Do Not Try This on Your Way Home
Moving the stupid-driver-tricks competition right along, Peter Jacobsen writes:
“One evening, while our van pool lurched through stop-and-go traffic as Hill Street enters the Pasadena Freeway, we noted another driver completing a crossword puzzle.
“While that was good amusement for our van poolians, amazingly enough the very next day, at the very same spot, we spied the very same driver, once again working on his puzzle. Our affable driver glided over next to the fellow’s open window. Riding shotgun, I yelled out the window, ‘The word is idiot!’ ”
Added Jacobsen: “Needless to say, that clue infuriated the puzzle-completing driver, but our driver knew the fast lane, and we were only taillights.”
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MORE CLUELESS DRIVERS: A recent snapshot here of a car on a street with a gas nozzle still attached to the gas tank (see photo) didn’t surprise Mike Reynolds of Manhattan Beach.
He shared his study of this phenomenon from his own experiences as a service station dealer:
* “From Jan. 16, 1995, to June 8, 1999, customers drove out with the nozzle still in their car 118 times.”
* “One customer did it twice.”
* “Twice the car left the property with the nozzle still attached.”
* “A female customer drove out with the nozzle just before closing at 10 p.m. A male returned the nozzle at 3 a.m. to our doorstep [as viewed on security camera].”
Reynolds added that many of the nozzle-negligent were speaking on cell phones at the time. “Through experience,” he said, “my employees would watch customers who paced back and forth next to their car using their cell phones and stopped many customers before they started to drive away.”
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SURF CITY NORTH? Joan Nilsson sent along a letter from Sweden that was addressed to Huntington Beach in a country not known for its wave-riders (see accompanying).
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THE 405-ERS: I mentioned that the GTE 2000-2001 directory for West L.A. has a listing for “L.A. Rams Football Ticket Office.”
For more (intentionally) funny reading, there’s Mike Lupica’s new novel, “Bump and Run,” which introduces an NFL expansion team known as the L.A. Bangers.
It’s the first team in L.A., Lupica writes, since the period when Raiders owner Al Davis “was moving the Raiders up and down the California Coast like they were the Ice Capades.”
Lupica says of the Bangers: “Everybody knew the nickname was short for Gangbangers though nobody would come right out and say it.”
L.A. obtained a franchise, Lupica writes, after the new owner agreed to “build his own stadium with his own money off the 405.”
All of which recalled Mike Ovitz’s failed, real-life proposal for an NFL team a while back--one that would play in a stadium in Carson called the Hacienda and would be furnished with mission bells that would ring each time the home team scored.
A welcome addition to the clamor on the nearby 405.
miscelLAny:
The reports of people being briefly trapped in elevators during the rolling blackouts got me to thinking about the somewhat illogical instructions found on many elevator walls. The instructions say: “Please do not become alarmed. Please use the button marked alarm.”
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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.