Birthday Blues: Museum Piece at 40

The Barbie doll is part of a “Classic Toys of Yesterday” exhibition at the L.A. County Natural History Museum. “Classic?” “Yesterday?” The museum’s not making it any easier on Barbie, who turns 40 on March 9.

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ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN: Some businesses don’t feel inclined to put out welcome mats, as you can see from snapshots I’ve collected over the last several months (see photos). Bob Smith, for instance, found an entrance sign that was also a no-entrance sign. Dorothy Cochran came upon an entrance that only a woodchuck could navigate. And Judy Bartlein noticed a sign that prohibited the entry of any non-employee capable of reading it.

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STUPID CRIMINAL TRICKS: Is L.A. the capital for this category? In the ‘90s edition of “The Book of Lists,” four of the nine incidents in the “Stupid Thieves” chapter occurred in the Southland.

Follow the bumbling bad guys:

* Three burglars inside a soon-to-be-demolished bank building in West Covina found an empty vault, which two of them entered. The door shut and they couldn’t get out until authorities, including the police, arrived.

* Two men were arrested in Canoga Park as they tried to drag a stolen 6,000-pound safe home with their car. “The scraping of the safe on the asphalt street created showers of sparks that could be seen for blocks, not to mention a deafening roar,” wrote authors David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace.

* A gang of thieves stole nine cars from a Silver Lake company that shipped autos across the nation. One problem: Each car had been drained of all but a gallon of gasoline.

* A nervous holdup man fled a Long Beach supermarket without a penny but was arrested soon afterward at his home. He had been recognized as the guy who had earlier filled out an application at the market for a check-cashing card, using his real address.

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MYSTERY SOLVED: A colleague couldn’t figure out why tour buses were constantly stopping to snap photos of a house down the street from him in Altadena. Finally, he asked. It turned out that the California bungalow stands in as the home of one of the characters in TV’s “Beverly Hills 90210.”

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L.A. VERSE: The appropriately named Elyse Verse put in her bid to become poet laureate of L.A. with this ditty about a famous cross-dressing basketball player.

Dennis (Worm) Rodman

Ever the odd man

Left one question to unfurl:

He’s joining the team

Or so it would seem,

But as Laker Guy

or Girl?

miscelLAny:

Time magazine’s Joel Stein was persuaded to sponsor an Adopt-a-Highway sign on behalf of the publication after a spokeswoman for the program told him: “I’m telling you, I have a location in L.A. that is phenomenal: Where the 405 meets the 5 at Burbank Airport. To me, that’s a location.”

Wait until the tour buses find out.