Lakers Draw Fans Even in Monastery

Writer Lee Watters spent a night at an isolated, rural Trappist monastery in Chile, figuring he was about as far from the urban U.S. scene as he could be.

“The Trappists are a quiet, contemplative order, cloistered without television and radio, although they do get Chilean newspapers,” Watters said. “I watched one monk spend the morning watering a row of trees. He’d move the hose, contemplate for 15 minutes, move the hose, contemplate, move the hose. . . . When my host introduced me to him later as Lee Watters from Los Angeles, Calif., the solemn monk’s first words were: ‘Can you believe the Lakers started 10-0?’ ”

Watters discovered that the monk was from Boston and was a basketball fan. And, Watters added, he had “shifted loyalties from the Celtics to the Lakers.”

Why not? After all, there is a town of Los Angeles in the Patagonian area of Chile.

MR. GOODWRENCH--WE’RE SHOCKED! Ross Hendricks found an ad for a South Bay automotive garage that seems to be pretty lax about the equipment it uses (see accompanying).

RUN, DON’T WALK: With who knows how many lazily aligned cars weaving back and forth on the road, is it any wonder that pedestrians are angrier? Especially in Riverside, evidently. That’s where Steve Barrett noticed a warning about temperamental walkers (see photo).

THIS JUST IN . . . : If you had a date for lunch today with Michael Tuck or Ann Martin at the KCBS commissary, you can relax. Channel 2’s eatery isn’t going to be shut down by the county, after all.

You may recall that the county threatened such a move Wednesday because the commissary appeared on a list of restaurants that were delinquent in paying license fees.

Actually, while the eatery’s concessionaire missed two deadlines, it had forked over the $586 license cost (including $117 in penalties) last month. But the payment hadn’t been recorded on the list. And a concessionaire representative had been unable Wednesday to produce a receipt showing he had complied.

THE STORY CONTINUES: In a New York Times profile, author and bookseller Larry McMurtry lamented the death of the country’s biggest used bookstores “in Boston, in Philadelphia, in Washington, D.C., in Long Beach, in Cincinnati . . .”

Whoa!

Roll back the tape there.

Long Beach’s 63-year-old Acres of Books, home of about 1 million books and easily the biggest repository in that city, is very much alive.

“A lot of people think we were torn down,” acknowledged owner Jackie Smith, referring to a period in the 1980s when the store’s downtown site was targeted for redevelopment. “There was a lot of publicity about that.”

But the 63-year-old landmark, with its towering stacks and airport-runway-length aisles is very much alive. It has something to offer just about everyone, including nonreaders.

The store keeps a supply of about 1,000 books--including orphaned volumes of encyclopedias, brightly colored textbooks and obscure novels with ornate covers--for real estate agents, restaurateurs and others who merely want to dress up the interior of a building. Who says Southern Californians aren’t interested in books?

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During an NFL game on TV last weekend, the camera homed in on a Raider fan wearing a skull mask topped by a spiked helmet, with a skull mounted on each shoulder and a name plate that said, “Assassin.” Yep, sure miss those Raiders.