EARTHQUAKE: THE LONG ROAD BACK

We don’t like the beat: Someone scrawled this rock ‘n’ roll-out-of-bed lyric on a wall along Pico Boulevard in West L.A.:

Get Your Kicks on Route 6.6

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Shaky public relations? In case you were wondering, Rancho Cucamonga’s baseball team has no intention of changing its nickname--the Quakes. Just look at Scott Dewees’ picture.

“We didn’t take that name because we take quakes lightheartedly,� explained Greg Scharlach, a spokesman for the year-old club. “We did a lot of research beforehand and found that there had been thousands of quakes in this area. Locals even call it quake country.�

Not only that, Scharlach said, but the quakes had “caused some fault lines to trap underground water in this area,� which enabled potato and wine growers to prosper.

“Without the quakes,� he concluded, “we wouldn’t have Cucamonga.�

The team, whose stadium suffered no damage, is also retaining its mascot: Tremor.

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Ironies, ironies . . . A customer in line at a Cal Fed bank in Los Feliz noticed an ad for mortgage loans that said, “You find the house, we’ll provide the foundation.�

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And, to think, people say L.A.’s the plastic city: The 1933 Long Beach earthquake

heavily damaged the parapet gracing the entrance to the Newberry Building in Torrance, but the landmark suffered no such problem in the 1994 Northridge quake. Not that anyone was surprised.

The building--now a supermarket--was restored last year, and the parapet was constructed so that “it’s not going to fall at all,� boasted city planning assistant Terence Yoo. And even if it did. . . .

It’s made out of plastic foam.

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A list that may make you lose some sleep: Old-timers have their own theories about what constitutes “earthquake weather.� But what about “earthquake hour�?

This might be merely a statistical quirk, but it’s nevertheless true that almost all of Southern California’s major shakers over the last 150 years have occurred relatively close to dusk or dawn, including, of course, the 4:31 a.m. Northridge quake. The others:

1--Tejon (7.7+ magnitude), 1857, about 8 a.m.

2--Northwest L.A. (6.0+), 1893, 11:40 a.m.

3--Santa Barbara (6.3), 1925, 6:42 a.m.

4--Long Beach (6.3), 1933, 5:54 p.m.

5--Tehachapi (7.7), 1952, 4:52 a.m.

6--Sylmar (6.6), 1971, 6 a.m.

7--Whittier (5.9) 1987, 7:42 a.m.

8--Sierra Madre (5.8), 1991, 7:43 a.m.

9--Landers (7.4), 1992, 4:58 a.m.

10--Big Bear (6.5), 1992, 8 a.m.

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Laugh relief: For the rest of the month, any quake victim who shows up at the Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard with evidence--be it the remainder of a vase, picture frame or door--will be admitted free to a show. That seems quite generous to us--we’d have thought they would have had a two-broken-item minimum.

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L.A.’s still on the go . . . KNX radio reporter Jim Thornton came up with this line after one aftershock: “The traffic is stopped, but the freeways are moving.�

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miscelLAny:

St. John’s hospital in Santa Monica, sometimes called Hospital to the Stars because of its celebrity patient list, was evacuated Thursday for a seismic inspection. We wonder how many National Enquirer reporters were camped outside looking for Liz.