Can you speak ig-pay atin-lay?The Department of...

Can you speak ig-pay atin-lay?The Department of Motor Vehicles apparently can’t. But after receiving a complaint about a vanity license plate that it had issued, the agency has studied up on its pig Latin and agreed to revoke it. The DMV’s language experts acknowledge that the plate’s message, which we won’t produce here, is an obscene variant of “darn you” in pig Latin. The plate holder, Randy Braverman of North Hollywood, will appeal the decision at a hearing Tuesday. He’s claiming poetic license.

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Was Heidi’s trash searched for bear entrails?”Love Potions,” a new book by Dr. Cynthia Watson, a Santa Monica physician, devotes a chapter to reputed food aphrodisiacs. Watson recalls the days when “farmers’ daughters wallowed naked in newly harvested wheat, some of which they baked into biscuits that would render men helpless before their charms.” Those poor, unsuspecting traveling salesmen.

Watson, a former instructor at USC, also discusses some less palatable aphrodisiacs tried through the ages, including:

--Bear gallbladders.

--Tiger penises.

--Roasted hearts of hummingbirds.

--The right lobe of a vulture’s lung.

--White moss scraped from the skull of a corpse.

--And bird’s nest soup, made from the “edible nests of sea swallows found in the dark of caves” of Borneo.

It would be just our luck to get stuck with the left lobe of a vulture’s lung.

LA’s amber waves of grain?What? You didn’t know about them? Brian Hanrahan saw them while vacationing in Canada. Downtown LA is what the business district of wheat-producing Lethbridge, Alberta, calls itself. We hope it doesn’t turn out that Lethbridge was the real subject of Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.”

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Bad sign: We’ve honored Caltrans often in the past for its original spellings, but we shouldn’t have blamed the agency for the notice that warned of road construction “thru Sep. 31st.” That was on a city street, off-limits for Caltrans sign-makers. We’re still navigating through the city bureaucracy, trying to determine who should get the credit for lengthening September.

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Room 22 . . . caliber: Warren Turnbull of Redondo Beach wonders if it’s a coincidence that handgun bargains are grouped with the “Back to School” specials on one page of the Pennysaver.

miscelLAny:

Enough talk about Heidi! Let’s talk about Fleiss. Cassell’s dictionary says fleiss translates as “diligence, industry, hard work, application, assiduity, pains.” The dictionary also includes the phrase ohne fleiss kein Preis --”hard work brings its own reward.”