E-Mailing Fellow Freeway Drivers

Have something to say to the driver in the next lane?

“No more shouting through your car window!” says Dana Point-based PlateMatch.com.

The Web site enables snoopy vehicle owners to register their license plates in a database for $59.95 per year and exchange e-mail with other members.

It’s sort of an update of a 1980s group, Huntington Beach-based Freeway Singles, whose members displayed numbered stickers on their cars.

In the current version, members receive PlateMatch.com license plate frames.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll finally bring together those two drivers mentioned here a while back: the Vista woman with the FRE2D8 declaration and the Calabasas man with the ASK4AD8 suggestion.

L.A.’S THE PLACE: Only four weeks to go and I’ve heard no buzz at all about L.A.’s coming New Year’s Eve celebration. Last Dec. 31, you’ll recall, the city put untold numbers of viewers to sleep before midnight with the boring show at the previously famous HOLLYWOOD sign.

I’d suggest another sign for a gathering: the famous LA marker high above the Pomona Freeway in Hacienda Heights (see photo). Let’s show the world those famous initials! I’m sure the kids at nearby Los Altos High School will give permission.

SPEAKING OF 2001: The Unitarius Academy of Science, based in El Cajon, has claimed for some time that a fleet of spaceships is coming to Earth from a planet called Myton next year and will invite Earth to join the Interplanetary Confederation of Planets. (Would Earthlings vote? Imagine all the ballots that would take!)

Anyway, when I received a snapshot from Mark Day, I wondered if residents of nearby Vista were making arrangements for the event (see photo).

IDENTIFIED OBJECT: But Day explained that the sign is for Upholstery Fabric Outlet.

LOCAL HONORS: In his “Book of Bad Songs,” author Dave Barry nominates as the worst of all time a tune that immortalized part of L.A.: “MacArthur Park” (1968).

You’re not familiar with it? Here, let me warble a few lines: Someone left the cake out in the rain / I don’t think that I can take it! / ‘Cause it took so long to bake it! / And I’ll never have that recipe again. . . . / Oh noooooooo. . . .

Not that Barry puts down every song by locals. For instance, he praised “Help Me Rhonda” by the Beach Boys, but added: “I’ve never been able to figure out the opening lines. It sounds as though the singer is singing, ‘Well, since she put me down / There’s been owls pukin’ in my bed.’ ”

MOVING FROM OWLS TO CHICKENS: In Friday’s column, I got to the bottom of the 1969 poultry truck crash that left a gang of freeway chickens near the Vineland Avenue offramp. But how to explain the origin of Freeway Chickens II, said to have appeared several years later near Burbank Boulevard, a few miles away.

“A homeowner was raising chickens and there was a hole in the fence,” said Caltrans manager Steve Palma. “The chickens went in and out on a regular basis and could be seen near the shoulder.”

Palma added that his father, Al, brought home one of the original freeway chickens, a white hen. “We kids kept the egg-laying hen as a pet in Venice for a couple of years before she disappeared one day,” Palma said.

Maybe that accounts for those reports of a roller-skating chicken in Venice.

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Just in time for the 21st century, Lew Grauss of Diamond Bar found the key to building a nonpolluting car (see accompanying).