Food fight: During the mayoral campaign, Richard...

Food fight: During the mayoral campaign, Richard Riordan had posters displayed at the Original Pantry restaurant, which he owns. (They described Riordan as “tough,” a word that is usually avoided around steakhouses.)

It was logical, then, that backers of Mike Woo would also turn their attention to restaurants. When Barbara Hoff dined in the Empress Pavilion a few days before the election, she--and everyone else at her table--opened fortune cookies that said: “Elect Mike Woo mayor of Los Angeles on June 8, 1993. MAKE L.A. WORK.”

Or rather, misfortune cookies.

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Political scientists will be debating for years: We’ll never know how Woo would have fared if he hadn’t had the bad luck to be endorsed by President Clinton. After all, Woo lost by only 43,000 votes or so.

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Would you buy a used airport from this man?Riordan, by the way, is the first businessman to be elected mayor of L.A. since John Porter in 1929. Porter was a used-car salesman.

Moving from politics to vice: David Carleton of L.A. came across a flyer from a realtor that contained an unfortunate typographical error.

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No back-seat driver: He’s 5-foot-10 and weighs about three pounds. “But he looks very brawny,” says Barbara LesStrang, who came up with the idea of marketing dummies as automobile passengers to discourage carjackings.

Safe-T-Man, who is manufactured in El Monte, is made of cloth and polyfiber and is available “in two different skin tones (dark and medium/light).” He sells for $99, though you get a tote bag if you shell out $129.

“If someone wants to take him in the house and set him up in the living room, he can be packed in the bag very easily,” says LesStrang, a Santa Barbara-area businesswoman. “You just fold his arms and legs around his neck.”

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London and Paris weren’t available for the remake: A marketing video titled, “A Tale of Two Cities,” sings the virtues of the cities of Lancaster and Palmdale.

miscelLAny:

The election of the New York-born Riordan keeps one remarkable streak alive. No native Angeleno has been elected mayor since Fred Eaton in 1898. Though records of some early leaders are sketchy, Eaton appears to have been the only L.A. mayor who was born here.