Pedestrian Is Inadvertently Guilty of Call Blocking

At a crosswalk in Santa Monica, Manny Gutierrez of Studio City saw the pedestrian walk signal flash “and the man in front of me walked into the crosswalk without looking. He was tapped lightly (no harm done) by a still-moving vehicle. The driver leaned out of the window and begged forgiveness, saying ever so apologetically, ‘I was busy making a phone call.’ ”

I’m surprised the driver didn’t yell at the pedestrian for interrupting his conversation.

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DUELING SIGNS DEPT.: John Klein of Agoura Hills spotted a juxtaposition of signs in a restaurant that raised the question: “But do you have to have reservations?”

And Al Schinnerer of Huntington Beach found some misdirections on a street corner in Signal Hill.

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WHEN IT WAS REALLY ADVENTURELAND: “In America,” Susan Sontag’s new novel, was inspired by the immigration to America of celebrated Polish actress Helena Modjeska, who settled in a Utopian commune near Anaheim in 1876.

In Sontag’s novel, actress Maryna Zalezowska and her companions reacted to 19th century Anaheim thusly: “No landscape, not even the swampy jungle of the Isthmus of Panama, had struck any of them as this awesomely strange.”

The weather seemed to consist of “only two seasons here: a hot dry summer, followed by a long temperate spring called winter.”

It’s so quiet that they could hear the “sound of their own footfalls. Pausing, they could hear the hiss of skinny desert-colored creatures. . . .”

There were bigger creatures too. Hence, one of the first queries from their new neighbors: “They ask how many guns we have.”

Zalezowska’s son stationed himself on the porch, where he practiced “answering the coyote’s howl.”

Today, in not-so-wild Anaheim, of course, kids need little practice answering the greetings of Goofy.

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Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LATIMES, Ext. 77083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, Times Mirror Square, L.A. 90053 and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.