Off-Kilter

How to Win Customers and Influence People: Here’s a novel business strategy: A Newport Beach restaurant called Sid’s doesn’t have any signs out front and won’t give directions if you call on the phone. Nevertheless, the place is often jampacked, which reminds us of that self-help book “Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them.”

In fact, maybe Sid’s doesn’t go far enough. Why not also build a moat around the building and unlock the doors for only a few minutes each hour? And employ no waiters or cooks, and install a jukebox that plays nothing but John Tesh. It could be huge.

Also, because we know a good idea when we see one, from now on Off-Kilter will be written entirely in Swahili--and in code--and each copy of the newspaper will be chained to a vicious Rottweiler.

Alarming Trends Department: Kazoo sales are up 40% this year, according to a spokesman for the Original American Kazoo Co.

Jell-O Brain Update: Two months ago, we told you about a newspaper article that said when Jell-O is hooked up to an EEG machine, it registers the same brain-wave activity as a normal adult. We weren’t sure whether this meant that humans were getting more stupid or that universities might soon be enrolling bowls of gelatin in their PhD programs.

The answer seems to be none of the above. USC professor Alice C. Parker reports that some of her colleagues recently tried to duplicate the experiment using lime- and brain-colored Jell-O but got “no brain waves.”

Vanishing Point: The mystery of invisibility continues to bedevil our readers. The latest attempt to unravel it comes from Kevin Finney of UCLA. In reply to a Balboa Island reader’s query about how and when the food being eaten by an invisible person also turns invisible, Finney offered his “unified theory of human invisibility.” Assuming that unseen people occupy space, he said, only two theories make sense: “One is that the person has mass but is transparent. This leads to the kinds of questions posed by the Balboa reader. The other recognizes that visibility is a product of reflected light waves. Therefore, an invisible person has the ability to bend incoming light waves around his body, so that from any angle, other people see only the light waves that would have come from behind the invisible person. Thus, food or anything else inside the invisible human would also be unseen.”

However, reader Jimmy Thornton theorizes that “invisibility occurs when you turn age 40 in a roomful of young women. They look right through you--unless you sport a huge diamond earring.”

OK, but now we have another question: What happens if an invisible person is hooked up to an EEG machine?

Best Supermarket Tabloid Headline: The worst part about having our Weekly World News kidnapped is going to the grocery store and enduring the stares and humiliation that come with buying replacement tabloids.

Worse still, neither of this week’s chosen surrogates, the National Enquirer and the National Examiner, had a suitably strange headline. Thus, we were forced to pay the heavy ransom to get our WWN back. And the winning headline is: “Skydiver Splattered Like a Bug on Jumbo Jet’s Windshield!”

* Roy Rivenburg’s e-mail address is roy.rivenburg@latimes.com.

Unpaid Informants: Wireless Flash News Service, Maegan and Thad Whitley