Downloading history: Among the items for sale...

Downloading history: Among the items for sale in the Nostalgic Gallery of Fame and Beyond in Little Tokyo is a 1950s-era Philco radio, an early-19th Century Victrola phonograph and a real antique--a 1983 IBM personal computer.

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List of the Day: This isn’t the first era in which Hollywood’s morals have been questioned by politicians. Glen Creason of the L.A. Library came upon the 1923 tome, “Can Anything Good Come Out of Hollywood?”

The answer was--excuse us while we check our notes here--yes. This stirring defense of Tinseltown followed a series of celebrity scandals, including the unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor.

The authors, Laurance Hill and Silas Snyder, sent one copy to the White House, inscribing the name of President Warren G. Harding on the cover.

Some excerpts about life in placid Hollywood:

“When the first motion picture studio came, there were 10 churches. Today, there are 22 churches.”

“A certain Dakota farmer (moved away from Hollywood) because he could find no one hanging around the stores or the post office who chewed tobacco and spun yarns.”

“Records show that there has never been a murder in Hollywood.” (Taylor did not live in Hollywood.)

“Even the livery stable was without the proverbial department of profane languages where ambitious youths could build up a vocabulary for men only.”

Doesn’t sound like the kind of place an old newspaper poker-playing editor like Harding would have found interesting.

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Hollywood on the hustings (cont.): Love it or hate it, the politicos continue the almost daily references to Tinseltown. Democratic saxophonist Bill Clinton, a veteran of the Arsenio Hall show, issued a mock announcement over the weekend saying that he’d been endorsed by the Official Madonna Fan Club.

George Bush, meanwhile, said in one speech that he didn’t mean America had “to go back to the days of Ozzie and Harriet.” (Ozzie, after all, didn’t seem to have a job on the show.)

Moving from Ozzie to a “Wizard of Oz” analogy, Rep. Bob Dornan (R-Garden Grove) quipped: “Gore is searching for a brain. Hillary is searching for a heart. Clinton is searching for Dorothy.”

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Was Patti Davis driving? In the midst of the current “family values” debate, Susan Vaughn of Santa Monica spotted a bumper sticker parodying the old peacenik slogan, “One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.”

This one said: “One nuclear family can ruin your whole life.”

miscelLAny:

When Hollywood (temporarily) became a city in 1903, one of the first laws it passed forbade the driving of more than 2,000 sheep down Hollywood Boulevard.