Like wheels on a bus, this boy’s mind goes round and round
Some people are just born problem-solvers. Take Jacob, a student in the fourth-grade class of Terri Lau of North Hollywood. The lad had no difficulty coming up with an answer when Lau posed this math puzzle to her kids: On a school bus with a maximum capacity of 66 and identical rows of seats, how do you know you can put three students on each seat, with no leftovers? Answered Jacob: “Just squish them.”
Moving on to spelling: The idea that someone proofread one of Oprah’s billboards evidently is an illusion (see photo). Responding to the blurb, Jack Herman suggested adding the words “but not the best speller.” Meanwhile, Eric Leonard observed: “Perhaps the guy can make a ‘T’ disappear.”
Inyo face, English teachers: While we’re at it, Tom Budlong of L.A. chanced upon an Inyo County sign that should be removed (see photo).
The real poop: As for a statistic that appeared on a Mt. Whitney sign (see photo), Bob and Fran Childers of Torrance asked: “Who weighed it?”
OK, L.A. may be sprawling but ... : I don’t think it extends as far as Alaska. Bob Rubin of Whittier, who noticed the cartographic catastrophe in an Asian airline magazine, theorized that someone had mixed up “Anchorage” with “Angeles” (see photo).
Seven identity crises ago ... : I read in the Long Beach Press-Telegram that there’s a proposal to turn the city’s Livingston Park into a parking lot (odd how different the meanings of “park” and “parking” are in this context). I was saddened by the news, even though I once had a startling experience there.
I had taken my daughter, Sarah, to the park. She was 5, I was 47. We’re sort of an odd couple, looks-wise, as well as age-wise, inasmuch as her mother is Chinese American and I’m Bald European. Anyway, I let her run into the fenced enclosure by herself because I had to go back to my car to fetch the novel I was reading. When I returned, she took no notice of me.
We didn’t speak until I told her it was time to go to kindergarten. She started hollering and refused to leave. Finally I took her hand and was pulling her along when a young woman stepped between us and the playground exit. “Do you know this man?” the woman asked Sarah, without looking at me.
Sarah, bless her heart, let me off the hook. “He’s my dad,” she said. The woman stepped out of the way, and Sarah and I left, me carrying my novel, “ ‘C’ is for Corpse.”
miscelLAny: Dodgers broadcaster Rick Monday, describing a long fly ball in one game, said that Dodgers outfielder Luis Gonzalez “crashed into the fence and held on to it.” He quickly added, “The ball, not the fence.” I suspect that Monday was sensitive to committing the same sort of boo-boo made years ago by Jerry Coleman, his counterpart in San Diego. “There’s a fly to deep centerfield,” Coleman exclaimed on that occasion. “Winfield is going back, back! He hits his head against the wall! It’s rolling toward second base!”