Caught Driving While Dressing

Today’s narrator of Stupid Driver Tricks is Carole Brooks of Ventura, who brings this harrowing story:

“I was stopped facing downhill on the incline in Santa Monica, waiting for the light to turn green to get on the Pacific Coast Highway. Suddenly, a pickup truck driven by a 16-year-old girl rammed into my rear, basically totaling my car.

“A few moments later, the girl popped out, apologizing profusely. ‘I couldn’t get out sooner,’ she said. ‘I was changing into my volleyball shorts when my foot slipped off the brake. I had to put my shorts on before I could get out of the car.’ ”

Summed up Brooks: “Moral of this story: Don’t dress and drive. Especially on an incline.”

FAR OUT: Men may be from Mars and women from Venus but Carol Lanham spotted an advertiser in UCLA’s Daily Bruin newspaper who is looking for a mate from still another planet (see accompanying).

CAN’T YOU JUST UNPLUG IT? Jane and Paul Lorentzen of Ojai came across a tool that evidently enables you to cut your radio in half (see accompanying). For those who can’t take Howard Stern any longer? Or is the ad supposed to say “radial” saw?

OOH L.A.-L.A.: The book “Naked Los Angeles” contains the photos of 77 unidentified Angelenos who posed with and without clothes (one magician inexplicably held a large pig in his two shots).

Don’t expect to see your doctor or accountant, though. Most of the nudists identified themselves as artistic types.

Author Gary Friedler, who advertised for subjects in local newspapers, said “it was difficult to get certain people like lawyers and studio executives to pose because many feared for their jobs. . . . Many wouldn’t pose without considerable monetary compensation which I simply could not provide”

Friedler, also the author of “Naked New York,” noticed that “Angelenos seem to spend more time mastering their appearance than New Yorkers do.” For instance, one L.A. man, after shedding his clothes, pulled some duct tape out of a pocket and asked Friedler to help stretch it “across his lower back in order to suck in his gut.”

MYSTERY OF THE DAY: Several kind readers told me the meaning of the English phrase “cats eyes” (they’re road reflectors akin to California’s Botts Dotts). Now, may I turn your attention to a snapshot of a sign in Quebec province, taken by Jay Berman of Manhattan Beach (see photo).

The village of St. Louis du Ha Ha does exist, ha ha, no really. But Berman didn’t visit it. So he and I are wondering whether any readers can explain the name (and the exclamation marks).

Merci.

miscelLAny:

Although the expression “cats eyes” didn’t make it over to this side of the Atlantic, it has been translated elsewhere.

William Currlin of Cerritos and Nick Nell of Burbank informed me that the reflectors are ojos de gato in Latin America. Nell added that speed bumps, which are “sleeping policemen” in England, “are policias muertos (dead policemen) in Latin America--very close to sleeping, eh?” No doughnuts for either variety.

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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.