Suspicious Couple Spotted in Car Were Just Chowing Down, Not Snorting Up

The always exciting police blotter of the Seal Beach Sun reported that “a male and female were seen in their car behind a business and thought to be snorting cocaine.”

But, the item said, “police checked the scene and the two subjects were just eating Japanese food with chopsticks.”

Hope the false alarm didn’t cause the two diners to lose their tempuras.

Another one you won’t see on “Cops”: The Sun also carried a complaint from a resident who “had been at a bar the previous night and had seen a video game there that shows a nude female when someone wins.”

At a Seal Beach bar? Shocking.

What kind of geography lesson is this? Michele Riniche of Manhattan Beach passed along a snapshot of a street construction sign from the city Environmental Services newsletter of Portland, Ore. (see photo).

L.A. Insult of the Day: In “Up Country,” the new potboiler by Nelson DeMille, an Army investigator visiting Ho Chi Minh City encounters an ex-South Vietnamese soldier whose family has moved to America.

A translator tells the American that the man’s wife and children are “doing well and send him money. They live in Los Angeles.”

Replies the investigator: “Well ... I hope they wind up someplace nice.”

Needless to say, the investigator grew up in the east Boston area.

Suburban Insult of the Day: I made the mistake of saying that Reseda had been ignored by the cultural world and promptly heard about two songs that mention the Valley community (not favorably): “Free Fallin’” by Tom Petty and “Screenwriter’s Blues” by Soul Coughing.

Now, Elliot Zwiebach has contributed a third: “Errol Flynn” by Amanda McBroom.

Zwiebach says it’s “about a child recalling her late father, an actor always billed several names below Flynn,” who was a carouser a la Flynn and walked out of her life when she was very young.

Zwiebach sets the scene with this verse:

“In a hall on the wall in a house in Reseda is a poster held up by two nails and a pin.... “

Thanks for the warning: Joel Grossman of L.A. spotted a guarantee from a cleaning company that could be read the wrong way (see accompanying).

Food for thought: If you clean your plate, just like mother always told you to do, Ken Pollock of Huntington Beach has just the restaurant discount for you (see accompanying).

And now for the traffic: St. Patrick’s Day put John Schulte of Banning in the mood to write a limerick--an L.A. type of limerick:

A commuter exceedingly wise

Moved away from his home in Van Nuys.

He said, “It isn’t the grime,

Or the smog, or the crime;

It’s the 405 I despise.”

miscelLAny: One of artist Sandra Beebe’s works on display in Long Beach is a nightmarish watercolor titled “The Sentinels.” I say nightmarish because it’s a close-up of two parking meters, one with the red “Time Expired” flap showing.

The list price is $2,000, which is probably about what various “Time Expired” flaps have cost me over the years.

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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.