Bad omen for Democrats?A lot of analysts...

Bad omen for Democrats?

A lot of analysts have praised the selection of Fairfax High graduate Jack Kemp as Bob Dole’s running mate, and they may have a point. After all, Clinton Avenue dead-ends at Fairfax High.

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MILITARY PREPAREDNESS, L.A.-STYLE: A friend of ours saw a National Guard unit’s Humvee parked in a shopping center in Lakewood. A chain was wrapped around the vehicle’s steering wheel.

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ATTENTION SHOPPERS! It’s time for another Only in L.A. Super Shopper edition (see photos). As a public service, we offer bargains in the categories of water (a Garden Grove apartment complex), napkins (Carl’s Jr. eateries) and pickles (King’s Fish House in Long Beach).

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MORE ON THE FASTEST GUN IN L.A.: We’ve mentioned that Wyatt Earp lived his final years in L.A., dying in his home on West 17th Street in 1929. The recently published book “The Earp Papers,” by Don Chaput, offers some more tidbits about the Earps in Southern California--and Hollywood.

* Wyatt Earp hoped to publish a ghostwritten biography and was already thinking of a movie deal when he wrote his friend, cowboy actor Bill Hart, for advice in 1926: “There are the questions of the copyright and the royalty and the separation of the story rights from the picture, if you think it would be something worthwhile now, to have filmed.”

* The book was turned down by every publisher, including one who said it had a “trifle too much gunplay . . . for the average reader.” (Standards must have been higher then.)

* Wyatt Earp’s father, Nicholas Earp, died in L.A., as did one brother, James (both of natural causes). Another brother, Morgan, who was shot to death in Tombstone sometime after the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral, is believed to be buried in Colton.

* Warren Earp, a younger brother who missed the O.K. Corral event, “spent a hectic lifetime trying to earn [a] tough reputation,” Chaput writes. Warren was involved in brushes with the law in Riverside and San Bernardino before being killed in a gunfight in Willcox, Ariz., in 1900.

* Virgil Earp, a nephew of Wyatt, appeared on the TV quiz show “The $64,000 Question” in 1958 and won $32,000. His category: The Wild West.

* In the quiz-show scandals that followed, Virgil Earp denied he had been coached. But one surmises that gambler uncle Wyatt would have smiled at the prospect of having the odds tilted in his favor.

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HEARTY WELCOME: The Santa Barbara Independent newspaper ran a Borders bookstore ad that was headlined: “Be a Woman Cardiologist.”

The ad said: “Girls [and boys] ages 7 to 10 will enjoy this interactive event featuring the book ‘You Can Be a Woman Cardiologist.’ ”

Maybe the event will draw boys who dream of someday marrying a cardiologist.

miscelLAny:

On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, David Fuhrer of L.A. points out that STAR COMEDY BY DEMOCRATS is a palindrome. Yup, it reads the same way forward and backward. Take it from an authority--Fuhrer has been honored in the Guinness Book of Records as “World’s Fastest Backwards Talker.” But can he talk out of both sides of his mouth like a politician?