These Folks Apparently Have a Very Long Holiday Season in Mind

This trend of businesses promoting far-off holidays is really getting out of hand. Christmas and New Year’s haven’t even gotten here yet, but Anita Sterman noticed that a Woodland Hills restaurant was looking forward to April (see accompanying).

Attention, shoppers! Artist Keith Robinson of Manhattan Beach paid tribute to a temperamental actor and a hard-to-find gift, among others, in his “Parent’s Guide to the Worst Toys of 2005” (see accompanying).

Unclear on the concept: Mike Frediani of Burbank spotted a pedestrian warning that was facing in the wrong direction. I just hope I don’t have to testify at the first slip-and-fall trial (see photo).

Question of the Day: “Whatever happened to mother’s milk?” asked Bill Stephen of Lakewood (see photo).

Speaking of drinking: Diedrich Coffee of Irvine just announced its new chief executive -- Stephen Coffey. It’s a better fit for someone named Coffey than his previous job as the boss of Edwards Cinemas. Why don’t more movie theaters serve coffee, anyway?

Wilting reputation? I guess the city’s recent troubles have made folks in San Diego a bit sensitive. San Diego Magazine grumbled that an item in the Wall Street Journal about the flower fields of Encinitas “doesn’t even mention Encinitas’ big neighbor, San Diego. It puts Encinitas ‘just north of La Jolla, California.’ ”

OK, here’s some recognition for San Diego: But not everyone is happy about it. San Diego State will be honored by Playboy magazine next year in its “Girls of the Top Ten Party Schools” issue, the city’s Union-Tribune revealed. The dean of students told columnist Diane Bell the rankings were “an insult.”

The guv and the bear: On the TV news, I saw a snippet about a Monrovia homeowner whose outside Christmas decorations are dedicated to Samson the bear. You may remember the creature who dropped in for some hot-tubbing in local backyards in the mid-1990s. He was eventually taken to the Orange County Zoo, where he was a crowd favorite until his death in 2001.

Samson also occasioned a memorable Times snafu in which parts of two paragraphs about a zoo visit by then-Gov. Pete Wilson were inadvertently combined. The resulting sentence read: “After his speech, the governor, accompanied by six children, his entourage and dozens of reporters, climbed out of his pool to pace along his chain-link fence, occasionally standing on his hind legs and tilting his head back.”

Wilson good-naturedly wrote a letter to The Times that said: “Samson has been described in print as old, feeble and toothless. But to call him ‘the governor’ -- that’s unfairness no bear should have to bear.”

miscelLAny: I’m glad the San Francisco Chronicle finally fessed up. It recently ran a correction to an Oct. 15 story “about mathematical references on ‘The Simpsons’ TV show [that] mistakenly said that 1,782 to the 12th power plus 1,841 to the 12th power equals 1,922 to the 12th power. Actually, 1,782 to the 12th power plus 1,841 to the 12th power equals 2,541,210,258,614, 589,176,288,669,958,142,428,526, 657, while 1,922 to the 12th power equals 2,541,210,259,314,801,410, 819,278,649,643,651,567,616.” As Homer Simpson could tell you.