If This Is Normal, Bring Back the Rain

Between storms, Nancy Mullen of San Pedro heard a radio traffic reporter say the freeways were back to normal. Then the reporter announced a possible sighting of a pipe bomb on the Century Freeway.

TIRED OF OUTRAGEOUS CLAIMS? Well, this column brings you signs snapped by Paul Cate of San Pedro and your correspondent at a couple of establishments that don’t feel they have to bowl you over with high-pressure advertising. Yup, they’re just the Ho-Hum Apartments of Long Beach and O.K. Toys of L.A. (see photos).

BENEVOLENT BILL: Barbara Mikkelson of the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society, which tracks urban folk tales, says one of the latest is “a hoax e-mail purporting to be from Bill Gates. It promises the recipient $1,000 for sending the message to someone else. Gates is supposedly testing a new e-mail tracking system and is willing to pay to have us help him.”

Quipped Mikkelson: “Clearly all those people he has on salary at Microsoft couldn’t possibly help him test a program the way a bunch of strangers could.”

Mikkelson said she’s heard from numerous people “who write to me along the lines of, ‘Well, even though this is hard to believe, I could really use the thousand bucks.’ The need to believe in that free money seems to push common sense aside.”

PARDON MY LANGUAGE . . . : A bit more than a decade ago the Angels baseball team unveiled a short-lived experiment in which the left field seats at the Big A were reserved as a “family section,” where drinking and cursing were forbidden. Obviously the club has relaxed its standards somewhat in the area of racy language. A new billboard, heralding the team’s renovated stadium, proclaims, “Kiss Your ‘Big A’ Goodbye.”

DID KEN HAVE HIS DOUBTS? The Statistical Assessment Service of Washington listed the “Top 10 Silly Science Stories in the News” in 1997, including a bombshell involving El Segundo-based Barbie.

“When toy maker Mattel announced plans to give the Barbie doll a less curvaceous figure, many reporters repeated the popular factoid that Barbie’s measurement, if projected to adult size, would be 38-18-34,” SAS reported. “But Paul Mulshine of the Newark Star-Ledger actually checked this with a tape measure. The result: Multiplying each of Barbie’s dimensions by 6 yields a statuesque 5-9 woman with fashion-model proportions of 33-18-31.”

There’s another Pulitzer opportunity this column blew.

COMMUTING MILESTONES: One year ago, Caltrans officials on the Pomona Freeway were preparing to drive through a ribbon to inaugurate the opening of carpool lanes in San Bernardino County when a funny thing happened. A 28-year-old Ontario resident plowed through the ribbon ahead of them. Luckily, she did have a passenger. Asked what she thought of all the officials trying to wave her out of the lane, she told the Ontario Daily Bulletin: “I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, I’m going to win a prize.’ ”

HIS THOUGHTS TURN TO OTHERS: Sensitive guy that he is, writer Rich Roberts of Wilmington says that “while cleaning out my rain gutters today, I couldn’t help wondering how Aaron Spelling’s roof was holding up.”

miscel LA ny:

The recent decline of USC’s football team has been recounted often in the sports pages. But now it has found a way into literature, as well. In his deft mystery novel, “Wake Up to Murder,” Steve Allen presents a sardonic song about L.A.’s problems that rhymes “people sleepin’ on the streets” with “USC defeats.”

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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.