Flying In to the Airport on Autopilot, in a Bus

For today’s edition of Stupid Driver Tricks, Joyce Glenn of Yorba Linda recalled the time she and friend Nancy Schulkey were escorting some Japanese visitors to LAX by chartered bus.

A student driver stood at the side of the regular bus driver “as we were heading east on the 91 freeway at about 70 mph,” Glenn said.

Suddenly, the two traded places.

“Didn’t stop,” Glenn said. “Just traded places! Fortunately, we did not crash and are still alive to tell the tale.”

A HALF STOP? As if stupid drivers don’t make motoring adventurous enough here, the Southland offers innumerable sets of bewildering traffic signs, such as these snapped at an Oak Park intersection in Ventura County by Larry Barton (see photo).

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THROWING THE BOOK AT SPELL CHECK: The discussion here about misspelling “it’s” got Palmdale attorney Ross Amspoker to muse about spell check pitfalls he has noticed as a Superior Court referee.

He saw one legal brief, for instance, that said a defendant in a car accident “awfully” exited the alley. Amspoker says the driver’s attorney “obviously meant to write ‘lawfully,’ but ‘awfully’ was correctly spelled and accepted by spell check.”

Another attorney “wrote in a motion that her opponent ‘had the gaul’ to make a certain argument,” Amspoker recalls. “I asked her if she knew that all of Gaul was divided into three parts. She looked at me blankly.”

Spell check cares little about the physical safety of attorneys’ clients.

“In a case in which the issue was the date the defendant was served,” Amspoker says, “a lawyer in his brief consistently used the word ‘severed’ for ‘served,’ e.g., ‘the defendant was severed on June 9, 1998.’ ”

Awfully said for that to happen to anybody.

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ATTENTION, SHOPPERS! The Seal Beach Sun reports that during a recent storm, the San Gabriel River washed more than 25 shopping carts onto that city’s beach.

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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.