Maybe This Singing Neighbor Should Consider Taking Some Voice Lessons
The Los Alamitos News-Enterprise said that officers checked out a report of a burglar alarm blaring at a building but heard nothing more than a woman singing.
Modern living:
Today’s exhibits (see accompanying) include:
A condo whose amenities include a dad (Valerie Anne Bishop).
A ship that promises weird lodgings (Charlotte Fournier of Laguna Woods).
A ranch that sounds as though it would be a pain to manage (Philip Wickey of Long Beach).
And, finally, speaking of the great outdoors, a place in Montana where it’s OK to shoot yourself in the foot (Michael Meyer of Palm Desert).
Nosing out the competition: The 2003 Guinness Book of Records is out, and it contains much for L.A. to be proud of. Daredevil feats accomplished in the City of Angels include:
* Fastest consumption of a bottle of tomato ketchup, 33 seconds, by Dustin Phillips. He sucked down 14 ounces through a straw that was a quarter-inch in diameter.
* Longest “spaghetti strand blown out of a nostril in a single blow,” 7.5 inches, by Kevin Cole.
* Fastest backward run from L.A. to New York City, 107 days, by Arvind Pandya. Or maybe it was New York City to L.A., I forget which.
* Fastest chowing-down of wristwatches, one hour and 34 minutes, by Kim Seung Do, who “ate five watches (the entire watches with the exception of the wristbands).” I dunno. The fact that he passed on the wristbands marred the performance for me. He could have put some ketchup on them.
Maybe a new Valley city should be run by a pharaoh, not a mayor: Some descriptions of the San Fernando Valley on the colorful americassuburb.com Web site of author Kevin Roderick:
* “San Fernando became as renowned as the Valley of the Nile” (a Valley newspaper editor in the 1930s).
* “Cleveland with palm trees” (Bob Hope).
* “The dizzy, ubiquitous mixture of Fifth Avenue and Main Street [with] its sun and its air, its capering squirrels, its four-lane pavements, its avenue of dining rooms....” (Coronet magazine, 1951).
* “Putting me in a closed car and stewing me in the sun is not the right way to guarantee my safety” (Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev complaining about a State Department decision to have him tour the Valley instead of Disneyland in 1959).
Clearly a guy with no appreciation for the Valley’s capering squirrels.
miscelLAny: Roderick’s Web site also contains some names proposed by Jay Leno for a Valley City: Off-Ramp Acres, Asphalt by the Sea, Smogadena, Pornadelphia, Newer Jersey and Unknown Actorville.
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Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LA-TIMES, Ext. 77083, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A. 90012 and by e-mail at [email protected].
