A Juror’s Costly Court Confession

Stressing the importance of being on time, an official in the Bellflower courthouse told a new crop of juror candidates the story of a woman who returned from lunch an hour late.

The judge, other jurors, attorneys and the defendant were waiting when she sauntered into the courtroom. The judge took a personal interest in her lunch break. He asked her where she had gone (a mall), what store she had shopped in (Nordstrom), and what she had purchased (some clothes). Then he asked her how much she had spent. When she told him, he announced that he would double that amount for her fine.

DINING GUIDE FOR THE DARING: The curiosities du jour (see accompanying) include:

* Some yams with attitude (from Gary Scheidt of Pasadena)

* A wine that may or may not be good for humans (William and Alice Heaton of Calabasas)

* A restaurant whose sign contained an unfortunate misspelling (Gerald Elijah, L.A.)

* And, some slop that a store actually charged for (Charlene Cella of San Pedro)

P.S.: The “swill” turned out to be Swiss milk.

MYSTERY SOLVED, SORT OF: After a Manhattan Beach resident snapped a shot of a sign showing the Quebec village of St. Louis du Ha! Ha! I asked for an explanation of the name.

William Freeman of Rancho Cucamonga, another city name I like, was kind enough to direct me to the town’s Web site, which gave two theories.

One version is that “Ha! Ha!” is derived from the language of the indigenous peoples and translates as “an unexpected place.”

The other is that French explorers exclaimed “Ah! Ah!” upon first seeing the area, so taken were they with its beauty, but some dunderhead recorded it as “Ha! Ha!”

OH OH: I should add that the above Web site was in French. And I haven’t read any French since I sat in Miss Valenzuela’s high school class 38 years ago. So it’s possible that what I read was not a passage about St. Louis du Ha! Ha! but a summary of a recent episode of “Saturday Night Live.”

WATCH OUT FOR GRAMPS: Some of the offbeat calls handled by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department over the last couple of months, as recorded in “The Open Mike” column of the publication Star News:

* “Huge mountain lion is in inf’s [informant’s] tree. . . . He would like deps to scare it away.”

* “Off-duty officer following a veh [vehicle] w/male driver in handcuffs. The unit advised ‘Code 4, magician only.’ ”

* “Ostrich running loose in traffic.”

* “Grandfather m/84 biting family members.”

* “Female just got out of the trunk of a Cadillac at the storage unit. She is screaming at another female.”

And a holiday item:

“Inf’s boyfriend said he’s on his way to her loc [location] to throw her turkey in the pool.”

miscelLAny:

Moorpark College in Ventura County gets some national exposure in Rolling Stone’s current “College Life 2001” issue. Brandon Boyd of the rock group Incubus said his favorite class there during the 1994-95 year was “anthropology of witchcraft and religion.”

He added that his final report was “a waking invocation ritual. We invoked a goddess around a huge bonfire at the side of the school, with the whole class watching while I was banging on a drum.”

But could he make the goddess jump out of the trunk of a Cadillac?

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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.