Maybe George Bush was right about broccoli:Helen...

Maybe George Bush was right about broccoli:

Helen Quackenbush, a 100-year-old North Hollywood resident, offered some unusual insights when she was interviewed for a new book on aging.

“I still drink a martini when out for dinner,” she said in “Healthful Aging--Inspirational Letters from Americans.” “And no one can tell me I won’t live longer for not eating my vegetables. . . . I never did like them.”

GIVE US SOME TIME TO THINK IT OVER: Radio station KIIS-FM has put up billboards showing disc jockey Rick Dees alongside Heaven’s Gate leader Marshall Applewhite. Caption: “Who would you rather follow?”

LYING LOW IN L.A. (cont.): On Thursday we discussed how San Diego’s Balboa Park was fingered as the supposedly secret site of ABC’s interview with Mafia turncoat Sammy “The Bull” Gravano. And we suggested some spots in L.A. where Gravano could now hide out. Now, Paul Ecker of Diamond Bar offers more places where the Bull would be unlikely to run into people:

* Dodger Stadium in the ninth inning.

* A meeting of the Al Davis Fan Club.

* A Kato Kaelin Film Festival.

* Bob Dornan Reelection Headquarters after the recount.

* A Pat Boone heavy metal concert.

SMOG-FREE MUSIC: “Up Los Angeles,” the latest L.A. song to arrive in the mail, is an oldie--Deborah Parducci wrote it 30 years ago when the City of Angels held a contest to find an official city ditty. She found out later that all entries that mentioned the word “smog,” including hers, went down--and out. As it happened, no clean air composition was declared the winner, either.

Her candid theme was that people who move, or visit here, bash the city but likely as not wind up staying.

Rhapsodized Parducci:

Everybody join me in a toast

To us poor folk out here on the Coast

Step right up and be an evangelist

Settle here and knock Los Angeles.

Perhaps Parducci should receive royalties from the publicists of the movie “Volcano,” who tightened up those lyrics slightly to read, “The Coast Is Toast.”

WE LOVE L.A., BUT . . . : Sometimes we just don’t know whether we’re coming or going, as illustrated in this photo by Robert Dean, taken in an L.A. smogscraper.

miscelLAny

No doubt there were girls all over the Southland happily commuting with their parents Thursday morning on national Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Remember the thrill of a no-school day? We wonder if any of the kids on the Santa Ana Freeway were momentarily taken aback--as our daughter Sarah was--by one malfunctioning electronic signboard that announced: TEST. TEST. TEST. TEST.

Steve Harvey can be reached by fax at (213) 237-4712, by phone at (213) 237-7083, by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com and by carrier pigeon at Steve Harvey, Metro, L.A. Times, Times Mirror Square, L.A. 90053.