Car Troubles

He did, then asked where he could put the one in front.  The man there saw no possibility and directed him to the Highway Patrol at 4th and Vermont.

There he retold his sad tale.  An officer circled the car, looking for a spot to put the front plate.  When he came up with nothing Bob asked, “What do you suggest?”

“Sell it,” the officer said.

UNDERGRADUATE ENTHUSIASM for today’s game is about even.  First SC students swiped a UCLA air horn, which was returned.  Then UCLA students put a blue paint coating on Tommy Trojan, the SC statue.  Then four SC students put a red paint job on UCLA’s Founder’s Rock but were caught swiping two banners.  An SC student policing group has curtailed their privileges.

THIN MARGIN
When getting on a bus that
is packed
The avoirdupois I long
have lacked
Is then a  joy, a thing
of merit,
As past the fatter forms
I ferret.
–DELLA SKELLETT

IT IS traditional and inevitable that reporters, who write the news stories, and copy readers, who edit and put heads on them, should quibble.  Reporters contend copy readers destroy their lilting prose.  Copy readers accuse reporters of slaughtering the language.  They went at it again the other day.

A rewrite man turned in a  story about a W 8th St. liquor store holdup in which a case of Scotch was stolen.  The reporter, obviously a naive fellow, identified it as “Hague and Hague” instead of Haig and Haig.

A surly copy reader asked him, “Are you sure it wasn’t a case of Holland gin?”

IN HIS latest Desert Rat Scrap Book, all about good Injuns, Harry Oliver tells of a party of tourists visiting some Indian ruins in a desolate section of Arizona.  To get to them they had to leave their cars and walk.

En route, a woman exclaimed, “Gracious, I forgot to lock the car!”

“Don’t worry,” the Indian guide said, “there isn’t a white man within 50 miles.”

IT MAY BE comforting to know that the Health Department is watching over you, even if you don’t care.

Bob Martin received a notice the other day that his dog Concho had been quarantined for 14 days as a rabies suspect.  Puzzled, he phoned County health and asked why.  “Because he bit you,” he was told.

Then Bob remembered.  Six weeks ago the dog playfully bit or scratched him on the leg.  About a week ago the sore looked infected and Bob stopped at Hollywood Receiving Hospital, where a doc put a bandage on it.  He also turned in a dog-bite report which went to Central, then to County health, then to Burbank, where Bob lives, and boom — quarantine for Concho.

Meanwhile, the wound was healed.

FOOTNOTES — It was a big week for bird watching.  In addition to the usual sparrows, towhees, blue-jays, juncoes and flickers, four stately quail, a long absent thrush, the first robin of fall and a yellow-breasted number tentatively identified as a MacGillivray’s warbler visited the back yard.  That’s what it states in Ernest Sheldon Booth’s “Birds of the West” — MacGillivray’s warbler . . . Councilman Ransom Callicott, chatting with a friend about car mileage, remarked, “Five gallons of gas is just a light lunch for my car.”