On the Grinch index, it doesn’t rank...

On the Grinch index, it doesn’t rank up there with the year that West Hollywood declared Christmas a working day for city employees.

But the Santa Monica Area Chamber of Commerce has come close--shunning Santa Claus, reindeer and mistletoe on the 225 new holiday banners that are being hung from city lampposts this week.

Instead, each 3-by-7-foot decoration shows either a gull, a dolphin or seaweed.

“The generic candle and Christmas wrapping could go in Des Moines or Cincinnati,” explained artist Laddie John Dill, who designed the banners with graphic artist John Van Hamersveld. “I wanted something that was more tailored to Santa Monica.”

No doubt the most tender Christmas carol sung in the beach city this holiday season will be the one that begins:

“I saw Mama kissing Santa Claus underneath the seaweed. . . .”

A recent survey by USA Today found that one of the most frequent complaints women make about men is the male habit of “not putting the toilet seat down.”

James Novack, a local inventor, says he has the solution: “Beep Seat,” a small electronic device that attaches to the underside of a toilet and senses when the stubborn dolt has left the seat up. After 40 seconds, it starts to sound off.

Novack said that the unit, which will be available in mail-order catalogues for $9.95, was designed after much “research, including taking a stopwatch with me to the bathroom.”

He found that, in most cases, the 40-second interval ends “before the man has left the bathroom.”

Novack, 30, said he came up with the idea after he visited his 87-year-old grandmother and left the toilet seat up.

“She was so mad,” he recalled. “She had fallen in and was very upset, and as she was scolding me, I thought: ‘There should be something to remind men to lower the seat.’ ”

Two auto theft suspects, inadvertently testing Assemblyman Richard Katz’s proposal to make the Los Angeles River into a freeway, drove onto the cement waterway near 5th Street with a police car in pursuit.

The two vehicles voyaged southward for about a mile, at which point the freeway demonstration encountered problems attributable to the recent rain.

“Both cars flooded out,” said Los Angeles Police Lt. Les Lutz.

The suspects tried to escape on foot down the L.A. River Freeway but were overtaken by the officers before they could find a suitable off-ramp.

The other day, while discussing colorful rooftop signs--such as the Carpeteria Genie in Hollywood and the Western Exterminator Mallet-Wielder in Carson--we mentioned the passing of Chicken Boy from the downtown L.A. scene.

CB’s saga continues, though. The 22-foot-tall, half-fowl was acquired by a design firm called Future Studio, which has created a whole line of Chicken Boy items--ranging from the Chicken Boy Fez and Chicken Boy Watch to Chicken Boy Beak Wear and Chicken Boy Bolo Ties.

Alas, Chicken Boy is lying in storage now, his head removed for space reasons. His current state seems something of a waste, especially when there is talk of trying to raise about $33 million to construct a West Coast Gateway here to rival the Statue of Liberty.

As Future Studio spokeswoman Amy Inouye sadly noted:

“We thought Chicken Boy was the Statue of Liberty of L.A.”