LUMBERYARD LOGS: Fun with crime

I’ll let you in on a little secret: Laguna Beach has fun crime. Our police files are so amusing that some of our copy editors, who also handle crime blotters for much bigger cities like Newport Beach, Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach, pass around Laguna crime blotter items as a form of inter-office entertainment.

One memorable incident that is fondly remembered around here involved someone who called police in fear of a menacing hummingbird.

Now we know why Laguna Beach police are such a pleasant group of people. Despite the constant stream of drunks, DUIs and the occasional armed robbery, most of what passes for crime in Laguna is pretty lightweight.

Just this week, someone called police to report seeing what might have been the backside of a baby bear that might have left footprints. Seems straight out of Goldilocks “” or was that a Charmin toilet paper commercial?

I couldn’t help but chuckle at the poor soul who called the police at 1:30 a.m. to complain about warbling homeless people in the neighborhood. What on god’s green earth do they have to sing about, anyway?

You always learn something new from the crime log. For instance, this week contained a little gem of information: apparently cliff jumpers occasionally descend (pun not intended) on one South Laguna neighborhood, and it’s gotten so bad that a builder has resorted to hiring armed guards to keep them away from his construction site. (The police log said the guards were armed with Uzis, but I tend to doubt this.)

Neighborhood disputes are always interesting. One woman in her 50s was accused of spraying an elderly female neighbor with a hose during a screaming altercation. Sounds like they all could have used a good hosing. The police responded with “counseling.” Now that’s nice.

My favorite this week is the guy who got the cops called on him for bad hair. He had apparently shaved only half of his head in the beach restroom, which caused some alarm.

Why only half of his head? Was he mentally ill? Must be crazy or doped up to make himself look like that, right? Wrong. The man was apparently guilty of nothing more than self-inflicted bad barbering, and was sent on his way.

Last week, we had the famous nutmeg-eating contest in which boys at a sleepover tried to ingest as much of the spice as they could.

When one passed out, they probably stopped, but we don’t know for sure. All we know is somebody “” a parent, perhaps? “” called the police to come look at the poor kid, who had in the meantime regained consciousness but was a bit woozy. Haven’t these kids ever heard of banana peels?

And then there was the poor fellow a couple of weeks ago who fell asleep at the beach with a valuable painting at his side. Was he painting it? Was it for sale? All we know for sure is that when he woke up, the $10,000 painting was gone. Whoops. Lesson learned: don’t take your valuable painting to the beach unless you are willing to sit up with it.

Here’s an update on an unusual incident, also from a couple of weeks ago. That poor woman who was stuck for 10 hours in the elevator at Pavilions went home and is OK, says Sgt. Jason Kravetz. And yes, she really was stuck in the elevator for 10 hours.

CINDY FRAZIER is city editor of the Coastline Pilot. She can be contacted at [email protected]