Red stoplight district:We’ve heard of comedy schools...
Red stoplight district:
We’ve heard of comedy schools for traffic offenders, not to mention free-pizza and free-movie traffic schools. But a new billboard on the Westside is advertising the Topless Traffic School, complete with a silhouette of a nude female instructor wearing a mortarboard and brandishing a teacher’s pointer.
The billboard says, “One on one instruction. . . . Tipping accepted. . . . Must be 21+.â€
We’re still not sure whether it’s for real or whether it’s a movie prop, like the sign on a downtown building that reads: “Southwest Road-Kill Museum.â€
We phoned the Topless Traffic School several times Friday but the line was always busy. But maybe that should not come as a surprise.
A BITING COMMENT: Cheryl Kazel photographed a sign that was altered by an anonymous non-lover of dogs in front of her L.A. apartment. “It used to say, ‘Please Curb Your Dog,â€â€™ she said. “It’s amazing what white-out can do.†Kazel adds: “The sign is no longer standing. . . . The Humane Society must have seen it and taken it down. I don’t blame them.â€
FAME-IS-FLEETING DEPT.: Some locals who were listed in past editions of the Guinness Book of Records but are omitted from the 1996 version:
* John Hutson of Signal Hill, who was once the world’s fastest skateboarder with a top speed of 53.45 mph (the record has been broken by Roger Hickey of San Dimas, who recorded 55.43 mph).
* John Moschitta, who became the nation’s “fastest talker†by reciting 586 words per minute during a (brief) performance in L.A. (he has been surpassed by a faster fast-talker from England).
* The Ventura Freeway, which was hailed in the late 1980s as the world’s most heavily traveled freeway (alas, it was based on a mistake by faulty Caltrans counters; the real king is the San Diego Freeway in Orange County--specifically the stretch between the Garden Grove Freeway and Seal Beach Boulevard).
* Jim Purol, who smoked 28 pipes simultaneously for five minutes in Hollywood (Guinness has dropped the category so as not to encourage an unhealthy pursuit).
* Beverly Hills waiter Roger Bourban, who set a record for fastest marathon run while carrying a free-standing open bottle on a tray, 2 hours 47 minutes (this category has also been dropped; apparently there was a fear that waiters with less balancing skills might soak themselves or an innocent bystander).
VANISHING L.A.: You might conclude from a sign photographed in Griffith Park that there’s a city crew in charge of obliterating street lines (look how faint that one set of double lines looks). But as you probably guessed, the sign was really posted during the making of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “Eraser.†Have you noticed how these hand-scrawled directions for film crews are popping up all over town? How did anyone find a film set in the old days?
MYSTERY SOLVED: We mentioned the other day that the face on the new James Dean stamp didn’t look like the late actor and we wondered who it really was. We knew we’d get to the bottom of this with some help from the readers. Sure enough, Elaine Vollmer of North Hollywood writes: “The postage stamp of James Dean looks like my nephew in Pennsylvania.â€
miscelLAny:
A headline on a press release from an “adult entertainment company†in Van Nuys says, “Vivid Video Insures Top Male Adult Star’s Genitalia for $1 Million.†A pity that John Wayne Bobbitt hadn’t thought of that.
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