Matt Weinstock

Sept. 27, 1957

I never thought the time would come when I would write an ode to a single-chamber incinerator but here I am, doing it. Well, not exactly an ode but maybe a panegyric or at least a paean.

After Monday, householders can no longer burn, not even on unsmoggy mornings or calm evenings.

By official edict, the backyard incinerator has become a villain, convicted of contributing to the delinquency of smog and sentenced to death.

I don't know about other people but I shall miss carrying the kitchen wastebasket daily to the ugly but inoffensive furnace and putting a match to the contents.

There was a sense of accomplishment in seeing a mess of crumpled paper and junk mail addressed to "Occupant" being reduced to ashes.

I always gave it the full treatment. As a confirmed fire watcher, I stayed with the incinerator in fair weather and foul to make sure it burned clean and didn't smoke up the neighborhood.

But henceforth all the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate around the house must be submitted to municipal collectors.

Only one problem remains--what to do with the darned old thing.

QUOTE AND UNQUOTE--A lady asked the pianist in the bar of an Altadena restaurant if he "knew anything by Jules Verne" and, reports Bill Morgan, he caught on quickly and obliged with "Around the World"... The Ubiquitous Reporter, as an anonymous postcarder identifies himself, reports hearing this first-row echo in a burlesque house: "Hold everything, Novita, until I wipe my glasses!"

DID YOU NOTICE the ad on the back page of Life showing a college couple saying "Winston tastes good" and a passing prof finishing the sentence, "AS a cigarette should"?

Let us not assume the Winston people finally yielded to the grammarians, outraged by "like" used until now. More likely, they decided to make the most of the teapot tempest over the grammatical error as a further, good-humored exploitation pitch.

SPEAKING OF words, the Hayward Hotel coffee shop has a sign, "Slunch," apparently a contraction of supper and lunch and not to be confused with "Brunch," breakfast and lunch. "Slunch" is specifically interpreted on the sign to mean a coffee break. If we get any more of them, under whatever name, we'll be snacking about every hour on the hour.

IT'S TOO LATE to do anything about it, with the deadline for the Dodger decision Sunday, but Jim Miller of Whittier wonders why the city executives didn't do as the Inglewood City Council did when the question of a racetrack came up. A postal card vote was taken, all registered voters receiving them. The people voted for the track.

AT RANDOM--Culver City Cully says one of the bad features of the five-day week is that the Sunday drivers are also out on Saturday... Pat Disberry tells of the motorist who came upon a woman standing beside a small foreign car and asked, "Had an accident?" "No," she replied acidly, "I always turn it over on its back when I have to change a tire"... A restaurant on Hill Street near 7th  which recently closed has its windows soaped pending new occupancy. And then the other day a sign was posted on it, "Another downtown L.A. improvement."