As she had threatened, Lawndale City Councilwoman...

As she had threatened, Lawndale City Councilwoman Carol Norman blew the whistle on her colleagues again.

Unable to signal her desire to speak because of a malfunctioning electronic light, the soft-spoken lawmaker pulled out a whistle and gave off two blasts during the Thursday night meeting, which was broadcast on cable television.

“Here comes the Barnum & Bailey Circus again,” growled Councilman Larry Rudolph.

A former member of the city Planning Commission suggested that the notorious whistle be seized.

Norman explained later: “There were some significant issues discussed and it (the power failure) made me less effective.”

After the councilwoman’s second toot, Mayor Sarann Kruse dispensed with the usual system in which members push a button that activates a light at the mayor’s desk. Instead, Kruse simply went around the table to call on each member to speak.

Norman, who often finds herself in the minority on the council, also utilized the whistle at the previous session because her button--and only her button--was malfunctioning.

City Manager Jim Arnold said the system had been repaired but “then it went belly-up again.” He added: “It was nothing intentional.”

“Next time,” Norman said, “I may show up wearing a hard hat with a flashing red light.”

Her latest reincarnation:

In the movie version of actress Carrie Fisher’s memoir, “Postcards From the Edge,” Fisher’s real-life mother, Debbie Reynolds, is played by . . .

Shirley MacLaine.

When County Supervisor Ed Edelman proposed the permanent placement of a 10-foot-tall, 40-foot-long sculpture in the county mall “to symbolize the international bonding . . . between Mexico and the United States,” he encountered some critics on the board.

“This is a piece of art, huh?” Supervisor Pete Schabarum asked dubiously after he was shown photos of the two segments of “Volemos Juntos” (“Let Us Fly Together”) by Victor Manuel Contreras.

Added Supervisor Deane Dana: “Being an engineer, somebody has to look at this thing in detail and see whether it can fit in that area out there. Ten-by-forty feet is no small little statue.”

“Isn’t that the size of a train?” asked Supervisor Mike Antonovich, referring to one of his favorite topics, predecessor Baxter Ward’s ill-fated proposal for a local commuter train.

The supervisors voted to ask the county museums of Art and Natural History, as well as the county Internal Services Department, to review the proposal.

Edelman would like the sculpture placed near a statue of Christopher Columbus.

“Have you checked with the American-Italian Assn. yet?” Schabarum asked.

Since it’s the end of the week, let’s clear up a couple of matters:

As anyone involved in the Banning High-Carson High football rivalry could tell you, Banning is located in Wilmington, not Carson, as was reported here the other day. Also, unless you have to make an extraordinary number of connections, Paris is about 5,500 miles from Los Angeles, not 8,000. . . .

After a typical business day in Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell My Lovely,” private eye Philip Marlowe says to himself:

“You’ve been sapped down twice, had your throat choked and been beaten half silly on the jaw with a gun barrel. You’ve been shot full of hop and kept under it until you’re as crazy as two waltzing mice. . . .”

Alas, the snooping profession apparently isn’t quite so exciting in reality.

Any wimp would be assured by the promotional material put out by the 82-year-old Nick Harris Detective Academy in Van Nuys.

“Unlike our TV counterparts, being a private eye is not a dangerous profession,” the academy says in hit-and-miss grammar.

The academy even brags that its “Prom Night was featured on the Pat Sajak Show.”

Prom night? Did the attending gumshoes leave their hardware with a gat-check girl?