Is piercing intelligence enough to catch a thief? In this case, yes
These boots were made for investigatin’. A customer at the Electric Chair in Huntington Beach made off with a pair of $90 boots, leaving his old shoes in the boots box. Pretty clever, except for one thing. The same guy earlier had paid for an ear-piercing in the shop. And before that procedure, the store jotted down his driver’s license information. Police had no trouble following in his footsteps.
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Cold property: Scott Dewees of L.A. noticed that a house seller in the San Fernando Valley was offering to throw in something free for the garage (see photo). Better throw in a year’s worth of free gasoline, too.
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Unloading homes (cont.): As for that house that was beached on the Hollywood Freeway for several days, KFWB traffic reporter Richard Turnage wrote:
“Made me wonder what the real estate listing would’ve looked like if Caltrans hadn’t intervened: ‘Quaint fixer-upper, priced to move! Freeway close. This house is a real charmer with great guard-rail appeal. Slow-lane adjacent. If you owned this house, you’d be home right now. Lost our lease, now everything must go!’ ”
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Thanks for the warning: The housing slump doesn’t seem to have reached Newport Beach, where Nancy Rayl read about a seller asking $2.5 million for a mansion, despite its apparent fungus problem (see accompanying).
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The car market is booming: Or so it seems, considering the price increase of a Winnebago, spotted by Jackie Heite of Torrance (see accompanying). Can you believe the attitude of the company? Bragging about charging five times as much as it used to. Sheesh.
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Read the small print: The appearance here of a sign for the town of Au in Austria prompted Stefan Belger of Palm Springs to write: “You might have missed the real joke in this sign. It translates to ‘Meadow,’ but it is also the word we Germans of all nations use for ‘Ouch!’ Which is even more remarkable because of the presence of the little sign underneath -- ‘Radarkontrolle,’ which announces radar speed checks in town” (see photo).
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It’s come to this:
At a meeting of the OFS retired journalists group last Wednesday, it was announced that one member was offering four tickets to that night’s Dodger game.
There was silence among the 60-odd attendees.
“They’re free,” the donor said.
More silence.
Finally, someone in the back of the room slowly raised a hand. The Dodgers are endangering the reputation of journalists as freeloaders.
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School daze: Regarding my item here about the Yale graduate who missed a tutoring appointment because she locked her keys in her car, Merrill Sarty wrote: “Can’t believe you missed observing that it obviously was not a Yale lock.”
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miscelLAny: Ken Burns’ “The War” series on PBS reminded me that Gethine Brown, widow of the late Times photographer Frank Q. Brown, has just published “How We Managed During World War II on the Homefront.” Pretty remarkable considering that she is 98 years old and blind.
Everyone made sacrifices during World War II. Sample passage, dated Dec. 14, 1942: “I had to pass an inquisition to get butter tonight, and then only ¼ pound. . . . In Hollywood, shoppers could buy only one egg (six cents).” Luckily, adversity doesn’t faze Gethine.
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Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LATIMES, Ext. 77083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A. 90012, and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com
