Keeping Your Car Clean @ MotherNature.com

“On the way home from work the other day,” says reader Susan Marquez, “my husband spotted a dirty truck with ‘www.washme.com’ scrawled on the back.” Judging from the washing that Southern California has since received, one might conclude that Mother Nature has a Web site.

WEATHER OR NOT: Like me, Philippe Brieu spotted the KABC-TV graphic that forecast “moistie” weather the other night. Quick-thinking weathercaster Garth Kemp explained at the time that it was a French term. Not so, says Brieu.

Still it was one of the best recoveries I’d seen a weather guy make since the time KNBC flashed a graphic predicting that it would be zero degrees the next day. Old pro Paul Johnson merely positioned himself so that the crazy 0 was blocked from view.

On the same subject, Bea Shaw of Toluca Lake remembered that when she was a news reporter on KABC, a weathercaster said, on a Sunday, “Tomorrow will be muggy. Followed by Toogy, Weggy and Thurgy.”

Help! A sudden downpour of silliness! Let’s move on to traffic.

LIVELY ROADS: Everyone’s in a hurry in Southern California these days, apparently even at funerals. Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in Glendale has posted a 30-mph speed limit for its winding one-lane roads--a race car driver would be lucky to negotiate some of the curves at that rate. Oddly enough, the speed limit outside the cemetery on nearby Brand Boulevard is 25 mph (see photos).

TRANSLATION, PLEASE! I’ve talked before about some of the weird closed captioning you can see on television. Bill Cranham was at a gym in Hollywood the other morning, watching a soundless newscast while he worked out. During a segment on Larry Flynt, a caption revealed that the porno king was scheduled to have a “you’re logical” procedure. Spelled “urological” in most other places.

JUST AS LOGICAL: You know how you sing a song all your life, then learn that you had misheard the lyrics? Well, I used to think that Bing Crosby crooned he was gonna settle down, stop roaming and make the “San” Fernando Valley his home. But I’ve had my doubts about the name ever since Vivian Lindner of Glendale passed along a piece of junk mail from Blue Shield that referred to “than Fernando Valley” (see accompanying).

NEW YEAR’S EVE SUGGESTION: Still another proposal for how L.A. can have its own end-of-the-year party--instead of watching a rerun from New York--is advanced by Jon Longworth. Technically, it’s more of “a Pasadena thing,” but that’s OK. “With a helicopter hovering in the air just seconds before midnight,” he said, “Rose Parade television broadcasters Bob Eubanks and Stephanie Edwards could drop down onto the intersection of Orange Grove and Colorado boulevards at exactly midnight.”

I suppose we should let them use parachutes.

miscelLAny:

“I talked to you four years ago and my gosh, what’s happened to you?” someone named Lon said on my answering machine. “Now you’re bald, you wear glasses, you got that white stubble all over your chin. You used to be athletic. You were the Dodgers’ best first baseman for many moons.”

Always great to hear from a fan. But if you’re talking about the 1957 Rancho Park Little League, I was a pitcher--for the Indians. And drew little attention. Certainly less than Fernando (Valenzuela, not Valley).

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Steve Harvey can be reached by phone at (213) 237-7083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by e-mail at [email protected] and by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, Times Mirror Square, L.A. 90053.