Eccentric? Us?

    Deserved or not, people in Los Angeles have acquired a reputation for eccentricity.  Today there's evidence that we normal, ordinary folk may be the victims of borers from without.
   
Into our placid, humdrum community about a week ago came Will Jones, Minneapolis Tribune columnist.  He visits L.A. several times a year to check on movies and television.

    While here he saw a great many people and went a lot of places — on a bicycle.  Yes, bicycle.  A man of firm beliefs despite his Wally Cox appearance, he contends it's the only way to travel — in Minneapolis or Los Angeles.
   
To prove his point he pedaled one day from MGM in Culver City to downtown L.A.  Another time he went from Hollywood to Santa Monica.  He covered Errol Flynn's funeral at Forest Lawn by bicycle.

   HE WAS ASKED to move from a certain Hollywood hotel because he insisted on keeping his bicycle in his room.  It is a large hotel and he argued, in vain, that it was practical to ride his bike to and from the pool and the dinning room.  He moved to a smaller place where his bicycle was socially acceptable.

    Then there was the time he had an engagement at a restaurant with Merrilyn Hammond of Capitol Records.  He arrived late.  To his dismay the parking lot attendants were reluctant to assume responsibility fro his bike. 

    While here, Jones must have created more consternation than 100 local conformists.  Obviously, these outlanders are partly responsible for giving the place a taint of screwballishness.

    THURSDAY, Oct. 29, the 30th anniversary of the black day in 1929 when Wall St. laid an egg, was not unnoticed by John Arrington, the sage of Bunker Hill, who observed.  "It couldn't have happened again because most of the buildings that people would have jumped out of have been torn down to make parking lots."

INVITATION
O come with me my pretty
    girl,
And be my protege;
We'll live and laugh and
    love and whirl
Upon our merry way-
And none will find a stone
    to hurl
If you're my protege.
    –JOHNNY LIGHTHEART

    DURING HIS lunch hour a few days ago Virgil Raymond, Water & Power employee, bought an alarm clock!  While he was away from his desk, fellow workers opened the package, set the alarm for 5:30 and re-wrapped it.

    Shortly before 5:30 Virgil boarded a No. 25 Griffith Ave. bus and became engrossed in his newspaper.  A man carrying a lunch box came and sat next to him.  As the bus reached City Hall the alarm went off.  Virgil, a sly one, lowered his paper and glared at the lunch box.  So did the other passengers and as the alarm continued ringing the poor guy tore into it.  Just then the clock stopped ringing.

    All this was duly reported by Virgil and the conspirators are pleased with their success.  But they feel it would have been a greater triumph if some terrified passenger had grabbed the lunchbox and heaved it out a window.

   TODAY'S BAFFLER has to do with two phone calls Jack Tobin made in quest of basketball information.  He talked to coach Howie Dallmar at Palo Alto for six minutes and the operator told him the charge was $4.25 plus tax.  He talked to coach Slats Gill at Corvallis, Ore., considerably farther, for six minutes and the charge was $2.70 plus tax.  Jack doesn't get it either.

    FOOTNOTES — Sponsors of the Glendale Kennel Club show tomorrow reminded entrants of Maurice Maeterlinck's line: "A few creatures fear us and endure our laws and our yoke but none of them loves us.  Only the dog has made an alliance with us" . . . The headline, "Kaiser Signs Pact," referring to the steel strike, had Janet Siskind wondering momentarily if we were back in 1941 . . . A teen-ager named Wendy hates windy days on account of the weak gags about her name.