Nowhere to Hide From This Psychic

In my second-favorite L.A. paper, the Los Alamitos News-Enterprise, the police log listed this bulletin out of La Palma:

“A man reported a psychic was hacking into his computer.”

Not to learn secrets, I presume.

WILSHIRE EAST? David Harwood of Pasadena came upon the Miracle Mile in Bullhead City, Ariz., no less (see photo). “This Miracle Mile,” he added, “has Wal-Mart, Kmart and J.C. Penney stores.”

THE NON-GLAMOROUS TRAVEL PITCH: A firm advertising flights to Mexico and Latin America displays four houseflies on its billboards, along with the claim: “Only the flies fly cheaper.” (See photo.) But do the flies fly coach?

THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED: Some factoids on the laradio.com Web site of historian Don Barrett:

* Talk show host Stephanie Miller’s father, William Miller, was the running mate of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964.

* Kenny Morse, host of the “Mr. Traffic” radio show, missed the $75,000 question on “Greed.” (No it didn’t have anything to do with traffic.)

* Local traffic reporters Jeff Culver, Jeff Stevens and Wes Wood were all married on the same day. (Actually, they’re the same person--Culver has used three different names on the air.)

* In March 1968, disc jockey Gene Weed of KFWB (“Top 40” radio) told listeners: “We’ll be right back with more music after the news.” The station immediately adopted an all-news format and no music was played again.

* Former KJLH owner John Lamar Hill operated the station from inside his funeral parlor.

THE HANDOFF: She boarded the Metro Blue Line train at Willow, near her house, and headed north, disembarking at the Imperial Highway stop. She was waiting on the platform there when his southbound train pulled up. They exchanged hellos and he handed her the goods.

She then boarded his train and headed south back to her house.

He, in turn, waited for a northbound train and returned to his job in L.A.

Yes, it can make for a complicated morning commute when a husband discovers too late that he’s gone off with something of his wife’s: her keys.

LOVING LE BIG MAC: “Le Divorce,” an amusing novel by Diane Johnson, centers on two Americans in Paris: Isabel Walker, a USC film graduate, and her sister Roxanne, a poet who attended UC Irvine.

Some observations about France by Isabel, the narrator:

* “In France, though they think of themselves as having Mexican restaurants, they don’t know what Mexican food should be, and they wouldn’t like the real thing. They hate spices.”

* “Santa Barbara is a city of mythological dimension in the minds of the French because of a soap opera called ‘Santa Barbara,’ which airs on French television, dubbed in French, involving the lurid social complications usual in soap operas, among uniformly blond, rich Californians. . . .”

* “I remain a little skeptical about the French. They pretend to love food so much, but why do they go to McDonald’s?”

miscelLAny:

Dick Block noticed that an ad placed by Beverly Hills in the New Yorker said the city “is just five minutes away” from the Getty Center in Brentwood. True, Block says, “if you happen to have a helicopter, something no Beverly Hills tourist should leave home without.”