Who’s to Blame When Toilet Causes Your House to Shake?

Did she want her plumber arrested? The crime log of the Laguna Niguel News said a resident phoned the cops to report that “when she flushed her toilet, the house shook.”

More bathroom humor: The resident’s unstable toilet reminded me of a pre-April Fools’ Day hoax that disc jockey Rick Dees pulled on the air 11 years ago. Dees announced one morning that toilets all over the Southland were apt to explode because of a backed-up sewer system, and he recommended that listeners put at least 10 pounds of weight on their toilet seats to prevent floods.

Hundreds of folks phoned sanitation agencies in a panic. “Fortunately,” an L.A. city public works official said, “I think a lot of people just decided to go to work rather than stand on their toilet seat all day.”

I was taking that day off, anyway, honest.

What about ‘all of the above’? “Nothing much surprises me around L.A. anymore,” wrote Judith Turcott of Downey, who enclosed an unusual question on a customer profile quiz (see accompanying).

“But,” she added, “this mailing came from a company in Lakewood, N.J. Guess they’re not so square back there anymore.”

No calculator needed! “I say the math can’t get much less ‘complicated,’ ” wrote Chris Chapin of Malibu in regard to a not-so-tempting offer he received (see accompanying).

Food for thought: David Chan of L.A. suspects the menu item he saw contained a typo. Really, it wasn’t a canine plate (see accompanying).

Genealogy, Hollywood-style: I read that Frances Fisher plays the mother of Julianne Moore in the movie “Laws of Attraction,” though she is just eight years older than Moore.

This kind of weird parenting is a tradition in the movies:

Paul Newman was actually three years younger than Jo Van Fleet, the woman who played his mother, in “Cool Hand Luke.”

In “The Manchurian Candidate,” Laurence Harvey was the son of Angela Lansbury, who would have been 3 when she gave birth.

Dustin Hoffman was the son of Sean Connery, seven years older, in “Family Business” and the son of William Daniels, 10 years his senior, in “The Graduate.”

And Anne Bancroft, the “older” woman who was Hoffman’s mistress in “The Graduate,” would have been just six grades ahead of Hoffman in school.

Most remarkable, perhaps, was Jessie Royce Landis portraying Cary Grant’s mother in “North by Northwest,” though she was actually 10 months younger than Grant. Perhaps this was the inspiration for the movie “Back to the Future.”

MiscelLAny: When actress Gwyneth Paltrow named her daughter Apple the other day, I pointed out that stars often give their offspring flamboyant names.

But Dennis Drissi wrote: “Maybe naming her baby girl Apple wasn’t a celebrity thing. Maybe it had to do with technology. Gwyneth knows darn well the Apples are less likely to be infected by ‘viruses’!”

Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LATimes, 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.