Will the loser sue?The Rodent, a satirical...

Will the loser sue?

The Rodent, a satirical West L.A. newsletter for low-billing attorneys, has nominated several lawyer movies for its annual awards competition. Vying for the top prize, a gilded Rodent, are:

* “Secrets & Lies”

* “101 Depositions”

* “The English Client”

* “The Truth About Cat and Dog Bites”

* “Larry Flynt vs. The People” (a sequel--and cross-complaint--to “The People vs. Larry Flynt”)

The anonymous newsletter says “The English Client” is favored to win. It’s difficult to top this touching tale of “a lawyer who commits malpractice, is badly burned by an angry client and then claims not to remember a thing about the case when questioned by State Bar officials.”

LEAVING L.A.: Amid all the talk about communities seceding from the city of L.A., North Hollywood apparently slipped away in the night. David Chan of L.A. (what’s left of it) sent us an ad indicating that North Hollywood has allied itself with San Francisco (see accompanying).

Which reminds us of the truncated title of the Larry Flynt movie that appeared on the ticket stub of Dave Kase of Palos Verdes Estates (see photo). Sometimes it does seem that everyone is against L.A.

ROMANTIC EXCURSIONS: American Airlines, you may have heard, recently announced it was offering round-trips from LAX to Duke Wayne Airport in Orange County for $68--yes, round-trip flights.

“Hey, for $50, I’ll drive a passenger from LAX to John Wayne and back,” joked Jay Olins of L.A., “and I won’t even make him or her check in one hour before departure time.”

In case you’re wondering, the 35-mile LAX-Duke Wayne jaunt is not the all-time shortest airline route in these parts.

TWA once had a Burbank-Long Beach flight (29 miles) and Alpha Air offered an LAX-to-Burbank run (19 miles). The record in recent years is held by American, which flew from LAX to Long Beach (17 miles) earlier this decade.

As for the current offer, there’s the question of who would want to fly from LAX to Orange County. Well, there are those 500 frequent-flier miles each way.

And there are no doubt people out there who agree with the driver spotted on one freeway with a license plate that proclaims: HATE 405.

HOT TIME OVER THE OLD CITY: You say it’s no fun getting around in this heat wave? Imagine how KFWB traffic reporter Lissa Walker felt the other morning. As temperatures soared, Walker went aloft in the “Air 98” Cessna and discovered that the plane’s heater was stuck in the “on” position. She delivered reports from her steamy aircraft for the next three hours.

“The thing about the Cessna,” pointed out colleague Jeff Baugh, who sticks to helicopters, “is that the heater works exceptionally well. It’s great--in the winter.”

miscelLAny:

Oddest new radio commercial is a Unocal 76 blurb in which a woman receives several suggestive phone calls from male strangers, one of whom confides that he found her phone number on a restroom wall. A Unocal announcer then brags that the phone number couldn’t have been picked up at a Unocal station because the company cleans its restrooms three times a day.