Novelist John Updike once rhapsodized that the...

By STEVE HARVEY

Sept. 15, 1989 12 AM PT

<i> From staff and wire reports</i>

Novelist John Updike once rhapsodized that the palm trees of Los Angeles were “isolate, like psychopaths.” Perhaps they were driven mad by what Updike called the “conquistadorial fevers (that) reminisce in the adobe band of smog across the sky.”

Actually, the local fronds have never been accused of a felony and they ain’t so isolate, either.

The last tree census of Los Angeles found that there were about 48,000 palms lining the streets, more than any city in the nation, including Palm Beach, Palm Springs or Palm anything else.

Of course, that was in 1976. And city officials, who admit that the number was an estimate based on spot counts, want some exact figures. So they’re getting ready to kick off the First Great Los Angeles Tree Inventory.

This time, workers will check every tree on city property and along curbs--they believe there are about 660,000--and punch their findings into hand-held computers.

“We’re going to be doing a lot of things, not just counting trees,” said Robert Kennedy, the street tree department superintendent. “We’re going to be checking which species we’re having problems with, which ones are doing well in the smog environment. We want to ensure the survival of L.A.’s urban forest.”

Counting won’t be so easy. With L.A.’s air pollution, you often can’t see the forest or the trees.

Journalism students in one USC class were asked to name which television news program they preferred. One responded, “Murphy Brown,” a sit-com anchored by Candice Bergen.

It is a small world, points out Arthur Steiner of Mar Vista.

He notes that the ad for La Petite Boulangerie in The Times’ Food Section Thursday said the bakery was “conveniently located in Los Angeles” at such addresses as “Four Embarcadero Center, 1909 Union and 1400 California”--all in San Francisco.

Or is L.A.’s urban sprawl more serious than we suspected.

The experiences of Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles in the 1940s are one of four subjects featured in a rotunda display in City Hall. The subjects, which also include the local orange industry, engineer William Mulholland and the experiences of blacks here in the 1920s, will be covered in separate segments in October on “The Los Angeles History Project” on KCET (Channel 28).

A visitor to the City Hall display recalled that one day during World War II, when he was on leave from the Navy, he was sipping a beer in a bar on Pico Boulevard when two other sailors came up to him and said, “Let’s go zooting. “

The term was a reference to the practice of Anglo servicemen of attacking Mexican-American youths wearing high-waisted “zoot suits” during a period of ethnic violence in Los Angeles.

“I told them I wasn’t interested,” the City Hall visitor recalled, smiling at the irony of it all.

The two sailors going zooting had only noticed the uniform of their beer-sipping mate. What they hadn’t noticed was that he was a Mexican-American himself, Salvador Salinas, now a Los Angeles city planner.

One dish that has never gotten much respect from comedians will be celebrated Sunday during the International Chopped Liver Cook-Off in the Farmers Market parking lot.

Cost is $19 per chef. “Chopping, mixing, molding, arranging, sculpturing and decorating begins at 2 p.m.,” according to a spokesman.

Then comes the eating, as the chicken, goose and beef dishes ask the age-old question: “What am I? Chopped liver?”

Noting that singer Michael Jackson has signed to star in commercials for L.A. Gear shoes, comic Arsenio Hall wondered: “Will he wear just one?”