People and Events

An errant raccoon notwithstanding, we are assured by Jet Propulsion Laboratory officials that the nation’s space program was not damaged. The raccoon was, however.

Shortly before 10 p.m. Tuesday, the animal scaled a power pole at JPL and got zapped with 16,000 volts. It fell on a transformer inside an electrical equipment area and landed on the ground--not before knocking out power at much of the Pasadena space facility for an hour and a half.

Pasadena Humane Society officer Endel Jurman said the raccoon, a female 6 to 8 months old, survived but with first-degree burns and hair loss over her entire body. “She’s not,” he observed, “feeling very well.”

The victim was taken to the Wildlife Way Station in Little Tujunga Canyon, where on Wednesday it was reported “in stable condition.” Jan Brown, a vice president of the animal refuge, said the victim had been named Voltage “as a tribute to the survival instincts that got her through this.”

JPL spokesman Don Bane said backup generators took care of vital equipment during the outage. As for their monitoring of signals from unmanned spacecraft, he said, “all that stuff is put on tape at the antenna station and played back to us later.”

The problem was confined to JPL, according to a Southern California Edison Co. area manager, Dave Sparks.

Two young men and three female companions were headed from Los Angeles to the beach in a stolen car, the California Highway Patrol says, but didn’t realize they were going the wrong way until they reached the Arizona border.

CHP officers reported that they saw the car racing back toward L.A. along the Interstate 10 Freeway and pursued it for 85 miles at speeds up to 95 m.p.h. The suspects finally ran out of gas and rolled to a stop.

CHP Officer Dave Robertson identified them as James Wilson, 21; Derrick Benjamin, 22; Janie Johnson, 18, and two juvenile girls. All were from Los Angeles.

They were arrested on suspicion of car theft, possession of stolen property, reckless driving and evading arrest.

And for not wearing seat belts.

It was Los Angeles’ outlawing of the sale of spray-paint cans to minors, says David Lowdermilk, that nudged him into forming his National Organization Taunting Safety and Fairness Everywhere (NOT SAFE).

Lowdermilk, a 40-year-old air traffic controller at Santa Barbara Airport, reasons that if the goal of officials was to prevent graffiti, “why not ban crayons, Magic Markers, pens and pencils?” Not only that, he suggests, the age limit could be extended to 75, so that people would be too old, feeble or too mature to write dirty words on walls.

Something of a Libertarian, Lowdermilk seeks to ridicule the efforts of legislators to protect the public and the environment by suggesting that the laws they write be taken to extremes. Among his ideas:

Force jetliners to taxi from city to city.

Reduce auto speed limits to 15 m.p.h. to save bugs from smashing themselves against windshields. . . .

Lowdermilk says this sort of thing helps him unwind after a tough day in the control tower. “Some people go out and get drunk,” he observes. “I write letters to the editor.”

But he doesn’t regard all of his notions as nonsense. Limiting every lawmaker to one law per year, for instance. Or restricting him (or her) to a single term in office. “These have some merit,” he insists.

Despite the protest of a small group of anti-smokers, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley signed his name Wednesday on the cigarette company’s sail that will fly on the U.S. catamaran before one of the America’s Cup races.

During a ceremony outside City Hall, the mayor wrote, “Good luck! Tom Bradley” on the sail just above the word “Marlboro.”

“I’ve signed this sail to wish Dennis Conner and his crew luck in the America’s Cup race,” Bradley said. “I have nothing whatever to do with who sponsors the race.”

That did not go over very well with the non-smokers, who carried signs that read: “Is the cup worth the cancer?” and “Real sailors don’t make smoke.”

One of the protesters signed the sail as “Rose Cipollone,” whose family last June won a jury verdict that a cigarette company was partly responsible for her death from lung cancer.