But It’s Already Confusing Enough

Could this be a new ballot controversy? An Orange County weekly reported that there was a third presidential nominee in contention (see accompanying).

Someone better straighten this out, by George.

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STREET SYMMETRY OF SORTS: Norb Huber sent in a shot of good old 141th Street in the Hawthorne area, which confirmed one of my suspicions. I figured there had been an accidental suffix swap years ago after I received a shot of 111st Street near LAX from Michael Tscheekar (see photos).

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BUT ENOUGH ABOUT NUMBERS: Ginger Nehls of Upland introduced a novel, “P.S. Longer Letter Later,” to her sixth-grade class, explaining it was written as a series of letters.

“I turned the book toward them so they could see the format,” she said. “One girl looked at me with a funny expression and asked, ‘But Mrs. Nehls, aren’t all books written in letters?’ ”

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ROOM SERVICE, CAN YOU SEND UP A PARACHUTE? Just the other day, I was talking about the wild times in the 1960s and 1970s at what is now the Hyatt West Hollywood on the Sunset Strip (Jim Morrison hanging from the balcony, etc.).

More colorful reflections about the hotel come from Hunter Thompson, excerpted from his new book “Fear and Loathing in America” in Vanity Fair magazine.

“The hallways still rumble with the sound of rock bands rehearsing, the elevators are still full of Halloween people and the late-night balconies are still a fine sideshow,” Thompson wrote in a 1969 letter.

“At one point, on this last visit, I looked down and saw a man in jockey underwear climbing across the front of the hotel like a white monkey, crawling from balcony to balcony in a very confident way, as if he knew exactly where he was going and had been there many times before. Maybe it was the manager, investigating complaints. . . .

“Whoever it was seemed very agile; he was moving about eight floors up from the street with nothing below except space and sure death if he fell.”

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ANYTHING FOR RATINGS: Another empty-headed moment from the local TV news folks: KABC anchor Laura Diaz broadcast a “tease” on KFWB radio at about 3:35 Wednesday afternoon, inviting listeners to tune in the station’s newscast later that day to “find out which vice presidential nominee suffered a slight heart attack.”

KABC evidently didn’t want you to know right away. Luckily, KFWB followed the blurb with an immediate update on the condition of Dick Cheney.

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NORTHRIDGE MILESTONES: Cal State Northridge’s upset basketball win over 10-time national champion UCLA has to rank as one of the most stunning sights on the Fox Sports West 2 network. Perhaps the most stunning since the 1998 Hawaii-Cal State Northridge game was mistakenly interrupted by an X-rated movie.

miscelLAny:

Sentimental guy that I am, I’ve brought out one of my favorite decorations (see accompanying) in order to give you this wish:

Merry Thanksgiving!

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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, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., 90012 and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.