You Can’t Dial City Hall
A City Council member’s aide was overheard complaining about a 3 1/2-hour class that she is required to take, along with the other City Hall workers who have been resettled in the nearby City Hall East building. City Hall itself has been shut down for rehabbing. The purpose of the lengthy class? To learn how to use the telephones in City Hall East.
Your tax dollars at work.
SMILE--YOU’RE IN L.A.! Edwin F. Parsons Jr. of L.A. came upon a mansion in Hancock Park that displays a Greco/Happy Face architectural style (see photo). Take it as a symbol that the real estate market is recovering.
THEY PROMISE IT’LL COST LESS THAN “TITANIC”: A colleague was driving through Culver City when he saw two men holding signs that said, “Please Help Us Finance Our Film. At Least We Have a Goal.” To show how serious they were, these guys weren’t on a street corner. They were outside the entrance to Tri-Star Studio.
DOWN BUT NOT OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS: A publicist told us another story about a sign-holder. This one said, “Starving. Hungry.” The panhandler always stationed himself on the same street in Beverly Hills. One day the publicist saw the guy buying some food at Gelson’s, a pricey market for those with gourmet tastes. Said the publicist: “It’s nice to know that when you care enough to give, he cares enough to buy the very best.”
BI-PARTISAN JOKE: “In the Kitchen With Bill” is a high-calorie recipe book filled with numerous jokes about the President’s prodigious eating.
In the chapter, “Easy Egg McClintons,” for instance, the tome says that Clinton’s public jogs/McDonald’s stops in Washington D.C., were “brought to a quick end. Some say it was for security reasons, other say it was for dietary reasons (and still others maintain it was to protect the public from the presidential thighs).”
I mention the book because it was being hawked at a booth in the Bonaventure Hotel recently at a state political convention--a Democratic convention.
Incidentally, I suspect this volume will be updated through the years--especially the recipe titled, “Hillary’s Semi-Sweet Revenge.” Right now, it’s just for cookies.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Cindy McMahon was driving her five-year-old son Joseph and his buddy, Jake, to lunch. The boys were commenting on the restaurants along the way.
“We go to that one,” Jake said, pointing to a Japanese eatery. “My brother and sisterlike sushi. But not my mom. She’s a vegetarian. How about your mom?”
“No,” replied Joseph. “She’s a book writer.”
ATTENTION SPACE ALIENS: A shop that specializes in customers with 16 fingers? That’s what Louis Nitti of Fontana thought he’d found. (see photo) Upon checking he was told the price was $16. But the price covers any number of fingers.
VITAL COMMUNICATION TOOL: Writer Don Page reports that comic Louis Nye quipped during a Pacific Radio Pioneers luncheon, “Gov. Pete Wilson has just signed a law that says you can’t get a driver’s license in California if your middle finger is missing.”
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Darrell Issa, a Republican hopeful in the U.S. Senate race in California, is a millionaire car-alarm manufacturer. I’m not interested in hearing his views on the government, the economy or foreign relations. I want to hear what he’s going to do about car-alarms that go off in the middle of the night when a gnat lands on a windshield. In other words, noise pollution.
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.
