For These High School Graduates, Learning Continues to Be a Veritable Feast

Students with a hunger for knowledge at El Camino Real High were directed to an appropriate site to pick up their diplomas, Paul and Rachel Orr of West Hills point out (see accompanying).

Oops -- almost forgot our vegetables: Vince Stickel of Bloomington came upon a grisly green accident report on a CHP Web site (see accompanying).

On the road: Returning to her hometown of Hankinson, N.D., Karen Essner of Hawthorne noticed a law firm with an eye-catching name (see accompanying).

Moving art: For those of you who can’t get enough of freeways, there’s Yutaka Sone’s “Jungle Island” installation at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary.

It consists of four small white marble slabs that replicate L.A. freeway interchanges amid a tropical environment of exotic plants.

I drove over there from The Times for a look (you didn’t think I was going to walk six blocks, did you?), but found something in the artwork missing. Maybe it was the absence of brake lights in the freeway traffic (all the objects are white).

And there were no panhandlers at the onramps. Nor could I see any traffic tie-ups, except maybe one -- a real-life winged insect had crashed and died on Sone’s 105 Freeway. Twice the size of the tiny vehicles in the exhibit, the bug looked like some villain in a sci-fi movie.

Concrete culture: Of course, L.A. freeways are no strangers to the arts. Surely you’ll recall:

* The 1987 piano recital for motorists by author Sandra Tsing-Loh in a parking garage off the Harbor Freeway.

* The lyrics “Santa Monica Freeway/Sometimes makes a country girl blue-ooh-ooh-oooh” in the song, “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma,” by Shelley West and David Frizzell.

* Movie dialogue such as this from motorist Chevy Chase in “Fletch”: “I would have been here sooner, but a manure-spreader jackknifed on the Santa Ana. You should see my shoes.”

* And, finally, Robert Goulet’s serenade to Ventura Freeway motorists from a helicopter on Valentine’s Day of 1991. I believe he crooned the words that every Angeleno has uttered toward freeways: “If Ever I Would Leave You.”

MiscelLAny: In the you-think-you-have-problems category, a reader wrote to the Palisadian-Post, “I’m dreading spending my summer weekends with the windows closed, as we’re surrounded by charcoal grills. Can anything be done about the billows of smoke that fill the air?”

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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.