COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:Two tales involving parking lots

I tried. I really did. But I can’t. Yes, it is time for the annual report on Black Friday, a.k.a. the day-after-T-Day, door-buster, line-up-at-zero-dark-30 official start to the Christmas shopping season. And yes, I’m sure you saw all the breathless reports from uber-malls across the Southland, to say nothing of scenes from across the country, with hordes of Black Friday shoppers pushing, shoving, trampling each other, hoping against hope that they will get an iPod Nano for $39.99 before they are all gone.

Very scary.

Of course, keep in mind that I am deathly allergic to shopping and would rather get food poisoning than go shopping on a Tuesday in April. To actually do so on Black Friday would cause my airways to shut down and my major organs to fail, paramedics would have to be called, and even with the defibrillator paddles turned up to 2.5 gigawatts I would be flat-lining — and that’s all before I found a parking space. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I wear a Medic Alert bracelet that says, “I am shopping-intolerant. If found unconscious in a store or parking lot, please move me to a safe location and call 911.”

Speaking of parking lots, there was one frightening statistic in all the coverage this weekend that caught my ear. KNBC News took an unscientific survey Friday morning and found that the average wait just to get into the parking lots at the major Southland malls was six to 10 minutes — and the average cruising time to actually find a parking space was between 20 and 50 minutes.

Do you get it? I don’t get it. May we move on? Thank you.

There was an interesting item in the Citizens Behaving Badly folder this week that also involved a parking lot. Last Tuesday, just after midnight, Costa Mesa police on a routine patrol at the Martinique apartments on Pinecreek Drive arrested a man named Saul Dimla on suspicion of counterfeiting.

They found $460 in highly suspect $20 bills in Mr. Dimla’s possession, arrested him forthwith and notified the U.S. Secret Service, which is responsible for investigating bogus bills and the people who make them.

No word on the quality of the bills, but Mr. Dimla told the authorities that he produced the funny money on a color copier, which is very common these days among people who are a little confused about what the term “making money” means.

Twenty-dollar bills are the faux dough of choice, by the way — $50s and $100s attract too much attention according to the Secret Service website — and color copiers are where all the counterfeiting action is these days. Takes all the romance out of it, I think. What happened to the cranky old forger in a back alley garage somewhere, hunched over a light table, etching printing plates that are darn near perfect while the big boss puffs on a cigar and a guy who’s 6-feet tall and 5 1/2 -feet wide guards the door? Now that’s counterfeiting.

Not only have color copiers sucked the romance out of the whole process, they have dropped the average age of counterfeiters like a bowling ball from the third floor.

According to KIRO Eyewitness News in Seattle, a trio of sixth-graders at a Seattle middle school cranked out $20 bills by the stack on a color printer and spent them at the school cafeteria and local markets.

Their undoing was a sharp-eyed school cafeteria worker who got suspicious when the trio each paid for their lunch with a crisp, new $20 bill.

Think the sixth grade is a little young to be counterfeiting money? Try the fourth.

Last year, at Marquette Elementary School in Gary, Ind., yet another cafeteria worker thought it was odd when a fourth grader paid for his lunch day after day with a $20 bill.

She notified school security, who asked the boy where he got the $20 bills, at which point he gladly emptied his pockets and pulled out a wad of them. Gary police arrested two 10-year-old boys and a 12-year-old girl, all of whom had plenty of the funny money on them.

They also found wadded-up copies of 20s, 10s and 5s in a trash can next to a computer in the first boy’s bedroom. “Doing your homework, Jimmy?” “Yes, ma’am.”

In case you run into any fourth-graders, here’s what the Secret Service says you should look for if you think someone has slipped you some bogus money.

On the real deal, all the details are razor sharp, as in the fine lace lines around the border and the hair and eyes and fabric folds on the Founding Dads, who should stand out clearly from the background behind them.

Another tipoff is the saw-tooth points around the edge of the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury seals. Those are very hard for real counterfeiters and even harder for color copiers to reproduce. The newer bills — bigger portraits, more colors, more background details — are even tougher to fake.

Finally, it’s all about the paper. That’s the biggest challenge for counterfeiters, trying to make the feel real. Whatever the reason, if you have any doubts, just call the police. They will check it out and take it from there.

OK, fine. But here is my question. If counterfeiting money is a cakewalk for the average fourth-grader, exactly how did Saul Dimla end up getting pinched for it last Tuesday, after midnight, in an apartment parking lot? He had to be doing something loopy or he wouldn’t have been stopped and questioned.

I don’t often walk around with $460 in counterfeit bills on me, but whenever I do, I make a real effort not to do or say anything weird, or any more weird than normal. But that’s the thing about technology. Whether you’re trying to figure out how to print money on a color copier or how to use an iPod, ask a fourth-grader. They know this stuff.

I gotta go.