Recent Southland Weather Reminds That We Do Have Seasons

The recent weather -- a rainstorm before summer ended, followed by windy, 100-degree days to start autumn -- recalls a line by the late Times columnist Jack Smith. It’s not true that we have no seasons out here, he said.

It’s just that, in unpredictable Southern California, you never know what day it’s going to be winter, what day it’s going to be summer, etc.

Well, the weather’s right for it: Craig Walker of Orange sent along a shot of a cheeky laundry marquee (see photo).

Unclear on the concept? A store with a loose definition of “new” caught the eye of Don Fawcett of Brentwood (see photo).

Wild with numbers? While in New Zealand, Lloyd Welch of La Canada Flintridge found some accountants whose names don’t fit that occupation’s conservative image (see photo).

Which reminds me: USC fans are no doubt wild about their school’s latest victory over UCLA -- in the business school rankings.

USC’s Marshall School of Business moved from 23rd to 10th in the nation while UCLA’s Anderson School of Management remained at No. 19 in the yearly Harris Interactive Poll.

I wonder if UCLA’s secondary position means it’s going to be more difficult for the school to recruit highly sought-after bean counters and number-crunchers out of local high schools.

Your tax dollars at work: Gary Maxwell of Huntington Beach chanced upon a highway project gathering some important information in Fountain Valley (see photo).

Oops: The snopes.com website, investigator of urban folk tales, says that, alas, it’s true:

After Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, CBS showed a rerun of “The Price Is Right” that offered a grand prize of a round-trip flight “from Los Angeles to New Orleans for a six-night stay at the Renaissance Pere Marquette Hotel, within walking distance to the French Quarter.”

Snopes added that “network executives caught on and pulled the episode before it aired in the Pacific time zone, but only after it had already run on stations in the Eastern, Central and Mountain time zones.”

A CBS spokesman told the website that the show had attempted to screen out reruns with mentions of New Orleans but that “episode was unfortunately overlooked.”

miscelLAny: Russell Kishi told the ronfineman.com media website that the closed captioning of a local TV news broadcast twice referred to the movie version of “To Kill a Mockingbird” as “Tequila Mockingbird.”