Smell Segundo: An indignant caller disputes our...

Smell Segundo: An indignant caller disputes our story that El Segundo (“The Second” in English) was so named because it was the site of Standard Oil’s second refinery in California.

“Actually,” he told us, “El Segundo is a shortened version of the name. The full name was El Segundo de Nada because the city is ‘Second to None.’ ”

Well, we phoned the city, and reference librarian Denise Dumars confirmed our version. She consulted the history, “El Segundo--75 Years,” and found that author Eileen Curry Hunter relates that the name was the idea of the wife of a Standard Oil exec.

Too bad El Segundo wasn’t the first site, in which case it might have been christened El Premiero. Then, perhaps, it wouldn’t have this complex that drives it to put up nasty billboards about L.A. (Richmond, Calif., by the way, is El Premiero).

As for El Segundo de Nada, Dumars said the folk tale persists “because that’s how a lot of local people feel about the city. I think it’s also been used in advertising.”

Of course, El Segundo’s name has also inspired some kidding from its neighbors. The resident of another beach city wrote to tell us one of the most common quips. “There is a sewage treatment plant in El Segundo,” she said. “Let’s put it this way: They don’t call it No. 2 for nothing.”

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Post-POSSLQ: E. Robert Breech Jr. of always fragrant Santa Monica writes that his wife, Sally, “was highly flattered” by the reader who wrote us of seeing a white Mercedes with the license plate XPOSSLQ “driven by a beautiful woman.”

POSSLQ, of course, is the romantic census bureau term for Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters. Breech said that since he and Sally became XPOSSLQs they have been “happily married the last six years.”

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POSSLQ, through and through: Breech also forwarded a poem, author unknown, he received from a friend in Texas. An excerpt:

You live with me, and I with you,

And you will be my POSSLQ.

I’ll be your friend and so much more;

That’s what a POSSLQ is for.

And everything we will confess;

Yes, even to the IRS.

Some day, on what we both may earn,

Perhaps we’ll file a joint return.

You’ll share my pad, my taxes joint.

You’ll share my life--up to a point. . . .

(We have to stop here; the tears always well up in our eyes at this point.)

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OK--write on the street 100 times. . . . Michael Bird of Calabasas, who took today’s photo in Las Virgenes School District, points out the irony that it “is one of the top-rated districts, according to the recent testing reported in the L.A. Times.” Maybe the district should hire some of the kids to paint the pavement warnings.

miscelLAny The Total Woman Health & Beauty Spa in Woodland Hills sounds like the kind of place to get away from it all. Sure--and when you get away from it all there, one of its ads says, you can, “WATCH O.J. WHILE YOU WORK OUT. . . . You can enjoy the sidebars and the arguments. . . . You can get into shape without giving up one moment of trial coverage.”