. Joe Brito of Baldwin Park found another, a new housing development called El Escorial. Which means “slag heap” in Spanish.