UCLA’s Name Is No Hit on Road

What about be true to your school? UCLA’s 7-year-old special interest license plate (see accompanying) is the worst seller among the eight varieties offered by the state Department of Motor Vehicles. Just 3,125 UCLA plates are on the road, compared to 64,284 plates for the No. 1 seller, which pictures the coastline. Three thousand Bruin plates aren’t very many when you figure UCLA has an enrollment of more than 35,000.

The lack of interest probably has to do with something missing in its design. Mainly, the phrase “BEAT USC.”

I WILL WRITE MY SCHOOL NAME ON THE BLACKBOARD ONE HUNDRED TIMES. . . . Ken Buxton sent along an envelope he received from the office of the president of UC Berkeley (see accompanying), with the school’s name misspelled.

THE ULTIMATE SIGALERT: On a recent episode of TV’s “The X-Files,” agent Mulder encounters a woman who can make anyone’s wishes come true--with disastrous results, naturally. He challenges her to achieve world peace and, in the next scene, Mulder finds himself on a downtown street devoid of humanity. That’s the catch. To bring about peace, she removes the people.

What struck me about the scene was that it was shot in downtown L.A. Sure, the solution was a bit extreme. But it might be the best proposal I’ve heard yet for relieving traffic congestion.

WRONG KIND OF SERVICE: Certified public accountant David Zweig of Irvine says that when a client asked for the phone number for the Internal Revenue Service, his office inadvertently said it was (800) IRS-1040 (instead of the correct number, [800] TAX-1040.) The first number, Zweig later found, is a phone sex line.

TIME WARP: Joshua Dunn of Redondo Beach came upon a sign that really would have goofed up the final scene in the movie “High Noon” (see photo).

COLD WAR LEFTOVER: Vada Flowers of Woodland Hills snapped a shot of an air raid siren that has stood outside her building in Tarzana for more than 40 years, inoperative for the last 15 or so (see photo).

It was one of thousands of sirens in the city that were designed to sound the bad news when Soviet bombers or intercontinental ballistic missiles were on their way. The sirens were tested on the last Friday of each month, sounding off in unison at 10 a.m.

With the Cold War winding down, they were unplugged in 1985. More than 30% of them were broken, anyway.

Many of the sirens were just left standing because of the cost and effort to take them down. The one in front of Flowers’ building seems pretty solid. It hasn’t been hit by enemy fire but, she pointed out, “it survived the Northridge quake.”

SEEING EYE TO EYE: After the discussion here of the danger of a doctor operating on the wrong part of the body, a reader phoned about her experience in a Valley hospital. She was there for in vitro fertilization, and “a nurse came in and wanted to put eyedrops in my eyes. I said, ‘That’s strange. Why would you do that?’ The nurse said, ‘Aren’t we doing eye surgery on you?’ ”

miscelLAny:

I turned off the interminable Fox TV special “Opening the Tombs of the Golden Mummies: Live” the other night when the hosts showed a clip from the movie “Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.” (Honest.)

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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.