Thieves Turned Car Into Hot Wheels

Her brother’s car was stolen off an L.A. street but when police found it a month later it was intact--to say the least. The 1979 Buick Riviera, writes Diane Hoover in the Auto Club magazine Avenues, sported “shiny chrome bumpers and wheel covers, jaunty interior fringe, a custom steering wheel and plush sheepskin seat covers”--all of which had been added by the thieves.

Along with “a steering-wheel-mounted anti-theft device.”

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ONLY IN L.A. DINING GUIDE: This column’s latest offering of restaurant selections (see accompanying) includes a casserole for the adventurous (submitted by Judy Griswold of Rowland Heights), a dish with a mystery flower ingredient (from George Erlandson of Apple Valley) and what appears to be a lo-cal item (from Carole Miller of L.A.).

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MORE FOOD YOU CAN’T REFUSE: Josie Barbara, granddaughter of Mafia don Joseph Barbara Sr., will hold a news conference Friday at Guido’s restaurant in West L.A. to announce plans for “a cookbook based on her family’s Sicilian-American recipes.”

Among the delicacies to be described in the book is a recipe for Tonno Guccia A Ghaida E Dolce (sweet and sour tuna), in honor of Mr. Guccia, who was delivering fish to Joseph Barbara’s home when the police arrived to bust up the mob’s Appalachian summit in New York state. The raid was 40 years ago this Friday, but there I go, getting sentimental again.

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MEASURING INTELLIGENCE (CONT.): Mention was made here of the customer who was told by the supermarket clerk that the store didn’t stock yardsticks because “we don’t have a garden shop.”

This reminded Peter Griffin of the time he walked into a garden shop and asked a clerk, “Do you have any bulbs?”

She responded: “You mean light bulbs?”

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IT ALL DEPENDS ON HOW YOU LOOK AT IT: John Carlson of Diamond Bar, meanwhile, recalls friends who worked at a store telling him about a customer who was “looking for a 10-by-14-inch picture frame that her husband needed. On the store’s shelf was a selection of frames labeled 14-by-10 inches.” The customer rejected these, saying “her husband specifically required 10-by-14 inch frames. My friends tried to show her that by rotating the frame 90 degrees, she could get the desired size.”

No sale. She departed, Carlson said, in search of the “correct size.”

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AT LEAST THERE’S SUMMER VACATION: On a visit to USC, former Clinton Cabinet official Henry Cisneros related this joke to instructor Rahla Hall of the School of Public Administration:

One day, Johnny tells his mother that he doesn’t want to go to school anymore. The kids hassle him, he says. The teachers hassle him. Why, even the custodians hassle him!

“But, Johnny,” his mother tells him, “school is important. You must go.”

“I don’t want to,” he insists.

“You MUST go to school,” his mother insists. “After all, you are the principal.”

miscelLAny:

With striking Superior and Municipal court clerks demonstrating outside courthouses around the county, how many defendants will fail to show for court dates this week--then later tell a judge they didn’t want to cross the picket lines?

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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 and by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, Times Mirror Square, L.A. 90053.