This Carpool Rule May Give the Pregnant Pause

I mentioned a while back that a mortuary worker, caught using a car-pool lane, alibied that he thought he could count a dead body as a passenger. (He was dead wrong.)

Here’s another car-pool scenario that a cagey driver brought up on the CHP’s website (www.chp.ca.gov/html/qanda.html).

Question: “The HOV lane requires two persons in a vehicle. Now that I’m eating for two, can I use this lane?”

Answer: “California law requires that in order to utilize the HOV lane, there must be two (or, if posted, three) separate individuals occupying seats in a vehicle. Until your ‘passenger’ is capable of riding in his or her own seat, you cannot count them.”

The website says, believe it or not, that the pregnant-driver query is one of the most frequently asked questions of officers.

Dueling for customers: Frank Drainudel of Encino spotted two businesses that appeared to be in the same line of work (see photo).

What next? “Are you supposed to be tipping the doctor now?” asked Martha Bailey (see accompanying). “I thought tip jars at the coffee shop were obnoxious enough.”

Don’t know much about geography: Susan Simpson of Fullerton noticed that Metrolink seemed to be going the wrong way, judging from the directional notation included with a lineup of stops on one website (see accompanying).

Away from the mike: USC football broadcaster Pete Arbogast offers a behind-the-scenes look at his doings on his entertaining blog. Some excerpts:

* Waiting in a Lewiston, Idaho, airport after USC’s most recent game, “some of the players catch some cockroaches in the airport lounge and watch them race. Loser has to eat his roach. [Lineman] Jeff Schweiger downs his rather large specimen in one bite. Ewwwwwwww.”

* Some “grumbles” are heard, “particularly from what appeared to be an inebriated group of men” during a speech before the San Gabriel Valley Trojan Club, when Arbogast says a football team should never knowingly accept a referee’s bad call in its favor. The grumblers say things “along the lines of ‘ethics are for losers.’ ”

* After the Trojans’ opener in Arkansas, the team buses are overbooked “and while I went in and saved seats for our broadcast crew, some rummy kid -- who said he would save them if anyone tried to take them -- did nothing when someone took them, so [broadcast partner] Paul [McDonald] and I had to stand in the aisles all the way back to the airport, a one-hour trip.”

miscelLAny: The crime log of the Aliso Viejo News said that a resident complained that when he has “guests smoking in the patio,” his next-door neighbor sprays bug repellent in their direction.

Guess the neighbor has found a way to fight two types of pests at once.