As the sun took its rare midday...

As the sun took its rare midday break Thursday, numerous office workers, including some employees from nearby Security Pacific National Bank, lined 1st Street to gaze toward the heavens. Meanwhile, one man chose to go indoors. Armed with a pistol, he robbed the bank of an undisclosed amount at about 11:20 a.m., an FBI spokesman said. Then, as the sun reappeared, the intruder disappeared.

Things were still out of kilter two hours later at UCLA.

Several hundred people were evacuated from an administration building because of a suspected bomb.

“I saw some guy coming around the corner carrying a grocery bag with a shoe box inside,” an assistant dean said. “People don’t usually go back there.”

Police tried to retrieve the package using a remote control robot, but the box-like device’s arms were unable to reach the shopping bag. Finally, they sprayed it with a heavy stream of water, which tore open the bag, revealing the contents to be a toy locomotive.

Eclipse Day seemed like the perfect time to view Jon Erik Beckjord’s photo of Mt. Kennedy on the planet of Mars.

Incredibly, he hasn’t been able to interest a single supermarket tabloid.

Naturally, Only in L.A. bit.

Beckjord, curator of the Crypto-Phenomena Museum, whose address is a Malibu post office box, passed us the photo he had found in NASA archives. A secretary he knows was the first to notice that it contained a crater resembling a famous U.S. senator. “She turned it sideways and said, ‘Look--Ted Kennedy,’ ” he said.

Beckjord saw the likeness immediately, the prominent jowls, the prominent nose, the lock of hair over the forehead.

Sorry--space considerations keep us from also showing you Beckjord’s photos of craters that are dead ringers for Tammy Fay Bakker, King Kong, and Saddam Hussein (eyes and nose only).

No sign of Elvis, by the way.

Still on the off-beat beat:

The recent sighting of an erratic driver who was trying to balance a parrot on her steering wheel on the Ventura Freeway brought this reaction from Greg Horbachevsky of Van Nuys.

“Polly, want a crack-up?”

Summer has officially arrived, by the way. We know because just east of City Hall, on the Golden State Freeway, Caltrans reported the year’s first truck spill of watermelons.

miscelLAny:

L.A.’s first drive-through cleaners, termed an “Auto Laundry,” was opened by one B.K. Gillespie in 1927.