Given all the concrete opportunities here, it...

Given all the concrete opportunities here, it almost seems unfair to allow Southern Californians to enter a contest to see who commutes the farthest to work in the nation.

Sure enough, the top mileage musterer two weeks into the contest is a local--Kraig Kitchin, who lives in the Santa Barbara area, works in Hollywood and tries to stay sane in between. His daily round trip is a mere 240-mile hop.

Running second in the contest, sponsored by a stereo company, is a man who covers 190 miles between his home in the Palm Springs area and his Glendale office. Third is a woman who motors 186 between Bangor, Pa., and Brooklyn, obviously going to great lengths to avoid the subway.

Kitchin, a radio syndicator who admits, “I’m kind of a strange duck,” breaks the monotony of his pilgrimages with a cellular phone and tape recorder, on which he dictates letters during his 5-7:30 a.m. cruise. Does he shave, too? “Never,” he said.

Entry deadline is still a month away in the competition, in which the sponsor, Kraco, is offering the winner a complete car stereo system, a CB radio and a radar detector.

Kitchin hasn’t come up with a CB handle for himself, though, because he knows he will fall to second place as soon as his neighbor, Kathleen St. James, enters.

A representative of a fabric company, she drives from Santa Barbara to West Hollywood four times and to Costa Mesa once each week, the latter about a 300-mile round trip.

St. James gave the gas pedal a rest Friday after an accident in which her car was totaled. It wasn’t during a commute.

“I was three miles from my house, running an errand,” she said. “I’m on the road more than a thousand miles a week going to work and I get hit right here.”

Playboy magazine’s 29th Playmate of the Year--whose psychic mother predicted she would win--is named India Allen, and she seems to have some India-Rubber characteristics: In the same package of press info about her, one news release calls her a “5-foot, 10-inch honey-haired model,” and the other says she is a “5-foot, 11-inch beauty”--probably the first one of all those Playmates to expand vertically instead of horizontally. . . .

White Out: Reports of a 20-foot great white shark loitering off the Southern California coast were enough to spook many swimmers out of the water, even on such luscious days as these have been.

Body surfer Mark Ropele, Mr. Sang Froid, said “ . . . the chance of getting eaten by a shark is about the same as getting struck by lightning. I figure I’m not gonna get struck by lightning, so I’m not gonna get eaten by a shark.”

It may only have been a mama shark, marine biologists say, come south to warmer waters to give birth. But remember Ma Barker.

It’s often traumatic enough to go to work, without having to worry about whether your parking garage is going to attack you when you get there.

Take Republican Assemblyman Wayne Grisham of Norwalk.

Grisham was cruising into the state Capitol garage when, as aide Tony Russo put it, “this thing grabbed him.”

The thing was a security system that accidentally triggered, causing a steel barricade to pop up from below. The pugnacious apparatus simultaneously slashed the tires of Grisham’s Dodge Aries, crunched the car’s transmission and jacked the rear axle four feet into the air.

It all started with a garbage truck, officials sheepishly explained.

“The truck had struck a traffic barrier while servicing the garage area,” said Curt Soderlund, a spokesman for the General Services Department. “Workers were repairing the arm (at the garage entrance) when he (Grisham) went through. Somehow the security system malfunctioned. I can’t say more for security reasons.”

Grisham, though terming himself “a little shaken up,” worked the rest of the day.

His place in Sacramento lore is secure: He’s the first legislator ever literally held up by a machine.