Stormy Weather for Columbus’ Voyage

A fifth-grade teacher in North Hollywood asked her class to name “three hardships of Columbus’ voyage.” One student piped up, “The three hard ships of Columbus’ voyage were the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.” Another student, however, thought the first hard ship had a different name. He called it the “El Nino.” Even back then, El Nino was headed this way.

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CAN’T HURT TO ASK: My colleague Darin Esper found a pawn shop in Arleta with a daring sense of humor (see photo). Clerk Gilbert Cuevas told Esper that some visitors think the sign is funny, some think it’s unfunny and others are just puzzled. But what the heck. No one’s disobeyed it so far.

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A CITY THAT’S ALWAYS BEEN A BIT OFF-KILTER: Anne Koob couldn’t figure out why a New Jersey insurance company kept addressing mail to her in Kis Abgekes. “It sounded at best like a remote Greek island,” she said.

Finally, Koob summoned all her encrypting skills. “I realized that if I typed the word ‘Los Angeles’ with my right hand moved one set of keys to the left,” she said, “I indeed got Kis Abgekes. Thank goodness for ZIP Codes.”

So ends the mystery of Kis Abgekes (or K.A., as the locals call it).

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DUELING EL LAYS: Mark Dawson of Simi Valley relates that he works “for a large insurance company [and] recently received an information sheet on a life insurance policy from one of our offices in Illinois. Since it was an out-of-state policy they felt it should go to the state that should properly service it. The policy was for a person living in Louisiana (La.), and therefore was forwarded to our office in--where else?--L.A.”

In a personal aside, Dawson told me, “I feel the notice really should have come to you. The town is Harvey, La.” He added that there was “a final faux pas . . . the Harvey, La., policy had lapsed.” One more blot on the Harvey name.

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SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA--IT’S EVERYWHERE! Frances Russell of Burbank, meanwhile, ran into a singular version of Beverly Hills (see photo). She took this snapshot, by the way, several thousand miles away from Wilshire Boulevard in Vilnius, Lithuania.

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ALL THAT JAZZ: Never thought I’d be writing so much about Bix Beiderbecke, the great jazz musician whose name, as I mentioned, was spelled Big Spider Beck by one record clerk. That disclosure inspired a never-ending recital by readers of various homonyms they have encountered. For example, Jessie Buster of Port Hueneme writes to inform me that trombonist Betty O’Hara named her parrot, “Beaks Bite or Peck.” You’ll have to trust me on the spelling.

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GILBERT & SULLIVAN WOULD BE GROWLING: Norman Lobsenz of Redondo Beach went looking for a CD of “H.M.S. Pinafore” in a record store but couldn’t find one. So an employee looked up the title in the store’s database and said triumphantly, “Here it is--Hums Pinafore!”

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RACH AND ROLL: Wrapping up this musical interlude, composer Danny Gould recalled the time he phoned a shop in Hollywood to ask if it had any Rachmaninoff recordings. “I heard the clerk repeat the inquiry to the manager, and she added, ‘Would that be filed under Rock or under Maninoff?’ ” Hey, we’re humming now.

miscelLAny:

A pumpkin-decorating contest will be held Oct. 28 at Forest Lawn in Long Beach--in the cemetery’s Mausoleum Courtyard. Wasn’t there a setting like that in a Freddy Krueger movie?