Any Angeleno could have told her. ....
Any Angeleno could have told her. . . .
If disqualified Russian runner Nadezhda Ilyina really was searching for a bathroom between miles 3 and 20 in the L.A. Marathon on Sunday, you have to sympathize with her. Imagine--trying to find a public restroom in L.A.!
HE WAS REALLY CRUISING: The last controversial time we can remember over an L.A. Marathon course was Al Lohman’s mark of 2 hours and 8 minutes several years ago. It would have been a local record except that Lohman, then a KFI disc jockey, was in a car the entire time.
A non-fitness fanatic, Lohman explained later that his time would have been faster, “but I had to stop at a liquor store to buy some cigarettes.”
SALES FROM THE CRYPT: Maryann Bjerke and Steve Propes each noticed the same unearthly event listed in a weekly newspaper.
A CRITIC WITH GREAT DEPTH PERCEPTION: A passenger on the Blue Line showed his abstract painting to a seatmate and asked for an appraisal.
“It’s very nice,” the seatmate said. “It looks like something they have you look at when your eyes are being tested.”
GOOD NEWS, IDLERS! Jack Hallin, who snapped today’s photo at a park in Monterey Park (pardon the redundancy), points out the city doesn’t seem to mind loiterers during daytime hours.
THIS WEEK IN HISTORY: Two years ago a worker at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier reported that he found a “ticking” box next to a coffin that was about to be buried.
The Sheriff’s Department found something slightly different. “It was a wooden box wrapped with black felt,” said a spokesman. “It contained a voodoo doll with needles stuck in its head. There were also decaying chicken parts in the box.”
We think we would have preferred a simple, ticking box.
PALM ATTITUDES: We understand when writers take potshots at our smog, our traffic, our occasional bank robbery. But we never knew how creepy our palm trees were until we came upon the following references:
* In his Hollywood novel “Chimney Rock,” Charlie Smith describes “a line of royal palms, their ragged tops tethered to slender trunks like wigs on stiff rope.”
* In Kate Braverman’s short story, “Falling in October,” she refers to our fronds as “horrid, dull, sun-poisoned palms where anemic black rats lived.”
* And, in a poem, John Updike went so far as to characterize the palms in Southern California as “isolate, like psychopaths.”
From now on, you won’t find us loitering around palm trees.
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The L.A. City Historical Society would like to subpoena you to attend a March 16 lecture in the L.A. City Library on the history of the pioneer law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. The firm dates back to 1872, the Historical Society says, at which time the population of L.A. was around 7,000. And, it adds, the number of lawyers in L.A. that year was 38--”more than three times the ratio in the rest of the country.”
Steve Harvey can be reached by telephone at (213) 237-7083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, on the Internet at steve.harvey@latimes.com and by carrier pigeon at Los Angeles Times, Metro, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053.