Asleep at the Wheel? Coffee Can’t Get You Going When You Leave It Behind

On her way to work, Pam Coyle of Coto de Caza noticed “a tan Expedition on the 133 tollway had a white Styrofoam cup, complete with red stir stick, on the rear bumper. I ... could tell there was still [presumably] coffee in the cup, slightly sloshing. I had to get on the northbound 5 while the Expedition continued on. I hope that the cup was still on the bumper when she arrived at work so she could finish the coffee and stop wondering where she set it down.”

Hey, I have an idea! Why don’t commuters try that trick with their cell phones!

These SUVs are really getting out of hand: Jim Moore of Nipomo saw an ad for a vehicle where a large family could live comfortably--and even sip coffee on a porch (see accompanying).

Unclear on the concept: Michael Kory said he complained “many times to the post office about the misdelivery of others’ mail to our home.” So a postal supervisor gave a notice about the problem to the carrier for the carrier’s eyes only.

Naturally, it was delivered to Kory (see accompanying).

I’m reminded of the time postal carriers went on strike and Groucho Marx proposed this: “We give them the raises--but by mail.”

Wait ‘til the animal rights folks hear about this: Elinor Kastner of Venice noticed that one salon made a startling admission (see accompanying).

Seal of disapproval: In a discussion of bandit (unlicensed) taxis, I pointed out that you can spot the legal cabs in L.A. because they display the city seal. But Rufus Baker says some wily illegals have taken to painting the seal on their hacks themselves. But they aren’t all such great spellers. Baker saw one that said, “City of Lost Angeles.”

I’ve heard of trees being stripped...: The Beach Reporter’s police log says a woman “went out back to talk to her gardener [but] . saw a man she had never seen before, completely naked. Her gardener was nowhere to be seen.”

Now for another episode of “Ye Olde Cops!”: I’m not sure if there was an Only at Plymouth Colony columnist in the mid-17th century. But amateur genealogist Patricia Bausman of Westminster has found a wealth of police log-type items from the colony at a University of Virginia Web site.

Her favorite involved the arrest of one “Allice, the wife of Richard Berry, of Yarmouth,” who was charged with “goeing into the house of Benjamine Hammond, when noe body was att home, and felloniously tooke away a womans shift, that was new made, but without sleeus and a peece of porke.” Bausman says, “We don’t know what her sentence was, but I wonder if they went easy on her because the ‘womans shift’ had no sleeves.”

Good thing he said “perhaps”: Iquoted columnist David Allen of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin saying that Kem Nunn’s “Pomona Queen” was “perhaps the only novel of suspense whose hero is a vacuum cleaner salesman.” Don Burke responded that Allen had forgotten about the vacuum cleaner salesman in Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana,” portrayed in the movie by Sir Alec Guinness.

And Angelo Laiacona adds that a vacuum cleaner salesman thwarts an assassination attempt in the 1957 British comedy “The Green Man.” My late father, who was a Hoover salesman, never told me the profession was so exciting.

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miscelLAny: Paula Brynen says she was listening to the radio when she heard, “This traffic report is made possible by Rosarita refried beans. Wind advisory everywhere in Antelope Valley.” She said the report was interrupted briefly by the announcer’s laughter.