Look what Santa brought--Exhibit A!Times reporter Jim...

Look what Santa brought--Exhibit A!Times reporter Jim Newton, who has been covering the O.J. Simpson murder trial, received a package in the mail from Simpson attorney Robert L. Shapiro.

It contained some cologne sold by Bijan. The brand name: “DNA Fragrance for Men.�

Another lawyer joke.

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Family tradition: When the Three Stooges got together on the screen, Moe would invariably pound away on frizzy-haired Larry and bald Curly. So it sounded almost like another episode when the heirs of Moe were accused in a lawsuit of mistreating the heirs of Larry and Curly Joe by withholding merchandising income from them.

But this time it was Moe Howard’s side that got hit hard. Descendants of Larry Fine and Curly Joe DeRita won $4.4 million in damages in L.A. Superior Court.

Almost overlooked in the coverage was that one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys was Bela Lugosi Jr., son of the “Dracula� star. (Yes, he has heard all the vampire/lawyer comparisons.) Lugosi, 56, helped push a law through the Legislature a decade ago establishing that a deceased person’s name and likeness are property rights belonging to his or her heirs.

One of the philosophical questions raised by the defense in the Stooges case was: Who was more popular--the original Curly (Moe’s brother), or the later Curly Joe (DeRita), whose heirs were plaintiffs? Historians will long debate that one. But Lugosi showed that it was after DeRita embraced Stoogedom that the group’s movie and merchandising careers took off.

The irony of the case is that the Stooges got along famously in real life. “They divided everything equally,� Lugosi said. “They never had a fight when they were alive.�

The Stooges a dull bunch? Say it ain’t so!

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A coincidence too unlikely for fiction: This is a gloomy time for American Lit fans. Today marks the 54th anniversary of the death of novelist Nathanael West, who was killed in a traffic accident in El Centro. West, 37, was rushing back to Los Angeles to attend the funeral of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had died of a heart attack in West Hollywood the previous day.

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Belting out a Homer: West wrote one of the classic novels of Hollywood, “The Day of the Locust,� which has had a bizarre spinoff of sorts. One of the principal characters is a dim fellow named Homer Simpson, the kind of guy that you might build a cartoon series around.

Consider Simpson’s relationship with the “old broken deck chair� in the back yard of the house he rents in the Hollywood Hills:

“By moving his chair in a quarter circle he could have seen a large part of the canyon twisting down to the city below,� West wrote. “He never thought of making this shift. From where he sat, he saw the closed door of the garage and a patch of its shabby, tar-paper roof.�

Sounds just like Bart’s dad, doesn’t it?

miscelLAny In its year-end review, Time magazine gives “worst music� of 1994 honors to “The Three Tenors� performance by Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras--an “extreme example of bad taste and lazy greed� at Dodger Stadium. (But weren’t the Dodger Dogs tasty?) And for “worst product� of 1994, Time’s award goes to the $30-million, never-say-concede senatorial candidate, Michael Huffington.