Steve Harvey, the Only in L.A. columnist for the Times, was in West Los Angeles when he heard a voice from the past. A panel truck stopped and the driver asked a guy standing nearby if he wanted a great entertainment center for cheap. Selling bad speakers out of the back of vans was commonplace here two or three decades ago. "60 Minutes" even ran a segment, explaining that the speaker boxes were often empty or contained worn out parts. "The passerby wisely declined," Harvey writes.

Only in L.A. also observes that after Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante's lopsided defeat in Tuesday's election, "I'm confident that future office-seekers will never build their TV advertising campaign around the fact that they had lost a large amount of weight." And, he asks, what was Chuck Poochigian thinking by having his campaign spots narrated by Ben Stein in his best Ferris Bueller whine? "When he declared that Poochigian would make a 'darn fine' attorney general, it almost sounded like a put-on."