The Ludicrous Is Likely

Against the temptations of 900-line psychics or Super Bowl bets, remember the examples of ex-Orange County Treasurer Robert L. Citron and two decades of Pentagon big thinkers, all of whom employed psychics to bitter and fruitless ends. (In trying to find where Moammar Kadafi was hiding so we could bomb him, and where the North Koreans were hiding their plutonium, so they couldn’t bomb us, the government spent enough to buy about 6 million minutes on the Psychic Friends Network.)

That should teach us yet again: There is no profit margin in trying to predict human behavior.

Especially in L.A.

To live here is to be in a constant state of stupefaction at the outlandishness and infinite ingenuity, the excesses and the recesses of the human mind, compared to which interest rates have only two dreary directions to go.

The year is young and already I’ve heard from an out-of-state acquaintance who wanted to know whether Cardinal Roger M. Mahony really blessed a new Chevron station near Yosemite. Even a Nostradamus would have blushed to have foreseen a 1995 that included:

* A convicted North Hollywood child molester who told two young victims he was a space alien recruiting for a utopian society in another galaxy.

* Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon and Heidi Fleiss saving a suicidal man who plunged into the ocean handcuffed.

* A Valley elementary school setting up a “shooting bell” to warn kids to duck for cover.

* G. Gordon Liddy using sketches of the Clintons for target practice, then saying he meant no harm.

* A Santa Monica rabbi making menorahs out of the spent bullet casings from cops’ target practice.

Little wonder that the old movie moguls would brag of getting their best ideas from the vast investment of two bits in the day’s newspapers.

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Any future offers only two major options: the likely and the ludicrous.

It doesn’t take a MENSA membership to envision that Texas’ new law permitting concealed weapons for the first time in 125 years will significantly improve the gene pool to favor those with muscular trigger fingers (and, according to the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, a quarter of all 3- and 4-year-olds are strong enough to pull a trigger).

So let us say that, under the law of unintended consequences, it will be no surprise if in 1996:

* Cities frustrated by gunplay move beyond merely recording details of ammunition sales--as Santa Monica has done, and Azusa just stopped doing--to require serial numbers on bullets, like those that now appear on guns, so every shot is traceable.

* In the push to privatize valuable public property and services, DreamWorks buys up existing MTA tunnels for film storage vaults, and the signs will one day read “Disney’s Venice Beach . . . Franchises Available.”

* Aquarium wars erupt. Long Beach plans to open its attraction next year, and Oxnard and Santa Barbara have the same idea. Soon PCH will be like a turnpike: “Next aquarium 68 miles.”

* Hawaiian Gardens sponsors a competition to name its just-approved casino, ultimately choosing to call it the Aloha Club, a word fittingly meaning both “hello” and “goodbye.”

* The Rose Parade becomes available on CD-ROM, but more profitable will be the bootlegged version with a scratch-and-sniff by-the-numbers card for each passing parade entry: rose fragrance, essence of cardamom, sweating Midwestern bandsmen, and a whiff of horse spoor.

* Long Beach’s newly legal “walk-in massage parlors,” offering a fully clothed lunch-hour break for the ergonomically stressed, are co-marketed with coffee bars and named “Lats and Lattes.”

* In an excess of political correctness, a coalition opposed to dead white Greco-Roman culture tries to change the name of Pomona, both city and college, from that of the Roman goddess of fruit to Centeotl, the Aztec corn god. A conservative-sponsored ballot measure objecting to the appellation “liberal arts college” fails to qualify for the ballot.

* Lawndale’s new law classifying abandoned shopping carts a public nuisance and making the possession of a stolen cart a crime prompts the invention of a Lojack-like cart-tracking device. And Maywood’s ban on hanging laundry in a public right-of-way could face constitutional challenge from the ACLU-backed group, May Sunshine, Not Maytag.

* After a gadfly was prosecuted for punching Whittier’s mayor in the chops at a community forum last year, the city considers discouraging similar disputes by sending offenders not to court but into the ring against Whittier’s honorary mayor, Oscar de la Hoya.

The city of Bell now allows fortunetelling . . . in case you want to check my results.