Sitting in a traffic jam won’t be...

Sitting in a traffic jam won’t be a waste of time for 500 motorists in San Pedro this weekend.

They will be earning $5 an hour or more as motion picture extras on the Terminal Island Freeway, which will be closed until midnight Sunday for the filming of an accident scene.

Response to a published casting call for owners of pre-1971 automobiles was swift, especially among women. After all, the movie, “Air America,” stars Mel Gibson. Inevitably, someone speculated that San Pedro could be hit with “Gib-lock,” even though the actor won’t be there.

The movie itself is “about a helicopter pilot in Vietnam,” said Lisa Shapiro of Bill Dance Casting.

Makes sense. More and more, L.A.’s freeways do resemble a battlefield.

“It never rains in Southern Cal-i-for-nia” went the song lyric.

Some people, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony among them, seem to be wondering if that condition isn’t becoming literally true. Mahony has gone so far as to urge readers of the Tidings, the weekly newspaper of the L.A. archdiocese, to seek divine help.

You can be sure some Pasadenans will be praying for rain.

An increasing number of skunks are wandering out of the foothills in search of water, as well as food, says Steve McNall, executive director of the Pasadena Humane Society.

“Some of the large estates along the Arroyo Seco make great condominiums for our little animals,” he pointed out.

This could, in fact, be the biggest year in recent times for sightings/smellings. Last year alone, the Pasadena Humane Society caught 330 of the aromatic critters.

One way to fight the problem, McNall said, is to rent one of the society’s traps ($1 a day) to capture the invaders. The traps are hooded, incidentally.

“They’re calmer in a dark trap,” McNall said. “We don’t want them to get excited.”

Another verboten critter starting to appear in urban areas is the “designer pig.”

But, in this case, humans are the culprits. The pot-bellied, pygmy porker, imported from Vietnam, has become something of a fad pet (at a cost of $1,500 or more per snout).

However, attorneys in the county counsel’s office recently huddled on this important issue and decided that people can’t keep “designer pigs” in residential sections.

“The fact that people want to keep pigs as pets does not change the fact that pigs are livestock,” explained Frank R. Andrews of the county Department of Animal Care and Control.

An oink by another name. . . .

KLOS-FM disc jockeys Mark Thompson and Brian Phelps reached Abilene, Tex., Friday evening on their expedition to tow the floral noggin of the King to his home state of Mississippi.

At a truck stop in El Paso, the disc jockeys offered to allow spectators to touch the tarp covering the Rose Parade float for 50 cents or to peek under the tarp for $2.50, KLOS spokesman Steven Smith said. There were no takers. After all, it’s not like Elvis sightings are rare.

Terri Adams, a California Lottery winner of $4.7 million, treated 10 of her friends to a Mexican cruise. How do we know this? The press agent that she hired phoned to tell us.

The first nominee for Practical Joke of the Year (local division): The fan who left the name of a certain executed despot at the will-call ticket booth at the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day.

A stadium clerk, using a p.a. system to reveal the names of people who had tickets waiting for them, called out, among others, “Nikki Ceausescu.”

Hearing laughter, she caught the gag. That was the last call for Ceausescu.