Somebody Speeding Along on the Ventura Freeway? What a Novel Concept!

I just snapped up a copy of Stephen Cannell’s potboiler “The Viking Funeral” because I couldn’t resist this blurb on the jacket: “If Detective Shane Scully’s best friend, Jody Dean, committed suicide three years ago, then who did Shane just see for one fleeting moment on the Ventura Freeway?”

What a mystery! I mean the absence of congestion on the Ventura Freeway. In real life, traffic chugs along so slowly there you don’t see anyone for “a fleeting moment.” By the time I escape that freeway I generally feel like I’ve known the other drivers around me all my life.

Reviewing 2002 (cont.): Here are some excerpts from Manhattan Beach cartoonist Keith Robinson’s list of items that didn’t make it into Toys R Us (see above).

Unclear on the concept: Floyd Levin of Studio City could have been excused for wondering about the effectiveness of his anti-itch prescription (see above).

Water, water, up there: The federal government, as you may have heard, has cut by half the amount of water that Southern California receives from the Colorado River.

I’ll tell you one thing. I’ll no longer feel self-conscious when I ask the soda jerk at the movies to hold the ice in my Coke. Anyway, talk of a water shortage makes me wonder if we shouldn’t reexamine some colorful ideas that were proposed during the last drought (honest):

* June 1990: Ventura city officials say they’re studying the possibility of hauling icebergs from the polar caps here and planting them off the county’s shores.

* August 1990: L.A. County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn suggests that the Pacific Northwest act like a “good neighbor” and channel some water down to Southern California. (“You’ve got to be kidding,” says one Oregon official.)

* April, 1992: A Santa Barbara company talks of hauling water from Alaskan rivers here in huge nylon bags. (“Only somebody in California could come up with something like this,” comments one Alaska official.)

The Idaho conspiracy: And then there were the “IDA-H20” billboards that started popping up around L.A. several years ago. Idahoans grew a bit panicky until they found out that the ads were merely pitches for white-water rafting vacations in that state.

Don’t leave the Southland high and dry! Anyone out there have any imaginative water-conservation ideas?

MiscelLAny: Driving down memory row, Charles Wilson of Oxnard sent along an ad by a defunct used car dealership that read: “Lousy cars! High prices! Our motto is ‘caveat emptor.’ You needn’t go clear to L.A. to be lied to. Our salesmen are masters of deception.”

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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.