Not Quite Seeing Red on the Road

Diane Kevorkian of Rancho Palos Verdes, owner of a red Pontiac Fiero, ordered a personalized license plate that was an abbreviated version of “Lady in Red.”

No sooner did she receive LADYNRD than someone asked her why she wanted a license plate that said “Lady Nerd.”

*

FROM OUR MELTING POT: Since we reported the Genghis Khan Japanese restaurant, we’ve received sightings of a Mandarin Shogun eatery in Merced from David Chan of L.A. as well as Kebab and Chinese and Viking’s Table Chinese restaurants on the Westside from Robert Bahn of L.A. (see photos)

“What’s next?” Bahn asks? “Jack in the Wok”? “Kentucky Fried Rice”?

*

LIST OF THE DAY: Some tidbits from Don Barrett’s “Los Angeles Radio People, Vol. 2 1957-1997):

* LSD guru Timothy Leary was fired as a KEZY disc jockey in 1980 after reporting the “disappearance of the San Diego Freeway” and ending a commercial with the words, “Hey, you can get that dreamy, hallucinogenic, new Toyota truck.”

* Trading shifts with a deejay for a Hawaiian station, Earl McDaniel played the song “Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu” over and over the entire morning, identifying it by a different title each time.

* On his last day at KGBS, Jimmie Rabbitt played “Texas,” by the Charlie Daniels Band, 16 times in a row.

* Jerry Mathers of TV’s “Leave it to Beaver” was later a deejay for KEZY, as was a jock who went by the name of Beaver Cleaver.

* “Sig-Alert”--the term for a long traffic delay--was named after radio exec Loyd Sigmon, who set up a traffic-reporting system in conjunction with law enforcement authorities.

* “We’ll be right back with more music after the news,” said KFWB deejay Gene Weed on March 10, 1968, the last words before the station changed its format from Top 40 to all-news.

* Scotty Wilson, later a KIIS deejay, got his first radio job at a Honolulu station “because he matched the height requirements for fitting into the pig mascot uniform.”

* Merrie Rich, a New York public relations employee, won a talent search to be a co-host with Bud Furillo on KABC’s Sports Talk show--and was fired after a month.

* The late Chuck Browning, annoyed with a malfunctioning tape-cartridge machine, held a contest and gave it away to the fourth caller.

*

SONG SUNG L.A.: In our musical birthday salute to the streets of the City of Angels, we forgot this 1940s ditty:

Sepulveda, Sepulveda

That’s the great beat street, it’s so elite,

Feeling that highway under your feet!

Sepulveda, Sepulveda,

It’s the concrete dream, kumquat supreme . . . “

But enough of “Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu.”

miscelLAny:

A group of recording artists called Sonic Joyride has embarked on a tour of “some of the nation’s weirdest landmarks,” according to a spokesman.

Stops include “The World’s Largest Ball of Twine” (Cawker City, Kan.), the “World’s Largest Swedish Coffee Pot” (Stanton, Iowa) and the “World’s Largest Thermometer” (Baker, Calif.).

And in L.A.? Well, one of the band’s stops will be Dodger Stadium. Why? My guess is because it’s “The Baseball Stadium About to Be Owned by Rupert Murdoch.”

*

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.