Kids, don’t let your parents try this!As...

Kids, don’t let your parents try this!

As if Southern California’s roadways aren’t hazardous enough, excitable Angelenos are now being subjected to a movie called “Crash,” about people who become sexually aroused by car accidents. What next? Turn-on ramps?

DUELING LOGOS: Phil Proctor of Beverly Hills informs us that Burbank is the home of not one, but two, WB symbols just a couple of miles apart. The Watson Bros.’ employees repair weight-measuring machines. In other words, they work for scales.

CAR-CULTURE NOTE NO. 6,236: If you wish to visit the J. Paul Getty Museum on Pacific Coast Highway, you only have to make a reservation in the event that you’re driving there. The reservation is for your parking place.

A DESPERADO IN NEED OF A PUBLICIST: L.A.’s frontier history, contrary to some reports, did not begin with Two-Gun Bill Hart’s Westerns. The dusty little pueblo had its share of real-life exciting characters in the 19th century, including the subject of a colorful new biography by Jack Jones-- “Vasquez--California’s Forgotten Bandit.”

Poor Tiburcio Vasquez (1835-1875)--robber, prison escapee, a self-professed revolutionary, convicted killer--never got much ink. He was overshadowed by Joaquin Murrieta, who was the subject of several fanciful books, though Murrieta may have been an amalgam of five bandits (no photo of Murrieta exists).

The life of Vasquez, who posed for a photo on the eve of his execution, is pretty well documented in the final years, including these events:

* He was captured by a posse that wounded him at Greek George’s ranch near the corner of what are now Laurel Canyon and Hollywood boulevards.

* In custody, Vasquez was given a suit of clothes previously owned by a lawyer who had been shot to death during a card game for using his coat sleeve to conceal an ace. (Since the attorney “had been shot between the eyes,” Jones writes, “there was no hole in the suit, which Vasquez appreciated.”)

* Vasquez was visited in the adobe jailhouse by numerous women--some, a reporter noted, “belonging to the higher circles of society.”

* During his incarceration, the nearby Merced Theater staged a production called “The Life of Vasquez,” whose star, Samuel Piercy, interviewed the outlaw several times to make the portrayal more realistic.

* Vasquez’s last word to the hangman was: Pronto.

L.A. RHYME OF THE WEEK: Ginny Supple of Culver City offers these lyrics, which just beg for a melody:

Let’s view a luck-filled Los Angeles,

At play like a duck-billed platypus.

PLOT MATERIAL FOR A SITCOM? Comic Ellen Degeneres, attending the opening of Sean Penn’s club, McInerney’s, in Santa Monica, was greeted by a hip maitre d’ who said: “I am so glad you came out tonight.”

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The Long Beach Riptide, a minor league baseball team, has relocated to Mission Viejo. Obviously aware of Orange County’s conservative leanings, the owners have renamed the team the Vigilantes. At least it’s not the Militiamen.