Behavior of Apparent Ding-a-Ling Didn’t Ring a Bell With Alarmed Resident

What was once strange behavior ...: The Laguna News-Post carried a police log item about a resident who was alarmed “about a man pacing up and down in front of his house for at least two hours.” Police investigated “and found that the man was talking to his friend on a cell phone.”

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Another strange connection: When an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy pulled over a driver for a traffic violation in a parking lot, the woman began to sob uncontrollably. The officer walked away to write the citation, figuring that would give the driver some time to calm down. Then the deputy’s radio blared a call about a screaming woman, a possible stabbing victim. And the address was the same parking lot.

The deputy looked around but couldn’t find any evidence of a crime, and for good reason, recounted Star News, a department publication. The 911 call had been made on a cellular phone, not by a stabbing victim, but by the incoherent recipient of the traffic ticket.

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Some really foreign languages: You never know what exotic prose you’re going to spot in multilingual Southern California (see photos). Henk Friezer found a parking sign with an inadvertent touch of German. Vina Sealtiel came upon a florist’s marquee with a spelling that would make Parisians blanch. And Carlos Araujo saw an ad for what sounded like a Spanish bird show, not a dance act.

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The myth that won’t die: At the Oscars, actor Nathan Lane declared that Walt Disney would be smiling about the new animated movie award “if he wasn’t frozen solid.” Actually Disney, who died in 1966, was cremated and his remains were interred at Forest Lawn in Glendale.

But somehow the story arose that his body had been frozen with the hope it could be resuscitated later. The rumor coincided with publicity about a body-freezing movement called cryonics. Since then, emcees of awards shows, which are watched by millions, have no doubt helped keep the myth alive.

During one Emmys telecast, Paul Resider observed that two networks (Westinghouse’s CBS and General Electric’s NBC) are owned by companies that sell freezers, while a third, ABC, is owned by a company “whose founder is in a freezer.”

And at an Oscars show a few years ago, Billy Crystal cracked that until the creation of the Mighty Ducks hockey team “the only Disney on ice was Walt.”

Considering the miserable season that the Mighty Ducks are having, they seem to have fallen through the ice.

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miscelLAny: Ken Ayeroff, continuing the series of memorable marquee pairings, said: “I recall this twin bill at the now-demolished Pan Pacific Theater on one of my first dates in the early 1970s: ROMEO AND JULIET / THE ODD COUPLE.”

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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.