The Apron de Rigor for Barbecue Chefs

Summer is here and you may think the gift shop at the L.A. County coroner’s office has nothing you need. After all, you already own a set of its beach towels--you know, the attractive ones with the outline of a body.

But, as it happens, the 4-year-old shop, open to the public at 1102 N. Mission Road, has something new for your backyard dinners--a barbecue apron.

The garment, priced at $15, carries the coroner’s department name, a big red heart and two special pockets. One says, “Spare Ribs.” The other says, “Spare Hands.”

DANGER--CONSTRUCTION AREA ITEMS: Raul Aragon noticed that a sign in a hard-hat area at Cal State Northridge had misspelled “bang.” Or do the university’s bricks make a different kind of sound when they hit a hard hat? And in Beverly Hills, a gift-wrap motif on a soon-to-be-opened Hermes of Paris store won a civic architectural design award for best “construction fence design” (see photos). Guess the gift wrap beats a fence decorated with campaign posters.

WE PROMISE NOT TO PLAY IT AGAIN: A Reuters story, reporting on the Humphrey Bogart stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service, said: “Here’s licking at you, kid!”

WHERE’S THERE SMOKE . . . Continuing the discussion of notables who become figures of speech, Rondo Perkins, Leslie Westbrook, Darrell Sorensen and several other readers recalled a famous song lyric of the hazy ‘60s, “Don’t Bogart that joint, my friend . . . “

“We all knew what they were talking about,” Perkins said, referring to a typical Bogart movie pose with a cigarette. “You would pass the already burning joint and the guy next to you would just hold on to it and let it burn away instead of passing it on. ‘Bogarting’ became the buzzword for hanging on to something for too long.”

Which raises a question: President Clinton says he didn’t inhale. But did he Bogart?

APPROPRIATE ADDRESS: Bernie Weiss wonders if anyone else--in addition to the police, of course--noticed that the Bel-Air man charged with cultivating 4,000 marijuana plants at his mansion lived on . . .

Stone Canyon Road.

WATCH OUT FOR THE STING: Larry Channel spotted a personal ad in an Apple Valley newspaper from a woman describing herself as an “innocent and sweet” 5-foot-tall “Scorpion.”

21ST CENTURY DEBATE: One question posed by the new century is how the years will be described in casual conversation. “Two Thousand and One,” for instance, is a bit long-winded and not very musical. These are the ‘90s. The years of the next decade will be the . . . what?

Florence Ganahl Sharp, who attended Los Angeles High in the first decade of this century, once told my mother that the term “ought”--as in zero-- was commonly used back then. Thus, 1904 was “Ought Four” for short.

Perhaps the increasing use of the metric system will come into play. In the recent movie, “Strange Days,” which takes place on the last day of 1999, a character refers to the year 2000 as “2K.”

Not that any of this will matter very much to those who are still in the Bogarting crowd.

miscelLAny:

Jeanie Sauder wonders if the fund-raising invitation she received from an Assembly candidate was worded in a peculiar manner because of recent scandals. Such as the guilty plea of Rep. Jay Kim (R-Diamond Bar) to concealing more than $230,000 in illegal campaign contributions. Sauder’s invite asked her to respond promptly so that “arraignments” could be completed for the event.