License Now Requires a Course in Driving Irresponsibly

Russell Stone of Westchester swears he saw it: a young man talking on a cellphone while at the wheel of a driving school’s car on Culver Boulevard in Culver City.

“I wonder if learning to use the cellphone while driving is part of the standard curriculum these days,” Stone said. “I think he needed more lessons, though. He was holding the phone to his left ear with his right hand, which is poor technique.”

I forgot to ask Stone if the instructor was also on a cell.

Executives in the lifeboats first: Stone, doing double-duty for your columnist, also contributed a snapshot of a sign indicating that one business considered some employees’ lives more valuable than others’ (see photo).

Misleading packaging? On a visit to the L.A. County Arboretum, Raul Roa of Whittier wondered if “someone had hit the jackpot with a way of bypassing the cooking and blending of two of my favorite items and had found a way to grow them right in the garden, ready to serve” (see photo). Alas, he found out that the sign bore the nickname of a succulent that turns reddish-brown late in the year and somewhat resembles beans.

And contains a lot fewer calories.

The incredibly shrinking suspect: USC employees were e-mailed a crime alert about a local robbery committed by someone who would be difficult to spot without a magnifying glass (see accompanying).

TV graveyard: With the Emmys three months away, thousands of boxes of free videos of Emmy-nominated boob-tube offerings are in the mail to Emmy voters -- unsolicited. One mailman reports he delivered such a package to a voter who was holding a yard sale.

“I teased him with the classic Hollywood put-down -- ‘Straight to video, right?’ ” the mailman recalled, “to which he replied, ‘No -- straight to yard sale.’ ”

Fashion crime: A customer was leaving a Hermosa Beach store when the security sensors sounded and the manager asked her to stop. She helpfully told him that her bag was “making it go off,” the Beach Reporter said.

The customer allowed him to look inside and he found two damaged security sensors -- but no stolen items.

A witness then told the manager that the subject was wearing the bathing suit she had tried on in the store. She was arrested at the scene.

miscelLAny: The crime log of the Seal Beach Sun said a resident phoned police to complain of hearing noises in the garage. An investigation revealed no creatures in the garage, except for “a tortoise hibernating.” Which raises this question: Do tortoises snore?

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Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LATIMES, 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 [email protected].