The Sword Is Mightier Than the Baseball Bat

A Rossmoor resident alerted authorities about “a group of people in the park with baseball bats,” the Los Alamitos News-Enterprise reported, but the suspects turned out to be “members of a sword-fight club.” Not the usual type of fencing operation encountered by officers of the law.

HAPLESS CRIMINAL OF THE WEEK HONORS: In Cypress, the News-Enterprise said, “a 19-year-old man was arrested for attempting to steal a vehicle, after he ran along the railroad tracks, jumped the fence into Swain School, sprinted through the park and into a neighborhood, where he fell into a pool and got bit by a dog.”

Touche!

ONLY IN L.A.--ON THE CUTTING EDGE: Don’t know if you’ve heard, but a couple of California businesses, including FreeCar Media of L.A., are paying motorists up to $400 a month to swathe their cars in ads, the way buses do.

Fun reading for others during a traffic jam, right?

Anyway, in 1997, I wrote of a West L.A. man who put up a sign that said, “Advertise your company on the sides of my classic 1958 Chevy panel truck in exchange for body work on the truck.”

As far as I know, no company took him up on the offer.

UNREAL ESTATE: Today’s selections (see accompanying) include:

FARE AND UNFAIR: Bandit (unlicensed) taxis have long been a part of Southern California, often carrying markings that give them an appearance of legitimacy. But freelance cabbies aren’t being so subtle during the MTA strike. A colleague of mine saw one bandit hack holding up a placard that said, “$5 a ride.”

The way you can verify a licensed cab, by the way, is by the city seal imprinted on the car. That, and the frown on the driver’s face.

GLIDING INTO THE PAST: Historian Ralph Shaffer writes that a recent article in The Times about the development of hang-gliding at Dockweiler State Beach “would have brought a sense of triumph to a long-forgotten senior who pioneered the sport in Los Angeles over a century ago.”

That was Frederick Shaw, a street person who was known as L.A.’s No. 1 eccentric.

In an 1887 letter to The Times, Shaw wrote that, with the proper equipment, humans could fly like birds.

“It can be done safely on the plains near the ocean, and the new-fledged birds can alight in the water,” he added. Shaw foresaw many other developments, including the construction of the harbor at San Pedro. Of course, he wasn’t right on every count. Shaffer, a professor emeritus at Cal Poly Pomona, points out that Shaw also proposed powering ships “by harnessing whales.”

miscelLAny:

The Westsider newspaper’s police log reported that “a suspect, for no apparent reason, threw magazines at a victim,” striking the guy in the. . . .

Well, let’s just say this was a new type of below-the-belt journalism.

I only hope the suspect was throwing issues of Time magazine or the New Republic and not something as bulky as Vanity Fair.

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.