The Bad News Was, His Car Is Gone; the Good News Was, It Was Only Stolen

While on vacation, I resolved to become more positive about life, so today I offer this police log item from the Rancho Santa Margarita News: “A caller wanted to know if his car had been repossessed. He was ecstatic to hear it may have been stolen.”

Raider nation: The start of pro football season reminded me of my recent journey back from San Luis Obispo on the 101. I always know I’m getting close to home the first time I’m cut off by another driver. This year it happened near Santa Barbara, and the perpetrator was in a truck displaying a Raiders sticker. I can’t recall ever seeing a sedan displaying a Raiders sticker.

Slow-break basketball: Traffic slammed to such a halt in Santa Barbara that I could have disembarked from my car several times and made use of the hoop that Michael Fink spotted on the San Diego Freeway (see photo).

Letters imperfect: A pavement sign with some loopy spelling caught the eye of Russ Fega of Altadena (see photo).

Bourne to be confused: Richard Chase snapped a shot of a theater marquee in the throes of a true identity crisis (see photo).

Speaking of dislocation: “I guess those Right Coasters think everything west of the Mississippi is the same place,” writes Andrew Pannell. He relayed an online article in the New York Times about Gov. Gray Davis signing a bill on “a clear morning in Los Angeles” at “one of the city’s highest spots, the observatory at Griffith Park.” The accompanying snapshot, however, showed a famous Bay Area bridge in the background (see photo). (Unless Davis used some of his immense campaign treasury to drag the bridge down here for the day.)

Passport, please: The “Country of Los Angeles” designation that a reader saw on a Department of Recreation and Parks form didn’t surprise Toni Williams. She wrote: “When my daughter Vanessa was in the second grade, she had to write a family history, and she stated that her mother was from California and her father was from Los Angeles.”

As if commercials aren’t annoying enough: Mystery novelist John Morgan Wilson recounted a strange phenomenon on the Adelphia cable system in his West Hollywood area: “Some of the commercials on the Court TV channel mix the audio from one commercial with the video of another commercial. It makes for some surreal TV, i.e.: audio from a spot for a golden oldies collection playing over video of a Forest Lawn commercial ... audio for a weight-loss program heard over a Lawry’s Prime Rib spot showing customers digging into juicy slabs of beef and a little girl being served a sumptuous chocolate sundae

Well, I wouldn’t bother Adelphia about it now. The company is too busy searching for the billion-plus dollars that was allegedly pilfered by its fat-cat executives.

MiscelLAny: Jerry Schwartz of Manhattan Beach was driving through Carson City when he saw a gambling house’s partially burned out sign that said: C A ---O. A friend commented that the hotel seemed to have taken the S-I-N out of gambling.

*

Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LA-TIMES, 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.