Why buses are better than planes, part one. Flying to El Paso, my plane (ironically, an Airbus) began emitting strange high-frequency blips and unexplainable static from various locations above the passengers' heads. After an air-mile …
Food's as old as we are. It's impossible to tell whether people have shaped foodstuffs more or food's done more to shape people. The Irish and potatoes, Mexicans and corn, Asians and rice, Norwegians and …
HEY, LADIES! Let's hear it for men! Give a shout-out now to the body masculine! Here's to five o'clock shadows, Adam's apples, square jaws, and rough skin. To testosterone, to the Y chromosome, to the …
It's all pretty unusual, when you really think about it. First off, you've got this exclusive fruit (the grape) that grows only in special regions. And then, the whole time that it grows, it’s fussed …
Michael Tuck threads his bathroom tissue over the roll, “definitely over.” For Carol LeBeau’s last meal, she’d eat peanut butter and jelly on fluffy white bread. And Paul Bloom wouldn’t tell me how old he …
I’m allowed to write this article only because I’m a 7. I don’t mean that I’m a 7 the way Bo Derek was supposedly a 10. I mean that I’m a 7 on the Natural …
There’s three dogs and a cat here, so there’s a zoo-like quality. On most days, Benjamin gets up earlier than I do because he has this farm-boy physiology and I don’t. I’m kind of a sleepaholic.
Dinner at Tapenade Restaurant is a memorable experience. The cordial ambience, the feel of that which is unmistakably French, and service like a brilliantly engineered heist: the help comes and takes you from your worries, …
I see Asian gang cars some nights, in a long caravan down the Mira Mesa Boulevard. They meet at In-N-Out Burger before heading off for illegal street races on Kearny Villa Road or in Sorrento Valley.
I’ll take the charming anachronism over the “in thing” any day. Just give me the Flat Earth Society, Elizabethan countesses surfing the Internet, and long-haired hippies on Wall Street. Grant me Kodachromes and unicorns, abaci …
Who said the words and the music were supposed to go together? Just when the sleepy situation of local business had begun to awaken in the Bird Rock area of La Jolla, the residents and …
Pacific Beach compresses roughly 10,000 people into its five square miles. It's a tight community, with many sober families and older residents living alongside a large contingent of college-age drinkers and partiers.
Listen. I’m a basketball extremist. Maybe it’s the rhythmic, elastic whump (ring)s, whump (ring)s — thuds resounding echoing overtones — leading me into reverie every time, the odd expectant tempos, down the block, passing my …
There must be some discrepancy. Word on the street has it that bouncers come big and dumb, like unnecessary monsters set on ruining our nights out. "Bouncers only get those jobs because they're naturally violent …
Having a dip in Mission Bay is less difficult than wrestling ocean swells with the mighty Pacific: the pacified Mission Bay waters boast warmer temperatures, smaller waves, shallower beaches, and fewer rocks; and there are …
Way back in English class they called it "situational irony." There in the tiny, tranquil breakers, almost waveless, pint-sized children frolicked. They scooped dark mud and tossed it, wrestled, and held each other's adolescent heads …
In San Diego, airport cabbies rest at the top of the public-transportation heap. Their fares are more regular — and generally larger — than those of mere city cabbies. Plus, the airport more or less …