A Candidate in Need of a Tutor
Reader Peter Ulrich sent over a news release from state Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren in which the Republican candidate for governor asserts that the public school system is not “acheiving” as it should. OK, Dan, write 100 times on the bulletin board. . . .
WHAT GOES ON AFTER DARK? “I’ve always gotten a kick out of this sign at the golf course in my dad’s retirement community in Newhall,” writes Nancy Swisher of Sierra Madre (see photo).
“There’s probably more than one teenager who would like to get permission to park for just those purposes.”
WE’VE ALL ENCOUNTERED ONE: Norma Wilde of Culver City found an ad in a Westside newspaper that calls for a “contentious” desk clerk (see accompanying).
I hate to see such behavior institutionalized but it comes as no surprise. There was that scene in the movie “L.A. Story” in which Chevy Chase is mistreated by a restaurant maitre d’. “It’s the New Cruelty,” Chase explains.
PUTTING THE HOLLYWOOD TOUCH ON A PASSERBY: Phil Proctor and his wife, Melinda, saw a panhandler with this sign near downtown L.A.: “Movie producer: Need $25 Million and a Pretty Woman.” Proctor said: “I wrote him the check but refused to let Melinda out.”
TOUGH BIRD: You have to hand it to the California gnatcatcher. The presence of about 10 pairs of the birds prompted the county Board of Supervisors to scale back an amusement park’s expansion plans in the San Gabriel Valley.
Thus, the gnatcatcher has not only withstood El Nino but Raging Waters, as well.
INNOVATIVE L.A.: On his visit to Japan, Mayor Richard Riordan told his hosts that L.A. is the birthplace of the fortune cookie. The reaction was muted--fortune cookies are, after all, served in Chinese restaurants--but the claim appears to be true.
“The fortune cookie is indisputably American,” Stanley Karnow wrote in Smithsonian magazine a few years ago.
“It was invented in 1916 by David Jung, a Los Angeles noodle manufacturer.”
Karnow wrote that Jung “borrowed the idea from the practice among ancient Chinese rebels of exchanging covert messages inside buns.”
At the time of the article, a state-owned company in China was preparing to begin the sale of fortune cookies in that nation.
The manufacturer?
A noodle company from Brooklyn (the one in New York).
DID HE KNOW HE WAS ONTO SOMETHING? All of which recalls the old Stan Freberg comedy recording in which he visits the most famous writer of fortune cookie messages.
The writer proudly recalls his first such work, which was: “A letter of great importance may reach you any day now.”
Freberg replies: “I remember breaking open a cookie and reading that several years ago.”
“And did a letter of great importance reach you?” the writer asks.
“Yes, I was drafted,” Freberg responds.
The writer, by the way, indignantly denies the rumor that a diner once found a message that said, “Help me. I am being held captive in a fortune cookie factory.”
As Freberg leaves the writer’s headquarters, a faint pounding noise and a muffled voice can be heard.
miscelLAny
“Mail rider arrives. No mail for anyone in Los Angeles. (Feb. 26, 1854)”--from Paul Glover’s Amazing Los Angeles History Calendar. Must have been a panicky day for that era’s Only in L.A. columnist.
*
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.