Hotels in the Beverly Hills area are...

Hotels in the Beverly Hills area are renowned for their service, so writer Norman Sklarewitz was not surprised at the extraordinary steps that the Four Seasons took to find out the score of Game 3 of the World Series for him.

Sklarewitz, who was attending a trade fair there the other night, discovered that the hotel apparently deems it declasse to have a TV set in the bar or the lobby. So he sought help from the concierge.

“She thought for a moment and then she said, ‘I’ll phone security--they’ll know!’ ” he says. Unfortunately, security didn’t answer.

Finally the concierge hit upon a solution.

“She called home,” Sklarewitz says, “to ask her mother to ask her father.”

The double-play combination clicked.

The ornithologist commemorated in the Dick Davenport Memorial Bird Walk--he died while photographing a Bachman’s Warbler in Yosemite National Park--was actually a character in “Doonesbury.” But you knew that, right?*

Some readers wondered whether the walk was also fictional. But Kimball Garrett of the Natural History Museum assures us that the event will indeed happen Nov. 6 at the Rose Garden in Exposition Park. First raising of the binoculars is scheduled for 7:30 a.m.

* We did not.

Meanwhile, sign-watcher Carolyn Guiditta of Arcadia came up with this candidate for our Dueling Directions award.

List of the Day:

We’re indebted to Spy magazine for wading through David Rieff’s “Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World” and fishing out some civic descriptions that “offer clear evidence that Rieff can’t quite be trusted yet with his own key to the metaphor closet.”

Some examples:

1-- “. . . that amnesiac pleasure dome known as West Los Angeles”

2--”. . . that obdurate arcadia otherwise known as West L.A.”

3--”. . . that far steeper canyon otherwise known as downtown L.A.”

4--”. . . that glitzy Oz called Los Angeles.”

5--”. . . Anglo L.A., that metropolis of Greta Garbos.”

That David Rieff.

A Diamond Bar businessman named Jeff Nelson phoned to claim responsibility for the placement of the blue and gold beach umbrellas along the Pomona Freeway this week.

“I wanted to bring a little culture to our area,” Nelson explained. “I loved Christo’s exhibit. The San Gabriel Valley is always ignored. Foreign films play in West L.A. but never here. We don’t have any decent art galleries, either.

“People act like we’re a bunch of buffoons when we’re just as interested in art and culture as anyone else.”

On the other hand, no one’s ever called the San Gabriel Valley an amnesiac pleasure dome.

William Sertl, senior editor of Travel and Leisure, writes to confess that his publication “did place (fictional detective) Philip Marlowe in the wrong city” in its 20th anniversary issue.

Only in L.A. previously expressed indignation over the magazine’s praise of Raymond Chandler’s artful description of “the shadowy streets of San Francisco .”

Sertl, however, asserts that Only in L.A. “also got something wrong.” He maintains that on our list of L.A.’s most shocking sights we shouldn’t have ranked one studio’s dwarf-studded headquarters over the sybaritic, years-in-the-making digs of a Hollywood producer.

“The Disney dwarfs,” Sertl said, “can’t compare to the Spelling mansion.”

And that’s the news from this glitzy Oz of a steep canyon.

miscelLAny:

In 1919, a state traffic commission declared that L.A. had reached its limit of motor vehicles. There were 100,000 then, or about 6 million fewer than the number currently registered in the city.