Officers Get to the Bottom of Case of the Intoxicated Student

The great escape artist, he wasn’t. An intoxicated young Isla Vista man, embroiled in a martial arts fight in an apartment, was arrested after he threatened to fight arriving officers, reported the Daily Nexus, UC Santa Barbara’s student newspaper.

“Just let me pull my pants up,” he was quoted as saying.

The drama didn’t end there, though.

After being placed alone in an interrogation room at a substation, the suspect “slipped his handcuffs to the front of his body,” the newspaper said.

He then “stacked the room’s plastic chairs and trash can on top of one another to form a makeshift ladder, which he used to climb up into the acoustic ceiling tiles.” Vandalism was added to the charges against him.

All wet: Like everything else in this world, taking a bath isn’t as simple as it used to be (see accompanying):

* Ron Wilford of Burbank found an apartment where you need reservations to take a soak.

* Patti Garrity of Manhattan Beach noticed a tub that seemed to be filled with edibles, not water.

* And Paul Neifert of Ontario and Nadine Colt of Banning chanced upon a home where it could take you forever to decide which bath to jump into.

Clothes-less column (cont.): Writer Kevin Roderick’s laobserved.com website points out that the TV show “LAX” had an episode involving a male streaker running through a security checkpoint just a few days before a similar real-life event at the airport. A Canadian man, miffed that an airline had refused to sell him a ticket, shed all his clothes, jumped a fence, ran across the tarmac and attempted to hide in the wheel well of a jumbo jet.

Incidentally ... : I should confess that a quarter-century ago, a member of my sister’s household also sprinted onto an LAX runway while clothes-less.

It was her Labrador mix, Morris, who had eaten his way through a wooden crate on his arriving flight and apparently decided to run off some calories.

Though the seemingly indestructible hound had previously been hit by cars twice and survived, Morris had never been hit by a plane, and my sister was worried. He was, fortunately, caught without incident.

One officer suggested that my sister switch to plastic crates.

miscelLAny: Hans Haveron’s “The Day the Oceans Rose Over Los Angeles,” which opens Nov. 12 at the Ghettogloss Gallery in L.A., is described as an art show of “underwater surrealism.” I guess everyone in L.A. takes a bath in that one.

Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LATimes, Ext. 77083, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A. 90012, and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.