Don’t Light Any Home Fires With Hot Words, Sailors Told

Words, the meaning of.

* Pass me the *!&!% turkey.

The Signal Bridge, the newspaper of the San Diego Naval Base, is imploring sailors to clean up their language before going home for the holidays.

Says an editorial:

“All those swear words can be replaced with other words or deleted from a sentence completely without changing its meaning!”

* Leighton Worthey, 19, political thinker and songwriter, has delivered up a farewell song to the San Diego County Edition of The Times, modeled after “American Pie.”

In part:

So, bye, bye Los Angeles Times

Took a walk out to the market

But the paper was gone.

I was a (lusty) teen-age political nut

With old mayoral petitions

And a date for lunch

But I went forever “Out To Lunch”

The day the paper died.

* Steven J. Casey, special assistant to Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller, has done the preliminaries for a book, “Die Like a Man: Robert Alton Harris and the American Death Penalty.”

His agent has shopped the idea around the major publishing houses of New York without success.

Casey suspects the turndowns may be due to his support for the death penalty, a major act of political incorrectness in literary circles.

(For the record: “Die like a man” was what Harris told one of his teen-age victims before shooting him).

* Three patrons at the Daley Double in Encinitas listed Millard Fillmore as their favorite President in a Night Talk poll for KCEO-radio.

* Yes, Supervisor-elect Dianne Jacob does keep a plastic replica of a machine gun on her office wall.

It was a present a few years ago from her former boss, East County Supervisor George Bailey, after a news story said she worked so fast it was like a machine gun.

She may want to warn people it’s a replica. It’s realistic enough so that one recent visitor thought it was real and got a tad edgy.

Everyone’s a Joker

It’s the law.

* Your legal system at work (San Diego branch).

Prosecutor: “You say you’re innocent. Yet, five people swore they saw you steal that watch!”

Defendant: “So what? I can produce 500 people who didn’t see me steal it.”

* Deputy Dist. Atty. Nida Brinkis was trying an embezzlement case but the victim had the misfortune of landing in jail (in a separate case).

So rather than have the victim appear in court wearing jail blues (lousy for credibility), Brinkis asked the victim’s family to bring some civilian duds.

Problem: The family brought a shirt with black-and-white stripes that looked straight from a 1930s prison movie.

Brinkis sent the family back for a different shirt, over objections of the defense attorney who preferred the fashion statement made by the stripes.

* San Diego lawyer Harvey Levine does a lot of speeches to legal gatherings, like one to defense attorneys last week in Century City, and he likes to pepper them with lawyer jokes.

If there are judges in the audience, they love jokes knocking lawyers.

But as soon as the judges start enjoying themselves too much, Levine lays on the story about the hunting dog.

Seems a guy had a hunting dog named Lawyer who was fearless and aggressive.

But one day the guy goes hunting without the dog. His buddies are shocked.

“Well,” says the guy, “a terrible thing happened to Lawyer. Somebody called him Judge by mistake and now all he does is sit on his rear end and bark.”

A Roving Eye

The real royals have split, but Charles and Diana are still together at the San Diego Zoo.

We’re talking pigeons sharing the coop at the children’s zoo. There’s no plan to separate them.

However, there is word that Charles has been eyeing pigeons in the same roost named Laverne, Shirley and Lucy.

But any talk that Diana is interested in Oscar, Felix and Desi is strictly tabloid trash.