Cab fare to USC collected, eventually

A university is, of course, an arena for the pursuit of knowledge. But USC’s campus cops decided to intervene at a school entrance when they “observed four students run past the location with a male in pursuit.” The problem? “The male was a taxi driver and the students had fled from his cab without paying their fare,” police reported. Two of the scofflaws escaped and the others refused to identify them. But the two apprehended students did pay the fare and were released, “after being advised that the matter would be referred to Judicial Affairs.” I hope they remembered to tip the cabby.

Summing up 2006? Curt Doty of La Canada Flintridge chanced upon a movie marquee that seemed to offer a commentary on the last 11 months (see photo). Hey, not so fast. Maybe December will save the year.

Guide to adventurous dining: Today’s specials (see accompanying) include:

* A place where the diners themselves are dished up, from Rusty Young.

* An event that could upset your stomach (and so soon after Thanksgiving!), from Timothy Lemm.

* And an odd command in a hamburger ad, from Larry Riesenbach, who says: “I initially thought they were saying we’d have to ‘roll over’ to allow our bellies to expand after eating this pastrami burger. Turns out the text is telling people to roll their mouse cursor over the links at the bottom of the ad to make a coupon pop out, etc.”

Strange connections: Joan Kaufman saw it at the Laurel Canyon offramp of the Ventura Freeway: “An evidently homeless man, with a ‘Need Food’ sign, having a vehement argument with someone -- on his cellphone.” Then there was this sighting in Los Feliz by J. Richard Singleton: A panhandler at a post office was “holding the door open to customers with one hand, talking on his cellphone with the other. The truly sad part was that the transient had a cooler phone than me.”

Bird on a wire: Mystery novelist John Morgan Wilson found a mystery he can’t solve: “At Sepulveda and Westwood boulevards, someone has managed to hang a mobile of an orange bird from a power line above that very busy intersection. The cheerful-looking birdie literally twists in the wind for the amusement of the thousands of people stuck in gridlock there every day. It appears well fixed by strong thread to the wire, not just tossed up like an old pair of sneakers tied together by the laces, which raises the question: Who did it, and how?”

And you thought you had problems: The Seal Beach Sun said a resident called police to report that his “neighbor was feeding squirrels in the area. The problem, according to the caller, is that the squirrels dig holes in the caller’s yard and bury their nuts in said holes.”

miscelLAny: “Boy, I thought the State Bar was tough with attorney discipline,” wrote J’Amy Pacheco after spotting this headline in the Metropolitan News-Enterprise: “Ninth Circuit Reverses Death Sentence for Attorney Incompetence.” Well, interesting idea though it might be, lower courts haven’t gotten that tough with attorneys. It was the client whose sentence was reversed.