The Bottom Line on Tax Refunds: First, You Really Had to Have Paid Some

In the unclear-on-the-concept department, a woman phoned Seal Beach police to complain that she still hadn’t received her tax refund from the federal government. The Seal Beach Sun reported that she soon admitted that her employer was paying her “under the table.”

Don’t know much about geography: Southern California’s layout can be difficult for outsiders to comprehend, as these reader sightings illustrate (see accompanying):

* A Northern California newspaper that said Olvera Street is near the ghost town of Bodie (spotted by Felix Gutierrez of Oakland). Well, give or take 400 miles.

* A travel magazine that declared that you could ride from downtown L.A. to Anaheim on the Blue Line (May Bertz of Bell). It’s a long walk to Anaheim from that last stop in Long Beach.

* A magazine article that would have you believe that Point Mugu was named after a cartoon character (Ray White, Pasadena).

* A shuttle ad that implied that Westwood is not part of L.A. (Dan Fink of the very same L.A.). Or is this a secession movement that has been kept secret?

Name game: The new general manager of the Long Beach Water Department is Kevin Wattier.

Hey, quit making that racket! “I read with interest your report [Wednesday] that USC music students were no longer allowed to practice outside because ‘the din of their practice notes’ disturbed classes,” wrote Brian Lowe of Woodland Hills. “Could it also be because--judging from their marching band--that USC musicians only know one song?”

Naturally, I quizzed Lowe’s background and found out that he was a UCLA alumnus, as I suspected.

But Lowe countered by pointing out that even Trojan football coach Pete Carroll mentioned the school’s music-makers. It happened when he was being interviewed after USC’s first game and he heard the marching band playing “Conquest” as it passed by.

“How many times do they play that song?” Carroll asked reporters. “Goll-eee. They just keep playing it.”

Now for a bit of UCLA bashing: A colleague of mine was in the UCLA alumni section at the Rose Bowl where a cheerleader was exhorting the fans to show their love for the Bruins. At one point, he held up a sign that said, “Be Boisterous.” And a UCLA fan (a former Bruin athlete?) asked my colleague: “Excuse me, what does ‘boisterous’ mean?”

He asked the right person. “Loud!” my colleague yelled.

Reality or illusion? Mark J. sent along a possibly apocryphal tale explaining why Daihatsu chose the puzzling name Charade for one of its models. A company exec was supposedly a big Audrey Hepburn fan and used his influence to have a car named after the 1963 movie starring Hepburn and Cary Grant.

I wonder what would have happened if the exec had been a fan of “Psycho” star Janet Leigh?

miscelLAny: Sometimes, I think, you just have to laugh at the craziness that seems to be all around us these days. Cynthia Lawrence of Toluca Lake heard a woman in a store lament an apparent train threat. The woman referred to the “Amtrak virus.”

Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LA-TIMES, Ext. 77083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., 90012 and by e-mail at steve .harvey@latimes.com.