After the Neighbors Squawk, Cops Give Parrot’s Owners a Good Talking To

You Think You Have Problems Dept.: The Laguna News-Post reports that residents called police “because a noisy parrot was bothering them with continued squawking. Officers responded to the location and advised the owners of the bird.” No word on what the parrot said to the cops.

Not exactly a recycling container: On her morning walk, Peggy Horngren of Buena Park came upon a strange item among one resident’s trash (see photo). Was it a prank? She’s not sure but she checked later and the, uh, box had disappeared before the trash truck pulled up.

Of course, some driver could have stopped and loaded it aboard. If so, I hope it wasn’t too heavy.

Typical Angeleno’s to-do list? Don’t know if you’ve heard about the foundmagazine.com Web site, which posts discarded and misplaced memos, love notes, doodles, kids’ homework and other neglected literature. (No, nothing from Enron on there yet.)

Anyway, I’m contributing a note that a reader found several years ago in an L.A. parking lot (see accompanying).

I never heard from the busy writer of the note.

A little reverse Scrabble: The mention here of the strangely named Slander restaurant in Whittier brought a note from Teri Wilkinson.

She informed me that it was actually called Slanders, which still ranks high on the strangeness scale, I think you’ll agree.

“We all laughed when the new owners came up with Slanders, not only because it was such an odd name, but because they were being so cheap,” explained Wilkinson, a resident of Whittier for four decades.

“You see, the name of the previous restaurant in the building was Islanders, with a huge scripted capital I and the ‘slanders’ in smaller script. The new owner simply took off the I on the old sign! No one was surprised when they closed their doors a few weeks later.”

Silence of the hamburgers: Bud Baker phoned to say that my list of eateries with wacky names should have included a favorite of Southland surfers: Shut Up Frank’s, in the Baja California town of Todos Santos (see accompanying).

The story, Baker said, is that it was so dubbed because Frank, the owner, married a woman whose spoke only three words in English: “Shut up, Frank.”

(Let’s not get into the matter of the comma missing after “Up.”)

Baker added that “Shut Up Frank” T-shirts and stickers are bigger sellers than the burgers and beer the place dispenses.

They never checked in here: Todos Santos, by the way, is also the home of the Hotel California, which once promoted itself as the site where the Eagles’ song of that name was written. The Eagles, who don’t agree on very many things, are in accord that they never visited the place.

miscelLAny: My second-favorite L.A. newspaper, the Los Alamitos News-Enterprise, carried this police log item:

“A man thought someone had entered his residence, since his dog was inside and the toilet seat was left up.”

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.