We’re on the Road to Better Cooking

Welcome to today’s column. Let me start you off with a couple of items that further cement (not to mention asphalt) the Southland’s claim as the world car capital. Alan Salit of West Hollywood found a sandwich apparently cooked on a car engine, while Charlie Hisserich of Sierra Madre came upon some fish cooked with eau d’auto. Nothing like fresh road-grill (see accompanying).

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LIST OF THE DAY: LAPD officers who gained fame out of uniform:

* Former Mayor Tom Bradley

* Author Joseph Wambaugh (“The Onion Field,” “The New Centurions” and numerous others)

* Actor Ken Osmond (smarmy Eddie Haskell on TV’s “Leave It to Beaver”)

* Former state Sen. Ed Davis.

* “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry. Joe Domanick’s history of the LAPD, “To Protect and Serve,” says that William Parker, chief of police in the 1950s, was “so stern and icy” that Roddenberry “was said to have based the character of Spock on him.”

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TEN YEARS AGO TODAY: The Times reported that after a storm brought snow to some parts of L.A. County, the Philadelphia Daily News ran a headline that said: “L.A. Sees Another Kind of Flake.”

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ALL IN THE SAME BOAT: Remember the photo here of the post office where three slots--for metered letters, for stamped letters and for large envelopes--all lead to the same bin? Connie Russell of Downey writes: “I am currently serving jury duty at the Criminal Courts Building. The three signs on the entry doors remind me of the post office slots. The doors say: ‘Jury,’ ‘Public’ and ‘Welcome.’ They all enter into the same foyer.” That’s sort of flaky.

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SURPRISE PACKAGE: In a story on romantic rendezvous, the Downtown News said that one of the strangest occurred at the Tower restaurant downtown. A visiting soldier had himself delivered to the table of his girlfriend in a casket. She was celebrating her birthday. Her friends “encouraged her to open it,” the newspaper said. “She hesitated, but eventually the friends won out.” Definitely flaky.

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A VALENTINE’S DAY GIFT FOR STARR ADMIRERS: Dan Fink of L.A. saw an ad for a ring that would probably appeal to Republicans more than Democrats. These words were engraved inside:

“Many are thee starrs I see yet in my eye no starr like thee.”

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WINDS OF CHANGE: I speculated a while back that a financial battering from the Typhoon restaurant in Santa Monica was partly responsible for the death of Dive!, the submarine-shaped diner owned by Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Deborah Neikirk writes that Dive! no doubt was also hit hard by Monsoon, another Westside eatery.

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WHICH REMINDS ME: As for the McDonald’s with horse parking in Palos Verdes, David Smollar wrote: “I heard it has three window counters: win, place and show.” (Maybe I should have scratched that joke.)

miscelLAny:

Forest Lawn in Glendale says its museum is “L.A.’s best kept secret” (see photo). The museum has a bronze statuary exhibit, a collection of “every coin mentioned in the Bible,” historical documents and a stone head from Easter Island. But hardly anyone has ever heard of the museum. Now, if it had on display a casket that was used on a date at a downtown restaurant. . . .

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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 dog sled at L.A. Times, Times Mirror Square, L.A. 90053.