“They like to carry the 9mm handgun,” Officer Roy moody says. He's talking about Lao and Cambodian gang kids. “And, of course, they do like the semi automatic rifles like AK-47s, even though we haven't …
July 27, 1995
Thursday, July 27
Cambodians, Lao, Viet gangs terrorize Crawford, Horace Mann, Gompers, Lincoln, Kearny High School, Linda Vista
Why Mozart can make you smarter
Hey, Matt: Why is it that whenever people listen to music they have to tap their toes or somehow keep rhythm with it? — X Cleveland, San Diego Dear Matthew Alice: My boyfriend does his …
July 27, 1995
Sin Jen, a romantic gardener in Ocean Beach
Sin recalls a disaster that struck San Diego before the war: When the water from Hoover Dam was first used in California, it was too salty and killed all the begonias and acid-loving plants.
July 27, 1995
Chopra has the New Age set in Del Mar enthralled
Of course, Chopra is well on the way to realizing his own infinite possibilities. He sold a million copies of his book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind and that’s just the hardback figure.
July 27, 1995
Thursday, July 20
Alexander Theroux's grammar of rock and roll
Parsing the demon-tongue of shake-your-groove-thang-ism.
July 20, 1995
"Hell in a handbasket" came from "Heaven in a handbasket"
Dear Matthew: Where the heck did the phrase “going to hell in a handbasket” come from? It doesn’t make sense to us and has been bad for business. — Handbasket Makers of America, La Jolla …
July 20, 1995
What saves flies in my car
Dear Matthew Alice: Say I trap a fly in my car when I go down the highway doing 65 mph. Why doesn’t the fly get smashed against the back window, assuming flies can’t fly 65 …
July 20, 1995
Popcorn smells — real and fake
To Whom It May Concern: Why can the smell of popped popcorn, whether popped fresh or burnt, be smelled farther away than other foods? Is there a fact behind this question, or is it just …
July 20, 1995
DNA: San Diego's tiniest snitch
“People don’t realize that when they’re hitting somebody, blood transfers onto whatever they’re using — not the first time, but by the time you come back like this” — he mimes a baseball bat coming down on a skull.
July 20, 1995
Thursday, July 13
San Diego mailmen spends half of their days sorting mail
A letter from San Diego to New York should take three days from the time our letter was dropped in the downtown collection box. Mail from San Diego meets the delivery standard 92 percent of the time.
July 13, 1995
The effect of a lid on pot of boiling water
Matthew Alice: It’s time to settle an ongoing debate between my brother and I which started one evening when we were making up a batch of spaghetti for our kids. The pot of water was …
July 13, 1995
Prisoners and their voting rights
Being that next year is an election year, I ponder this question to you: Can convicts vote? — N. Carcerated, Vista Being that I need to ponder your grammar, why don’t you ponder this one. …
July 13, 1995
Thursday, July 6
San Diego public defenders and their caseloads
Jorge DeHorta’s life ended, for all practical purposes, late one Friday night in July of 1994, a few minutes before 1:00 a.m.. when a Chula Vista cop and his K-9 partner arrested him in a …
July 6, 1995
Origin of the f-word
Dear Mr. Alice: I’ve always wondered about that most vulgar of English vulgarities, the F-word. I remember my fifth-grade teacher claimed it stood for Fornication Under Consent of the King. What is its true semantic …
July 6, 1995
Why not to double ingredients in Brownies recipe
Matthew Alice: If you want to double the amount of product from a reaction, you have to double the amount of reactants. In other words, if you want twice as much green paint, mix twice …
July 6, 1995
Wolfman Jack –San Diego top 40 DJ immortalized in American Graffiti
“The trouble is, in the early 1970s the radio people began to take over, the accountants and the researchers, the people who didn’t know what the hell was going on. That’s what screwed things up.”
July 6, 1995
San Diego County’s highest point, Hot Springs Mountain, is 6533 feet
Some of the loftiest — and least-visited — mountain country in San Diego County lies on the 25,000-acre Los Coyotes Indian Reservation. San Diego County’s highest point, Hot Springs Mountain, with an elevation of 6533 …
July 6, 1995
The tortured life of our duck
It looked like the fossil of a dinosaur, there on the CAT scan film. The veterinarian, Dr. Marjorie McMillan, pointed her index finger, the nail clipped, unpolished, toward the skull. “There and there,” she said. …
July 6, 1995
Richard Henry Dana in San Diego
So on that Sunday, young Dana — a stripling tar, 20 years old — walked into San Diego wearing a blue jersey, duck trousers, and a straw hat. He and his friend Stimson headed right to a “grog-shop.”
July 6, 1995
Geoff Brizzolara reviews his father's stage act
“Before you were born, the first time your mother felt you kick was in the middle of my guitar solo in Max’s Kansas City, to the tune of Bad Boy by the Beatles.”
July 6, 1995