THEATER CHAIN BALKS AT DIRTY-UNDERWEAR AD BUT NOT GORE

Bits and pieces, odds and ends, stuff 'n' nonsense:

-REMEMBER HOW your mother always used to tell you to wear clean underwear in case you were in a car accident?You'd better wear clean underwear to San Jose, Calif., theaters, too.

The AMC Theater chain has refused to accept a San Jose laundromat's ad because it shows underwear in a hamper full of dirty clothes.

The image is the same as a billboard ad campaign for Oasis Laundries Inc., which has been posted in San Jose for the past three months. The same picture is on the billboards, a hamper overflowing with dirty clothes - including underwear - and the adline says, "Are you buying underwear to avoid your laundromat?"

Despite the fact that the ad has been seen by millions, AMC Theaters found it offensive and refused to show it in the chain's movie houses.

That's OK, of course. But there is an irony here.

The movies AMC shows are all the same first-run movies that run everywhere in the country, including R-rated films with nudity, violent gore and graphic sex.

AMC Theaters doesn't censor its movies, of course, but finds dirty underwear is offensive.

Go figure.

-WALT DISNEY CO. filed suit against the Academy Awards the day after this year's Oscar show for using Disney's patented Snow White image in the Oscars program's opening production number. (It was settled out of court a week later, by the way, with an apology from the academy.)

That's wild enough, but did you see what Disney spokesman Erwin Okun said about the suit?

"We sue all the time," he told the Associated Press.

Makes you wonder who else has been fooling around with Walt's legacy?

Who would have thought that Mickey, Donald, Goofy and friends were a bunch of ambulance-chasers?

-KIM BASINGER, as you may have read, has made a unique investment. She bought a small town in her native Georgia.

Basinger paid $20 million for Braselton, Ga. - commercial and private property totaling about 1,600 acres. Braselton is 40 miles northeast of Atlanta and has a population of about 500. Exempted from the sale were private homes not owned by the Braselton family and property owned by the town government.

Basinger's most recent film was "My Stepmother Is an Alien," and she has a prominent role in the upcoming "Batman."