No Large, (Er) Small Accomplishment

One banner that the city of L.A. is flying as part of its ad campaign points out that the modern bathing suit was invented in the City of the Angels.

The banner also carries the slogan: “It’s amazing what grows in Los Angeles!”

How misleading.

After all, bathing suits are shrinking, not growing.

UNREAL ESTATE: Max Woods of Whittier found a real estate flier for a house whose features included “4-stair heating.” Which would seem to be better than no stairs heated at all. Woods suspects the flier was supposed to say “forced-air heating.”

IT’S A DOG’S LIFE AT STAKE: There seems no end to the Hollywood trend of placing pooches in danger in disaster movies. For example, you can see a hound that is:

* Subjected to a transplant operation by Martian doctors, acquiring the head of Sarah Jessica Parker in “Mars Attacks.”

* Frozen by Arnold Schwarzenegger while (the dog is) taking a pee against a fire hydrant in “Batman & Robin.”

* Trapped by a lava flow on Wilshire Boulevard in “Volcano.”

* Trapped by a flying saucer attack in L.A.’s 2nd Street tunnel in “Independence Day.”

* Stalked by a T-Rex in a San Diego backyard in “The Lost World.”

Only the San Diego pooch is transformed from from dog to dog food.

The rest of the hounds come out in one piece (well, maybe a couple of pieces in the case of the Martian transplant subject).

TALK ABOUT TIMELESS: Not to get into a scrap with a rival newspaper, but I was annoyed that the Orange County Register would limit its recently unveiled list of the “100 Greatest California Songs” to the rock era.

By doing so, the Register shunned the 1940s Kay Kyser piece, “When Veronica Plays Her Harmonica Down on the Pier at Santa Monica.”

THERE’S ALWAYS A SOUTHLAND ANGLE: “Into Thin Air,” Jon Krakauer’s book about a disastrous trek up Mt. Everest, has a light-hearted moment.

Soon after the climbers had set out, they had a meeting at a Buddhist monastery with a rimpoche, “the head lama of all Nepal,” as one local explained.

“Unsure how to act in the company of a divine presence, this living reincarnation of an ancient and illustrious lama,” Krakauer wrote, “I was terrified of unwittingly giving offense or committing some irredeemable faux pas.”

That is, until the rimpoche brought out a book of photos from a trip to America. There, wrote Krakauer, was “his holiness in Washington standing before the Lincoln Memorial and the Air and Space Museum (and) his holiness in California on the Santa Monica Pier . . . “

Play it again, Veronica.

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You think the police chief situation in L.A. has been filled with turmoil lately? Well, from 1877 to 1889, L.A. had 15 different police chiefs, notes Ralph Shaffer, a history professor emeritus at Cal Poly Pomona. Luckily, back then, the city didn’t have to give each fired chief a $375,000 buyout.

Steve Harvey can be reached by phone at (213) 237-7083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, Times Mirror Square, L.A. 90053, but not by harmonica.