The Soup du Jour Is Old Hat Here

A colleague buying tickets for the Van Gogh show at the County Museum of Art noticed this dish on the museum cafe’s menu: “Soup of Yesterday . . . $3.75.”

I’ll take the salad.

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QUOTABLE QUOTES: After a self-dueling beach sign appeared here (see photo), Lois McKinney wrote, “It appears you took no notice of the quotation marks, which are just as funny as the wording.

“From personal experience, I can guess what happened,” added McKinney, a customer service / office manager. “The person ordering the ambiguous sign probably did so in writing, giving instructions, followed by the text of the sign in quotation.”

So naturally the quotes appeared on the sign itself.

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UNLUCKY NUMBERS: Which recalls a snapshot of a county sign by Peter Lee a couple of years ago. In that case, the sign maker’s superior had evidently scrawled the number of letters in each line in the right-hand margin of the order form. And so the numbers appeared on the sign. That sign has since been replaced (see photo).

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GAME FACE: And I must pass on the punch line to a story Kent Bridwell told about his old firm. Through a proofreading error, the firm ran an ad in search of “a boldface litigator.” Several litigators responded, saying they indeed possessed bold faces. Anyway, when I asked what would have happened if the ad had asked for an italicized litigator, Bridwell said the result might have been the same.

He explained: “I am a half-Italicized litigator. My mother’s family is from the Genoa area of Italy.”

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AN INTERVIEWER AT HOME ANYWHERE: My reference to Long Beach City College history instructor Wendy Hornsby brought letters from several readers mentioning Hornsby’s other vocation: mystery novelist. Hornsby “once said she hates hearing that someone read one of her books in one sitting because they take so long to write,” said one fan, Katie Vaughn.

The Hornsby book, “77th Street Requiem,” by the way, relates one of the odder, real-life moments in the history of broadcasting. Recalling the 1974 shootout between Symbionese Liberation Army members and police in South-Central L.A., narrator Maggie MacGowen, an investigative filmmaker, says, “One news hen, with SWAT teams all around her, gunfire coming from inside the house, walked right up and knocked on the front door, ‘Are you really the SLA? Can I talk to Patty Hearst?’ . . . The newswoman’s name is Christine Lund.”

KABC’s Lund didn’t get the interview. But she got an “A” for effort in my book.

miscelLAny:

The new book, “Crimes and Mis-dumb-eanors,” tells of a South Bay restaurant cashier who was held up at gunpoint. Asked by police if she could identify the robber, she said she could because he was her next-door neighbor. He was arrested in his apartment.

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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.