8 Tourists Get an Early Revenge

So, protests against the Arena Football League’s mysterious billboards have been registered in Azusa, Bellflower, Hawthorne and Venice, among other communities.

Some citizens called law enforcement authorities about one billboard that says, “Eight Oklahoma tourists will be beaten in downtown Los Angeles,” unaware it referred to an Oklahoma football team.

Readers have complained to this column about the billboards, especially one double-entendre ad that suggests a sex act.

All this, and the L.A. Avengers have yet to make their Staples Center debut.

But they can claim one distinction at the moment:

The Avengers are the most disliked L.A. football team never to have played in L.A.

WHAT IF HIS SENTENCE IS COMMUTED? Jonathan Fink noticed that the marquee at a downtown L.A. movie theater announced:

ROMEO MUST DIE

SOON--28 DAYS

(“28 Days” is a coming movie.)

A MESSAGE FROM ROMEO’S ATTORNEY? Bill Kinman of Alhambra, meanwhile, saw this twin bill:

HERE ON EARTH

WHATEVER IT TAKES

EVERYONE’S A CRITIC: Outside a Rowland Heights video store, Carol Neideffer of Diamond Bar snapped a shot of a sign that seemed to refer to a section of less-artistic films (see photo).

LETTER IMPERFECT: In a newspaper advertiser, Will Kern of Santa Barbara spotted an ad for a class that the proofreader should consider taking (see accompanying).

DUELING MAIL SLOTS: Herb Stewart of La Mirada came upon rival claimants for the mail of customers (see photo).

A MACHINE WITH SOLE: The 83-year-old peanut roaster at Joe Jost’s saloon in Long Beach is a whirling, Rube Goldberg-type contraption of leather belts, wheels, a drive shaft and a one-horsepower motor.

No mere museum piece, it roasts 30 pounds of peanuts an hour. (Try eating a raw peanut some time, and you’ll discover why it actually belongs to the pea family.)

Anyway, a belt on the machine broke one day. So, with mechanics for ancient peanut roasters in short supply in this high-tech world, where did owners Ken and Cathleen Buck go to have it fixed? A shoe repair shop.

BUT DO THEY HAVE A JOHN WAYNE AIRPORT? On the subject of familiar-sounding place names elsewhere, Michael Kenney of L.A. writes: “In Rio de Janeiro I came across California Dreams, a combination bar & grill, with pizza, salad, sandwich and sushi islands, mostly named after California places and famous people.”

Kenney said the dishes included Elizabeth Taylor Spareribs and John Wayne T-Bone.

DOESN’T SOUND LIKE A HOT DOGS AND APPLE PIE KIND OF PLACE: Steve Koenig, who lives in Maputo, Mozambique, e-mails me that that city’s Restaurante California is, “as many of those suspicious of California’s liberal politics would be unsurprised to learn, located on Avenida Vladimir Lenin.”

Koenig adds that the American Cultural Center is at the corner of Avenida Mao Tse-tung and Avenida Kim Il Sung, which strikes me as downright un-American.

miscelLAny:

The police log of the Los Alamitos News-Enterprise said that in La Palma, “a man reported his car stolen from the gas station.”

Didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to crack the case.

It was subsequently discovered that the car “had been left in neutral and rolled into the street.”

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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.