Comments & Curiosities:

It’s a problem. Headlines can be deceptive. When I read “Naked Iguana House On Sale” (July 3), I thought it was a story about a bit of Newport Beach history that I missed.

Naked Iguana House didn’t ring a bell, but it was obviously historic, like the China House in Corona del Mar, sort of, and now, it was being sold. How sad. One more piece of our collective past up for grabs, on the block, soon to be subjected to the whims and wants of the highest bidder.

Why had I never heard of the Naked Iguana House? How embarrassing. I’m supposed to know these things. The photo that accompanied the story wasn’t much help. Unlike the China House, which looks very, well, Chinese, there was nothing about the Naked Iguana House that I could tell that looked liked an iguana, evoked an iguana, or resembled any other reptile in any way. But as it turned out, there was no need to worry.

The Naked Iguana House is, in fact, a private home on the Balboa Peninsula owned by Newport Beach resident Jim Jones. The house as not named for an iguana, nude or otherwise, but for a bar by that name in Lake Havasu, Arizona, which is where the London Bridge is, which I still don’t get.

The Naked Iguana House owes its moment in the media spotlight not to history, but to a long-running dispute with the City of Newport Beach, which suspects that the Naked Iggy is in fact a commercial enterprise, a party house to be exact, available for rent to anyone who has the bling.

The city believes that Jones rents it out for, hmm, social events and as a film location, although if you’re looking for a place for your daughter’s sweet sixteen party or your aunt’s 80th birthday — I’m pretty sure the Naked Iguana House is not it. Jim J. says the allegations are pish-tosh, they deserve a big “Oh hah!” and says the city has been mean and unpleasant to him for no reason.

He says that he has never rented the house out for ragers, reptiles, remotes or anything else and has even invited city officials to come by and check out La Casa Iguana Nuda for themselves.

A number of them have done exactly that, including code enforcement inspectors who wrote down an impressive list of building code violations and the Newport Beach police, who dropped by unannounced last year and found 24 grams of cocaine and more than 200 Valium pills in the house.