To His Relief, ‘Yes’ Marked the Spot

As the date of his shoulder surgery neared, Greg Horbachevsky, of Glendale, asked his doctor: “Is there anything you want me to do the night before the operation?”

“Yes,” the doctor responded. “Write ‘Yes’ with a felt pen on the shoulder to be operated on and ‘No’ on the other one--in big letters.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Horbachevsky said.

“No, I’m not,” the doctor said. “This is the way I keep my name out of the newspapers.”

After the surgery, Horbachevsky said, “It was a great feeling to get home and see ‘Yes’ under my bandage.”

ON THE BANNED WORDS LIST: Then there was the case of Curtis Barickman, of Sherman Oaks, who went into a Valley hospital for knee surgery.

Just before the operation, a nurse asked him: “So your surgery is on your left knee?”

“Right,” he answered.

“No,” she said, “we use the word ‘correct’ here.”

ANOTHER LANGUAGE LESSON: My colleague Raoul Ranoa snapped a photo of a carefully worded sign in a shop that sells, uh, smokers’ accessories, in Newport Beach, of all places (see accompanying).

DISSENTER: “This isn’t a real cop . . . just speed,” said the sarcastic placard that Brad Lewis noticed on the windshield of a black-and-white LAPD car (see accompanying). The anonymous author of the message had noticed that the car, parked in Pacific Palisades to discourage speeders, was unoccupied.

HOPPING DOWN THE PCH TRAIL: A resident of Seal Beach reported a sighting of a creature resembling a rabbit that stood more than 5 feet tall the other day. Were the bunnies overrunning the golf course at Leisure World retirement community beginning to mutate?

Not yet.

The “Police Blotter” column of the Seal Beach Sun revealed that it actually was a man in a costume carrying a net as part of a radio station’s promo.

I’m glad to hear the witness hadn’t imagined seeing a giant rabbit the way Jimmy Stewart does in that movie I’ve always hated. What’s its name?

Oh, yes: “Harvey.”

miscelLAny:

After several literary descriptions of Long Beach were offered in this space, my colleague Gerard Babb countered with a passage about L.A. from Saul Bellow’s novel “Seize the Day”:

“Someone had said, and Wilhelm agreed with the saying, that in Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.”

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Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LATIMES, Ext. 77083.