They Just Ate Up This Training Video

Cindy Ferrell of Long Beach ordered a dog training video for overnight delivery as a birthday gift to her roommate Gail Snyder (and Snyder’s year-old golden retriever, Oakley).

Unfortunately, the delivery person, finding no one home, dropped the package inside Ferrell’s gate.

Where three dogs waited.

The $83 tape was obliterated.

“The dogs also tore the catalog to shreds,” Ferrell noted.

She believes that her own collie, Rocky, teamed up with Oakley on the search and destroy mission. Tessa, her more mild-mannered female mutt, is not a suspect at this time.

Ferrell has appealed to the delivery service for restitution. She also mentioned the canine attack to the company that sells the dog tapes.

A company rep told her: “It’s happened before.”

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NO DOUGHNUT BREAKS FOR THIS COP: Westways magazine expressed surprise in the May / June issue over the large number of responses it received after asking readers to guess what was unusual about a snapshot of a motorcycle officer (see photo). Answer: The cop was a cardboard cutout.

This column is flattered, in a way, by that response. I like to think that some of the Westways readers remembered the photo from its world premiere in Only in L.A. on March 7, 1998. It was shot by Roger Marshutz.

The cutout, which bears the stern likeness of retired LAPD Officer Sol Lebus, was nicknamed Port-a-Cop. It has been deployed in the Hollywood Hills by residents who are tired of speeding motorists.

By the way, not every Westways respondent correctly guessed why the photo was unique.

One individual wrote the magazine: “If you look real closely at the motorcycle’s windshield, you can see a reflection of an alien’s face in it.”

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COIN BANDIT: Someone dressed up a parking meter on 2nd Street downtown as a masked robber, with gun in one hand and money bag in the other (see photo).

Perhaps the sentimental artist was aware that 1999 marks the 50th anniversary of the first such coin confiscator in the city. It was on Lankershim in North Hollywood and charged 5 cents an hour.

Last time I checked, the meters on Figueroa Street charged $2 per hour--or 25 cents for 7 1/2 minutes.

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MEMORABLE POLICE CALLS: Entertainer Steve Allen, a “Celebrity Driver of the Week” on KRLA radio’s “Traffic Jam” show, admitted that when he was in his 20s he would occasionally become angry behind the wheel.

Allen said that if a slow-moving vehicle was in front of him at night, “I would open the window of my car and stick my head out and do what, if I say so myself, was a perfect imitation of a police siren. . . . And believe it or not, at night it always worked. They always pulled over immediately.”

Of course, that was half a century ago, when the roadways were occasionally quiet.

miscelLAny:

Shame on Universal for an obvious bit of exploitation. Forty-eight hours before Mother’s Day, the studio chooses to release the film, “The Mummy,” today.

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.