Balm of Bother

The differences of opinion over background music in offices — whether it soothes or disturbs — continues to echo.

The
original complaint came from a City Hall worker who found the music
there shattering to his nerves and such a disturbing element he
couldn't do his work efficiently.

Now another city employee, in
the Building and Safety Department, finds it a boon in loosening
tension. He sends along statistics showing its psychological benefits,
including a management survey which disclosed an 8.03% increase in
clerical productivity and a 36% decline in lateness after planned
background music was introduced.

COLUMNIST CASSANDRA recently
wrote, "All over the United States you get this soft, mindless,
faceless music. You hear it in airplanes before take-off, in banks
before brush-off and in bars before clear-off. It makes you feel
sweetly dead in an icing-sugary sort of way. But it is a far, far
better noise than most of the filthy, earsplitting racket of modern
civilization."

However, a lawyer who finds that the music in the
Law Library bothers him when he tries to study thinks such public
places should have non-music rooms or a push-button system giving
people the privilege of shutting it off.

What all this has been
leading up to is a little situation out on S. Western Ave. A cafe there
has music piped into the rest rooms.

::

ALL OVER TOWN
messages, inscribed on sidewalks while the cement was wet, proclaim
that "John loves Mary" or "Eleanor loves Dick." However, OrlandoNorthcutt reports that on the south side of 6th St. near Rampart there is the sad inscription, "Paul loves someone else."

::

FOOT FASHIONS

Painted shoes are in, you know.
For lucky ladies with one toe.

–PEARL ROWE

::

OVER A
second cup of coffee a group of downtown office workers got to batting
around the question, what is the most perfect thing in the world? One
said a newborn child, others said a thoroughbred horse, a classic
painting, a jet plane, an outer space missile, a blade of grass, a
cactus.

I couldn't think of anything suitable at the time but it
came to me in a flash a couple of days later. I was sitting at the
typewriter at home when my candidate stood still in midair a few
seconds outside my window, looked in and said hello. A hummingbird.

::

AND OVER A second glass of something else in Tommy's Bar. on N Cahuenga Blvd., Tumbleweed Thompson and Joseph DeFranco
have composed a stirring ballad titled "Skid Row Lament." The first
verse goes, "The house where my soul lives is wrinkled and worn, the
house where my soul lives is held up to scorn, I've made it a
smokehouse and that isn't all, the parlor's been flooded with alcohol."

::

ONLY IN L.A. — The APCD
people have never figured out a satisfactory means of transporting a
small amount of oxygen, needed for instant tests but a bright idea came
to them the other day out of the blue. The youngsters at Santa Fe High
in Santa Fe Springs fill a basketball with it and release it as needed
… It will horrify connoisseurs to learn that two youths handed an
insulated bag to a waitress at the House of Pancakes, onStocker Ave., and asked for two orders of crepes Suzette — to go. On a picnic.

::

AROUND TOWN —
Gal named June, noting sidewalk superintendents watching Civic Center
building activity, remarked, "I guess there's something wrong with me
but I just don't dig these bulldozers" … Suggestion by June Ross Drummond: "How about calling it O'Malley's Valley?"