Keys

Nissan North America has a warning for customers: Placing your electronic key too close to your cellphone could leave you stranded. The automaker is asking customers driving new models of two of its flagship sedans to keep their car keys and cellphones at least an inch apart to avoid disabling the "intelligent keys."

HERE'S an urban myth that refuses to die: Hotel card keys are gold mines for identity thieves, who extract credit card numbers and other personal nuggets from them. This rumor, generating millions of Internet postings in recent years, is based on a thin premise at best. Now it's been convincingly debunked by Computerworld, a Framingham, Mass.-based weekly trade tabloid for information technology professionals.

If Chad Billingsley and Clayton Kershaw are ready for October, the Dodgers should be too. . . . This is only the fourth time that the Dodgers and Angels have each won as many as 90 games in the same season, but it's the third time it has happened since 2001. . . . A Freeway World Series, of course, would be a first. . . . Fifty years ago next Tuesday, Gil Hodges and the Dodgers clinched their first National League pennant in Los Angeles with a 12-inning victory over the Milwaukee Braves at the Coliseum.

When Alberta Rodriguez's high-tech key got stuck in the ignition lock of her 1998 Mercedes-Benz a few weeks ago, the 63-year-old real estate agent in Downey was forced to have the car towed to a dealer. The car was in the shop for a week and when Rodriguez got the car back, she was also handed a bill for $690 for a replacement key and a new ignition system. "I was shocked," Rodriquez said. "I was lucky that it happened at my house and not someplace else."

"Change is constant." Those words, first spoken by 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, might as well have been spoken by Phil Nuebling, a construction worker who has been employed downtown for the past six months and has been plugging Glendale parking meters with nearly $3 in quarters a day. That is about to change.

West Hollywood has the key to the parking space of the future. Offering a glimpse of what parking may be like in a cashless 21st Century, the trendy city has installed high-tech parking meters where a key can be used in lieu of a quarter. The Westside already has talking parking meters. And Los Angeles is planning to provide a pocket-sized personal parking meter to delivery trucks.

West Hollywood has the key to hassle-free parking. And it's for sale. The city is selling "cash keys" that when inserted in special meters buys parking time in 20-minute increments. By using the rechargeable, magnetized keys--set for an amount between $10 and $100--one is freed from carting around buckets of quarters to feed those ravenous meters.