It’s Time to Stop Trashing Venice

In a recent article on the 1958 film “Touch of Evil,” the New York Times said that Quinlan, the corrupt cop played by Orson Welles, “is the opposite of debonair, eventually plunging to an ignominious death in a trash-choked open sewer.”

Hmmm. Southern California homeowners who have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to live by such sites won’t like that description. The Welles character actually dies in one of the Venice canals built earlier this century.

Sewer? Venice hasn’t sunk that low.

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TO EAT OR SMOKE? Paul Stemmler of Torrance found a local restaurant offering an unusual dish called weedends (see photo).

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BIG MEN: One of L.A.’s greatest contributions--the Paul Bunyan-like fiberglass giant whose clones lurk near highways around the nation--is the subject of a Web site tribute.

More than 100 of the creatures with outstretched hands are described at www.roadsideamerica.com, including a golf-club-wielding giant threatening motorists on the nearby San Diego Freeway in Carson (see photo). “Very scary” was the description of one Web site contributor. He was apparently unswayed by the smile of the 22-foot-tall duffer, who guards a golf course.

The creature, designed by a local fiberglass company in the early 1960s, appears around the country as a spaceman, pirate, cowboy and a miner, depending on his headgear and what type of object he is carrying.

A lumberjack Bunyan wielding an ax is another common manifestation, and there are legends of rookie cops being sent by colleagues to the sites to check out reports of “big man with ax.”

The Bunyans are versatile. When a Foster’s Freeze in Malibu became a La Salsa restaurant, the resident giant donned a sombrero and serape. Good bye, Frosty Man. Hello, Sombrero Man.

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BLAME IT ON WHITTIER: In his book, “Sex, Death and God in L.A.,” author David Reid points out that Richard Nixon spoke of some subconscious influences on his vicious 1946 congressional campaign. “The main difficulty,” Nixon wrote in one memoir, “was that our neighbors (next to the house he rented from his barber in Whittier) raised minks for a living. Minks make beautiful coats, but as animals they are repulsive because they eat their young. I can still remember working on speeches late at night and hearing the screaming of the young minks next door.”

So that’s where Nixon developed his go-for-the-jugular style.

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BASEBALL CHATTER 101: I’ve occasionally questioned USC’s academic excellence, such as the time in the 1980s when some students were apprehended while trying to alter the HOLLYWOOD sign to read USCWOOD. Officers said the students seemed to have trouble making an “S.”

Anyway, to give the school equal time, its USC Report tells of a game in the 1960s when Trojan catcher Steve Sogge impressed onlookers with his erudition by yelling, “I have it, I have it,” as he chased a foul pop fly. Sogge later recalled that his coach, Rod Dedeaux, emphasized “it sounded terrible for college players to yell, ‘I got it, I got it.’ Bad grammar.”

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miscelLAny:

Speaking of higher education, I learned a new word after Robin Lake sent me a snapshot of a sign at Santa Monica College (see photo). A “vomitorium,” in ancient times, was a passageway through which spectators were discharged. It wasn’t a place you went after eating too many weedends.

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Steve Harvey can be reached by phone at (213) 237-7083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by e-mail at [email protected] and by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, Times Mirror Square, L.A. 90053.