San Diego's best tomato breeds: Better Boys, Early Girls, Yellow Taxis The ripe round red tomato sitting on the kitchen table is alive and busy. While we are asking, “How shall I eat it?” the …

Coronado Cays villages have a distinctly nervous feel When you turn off the road, past the uniformed fellow in his guard house and through one of the several wide gates, you have the impression of …

Long-necked bonanza We had reached our first destination, about two miles due west of the San Diego Wild Animal Park, the semirural home of a pediatric dentist who’s been raising ostriches as a sideline for …

A little bit warped and kind of sexy "My clue was Caravaggio. He was thoroughly trounced for using Christ and religious figures in his paintings. He didn’t paint them in the clothing and rooms of …

Brief Eden We didn’t see too much of the man in trailer number eight, who was supposed to be a Federale, except for the times when he would step out onto his wooden deck and …

Revenge I used to work on a morning show for Magic 102, a former classic rock station here in San Diego. I usually got to work before the other DJs, and I’d spend a few …

You want the night staff Do all these people pass through in the night, millions of little desperate atoms on their way to conventions, underground bingo palaces, or whores' bedrooms? The only person who sees …

We live in a pre-industrial world and we prefer it there “We feel much more comfortable in medieval clothes. Throw on your tunic, your cloak, and your sword, and you’re all set. You feel much …

Roommates from Hell Later that morning I called Carolee and described how I made love to her husband on her jungle-print sheets and gave her vivid details of our evening and our conversations. Rick and …

The Silk Road Ends in San Diego “One of the Russians said, ‘Treat these [Russians] and kill these [Afghans].’ The other doctor said, 'How can I do that?’ The Russian said, 'Like this!’ and he …

Stop Food Fights, Clean up after Motion Sickness When Renee drives the pink route, she wears a white visor and shorts that make her seem calmly athletic, like the directress of a tennis camp. Twenty-four …

Radical, Whole-Wheat Architecture He describes Dryden, who died in 1946, as “flamboyant, quixotic,” and “a personality who ranged from high to low.” He says, “He also describes this scene: “His family said he made and …

Ship of Fools “She poured wine for all of us. I picked up a glass and raised it in a toast and said, ‘Nostrovia ... Gorbachev... Nostro-via.’ The place erupted. The damn first engineer comes …

Destination Tijuana “Don’t let them tell me the bus is new. Of course, we always get there on time; it’s just on the way there are, well, complications. It’s in the nature of the route. …

Are Off-Roaders Destroying Anza-Borrego? "A green-sticker dune buggy decides to drive in past the closure sign and fiddle around. There’s a camper back in there, and they have a verbal duel. The camper takes down …

Out Here in the Middle of Nowhere “Before, gangs were racially segregated, so you had the Mexicans, the blacks, the Aryan Brotherhood, and so on. Now, the Bloods and all are recruiting across the racial …

Tunaville Times Crew members, nearly three-quarters of whom were Portuguese, addressed each other in the idioms of their native villages while they laid the huge black purse seine nets on the docks. Nautical designers and …

What Windansea surfers said about Tom Wolfe Eight summers have drifted by since Tom Wolfe (author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) traveled to California to write a series on “The New Life Out There” …

In time for the morning glass For a few years back in the '60s, Mike Doyle was the hottest surfer in the world. With an unusual combination of power on big waves and stylistic grace …

“Indians came to the valley in the ’20s. They settled out there, particularly the Punjabis, and married Mexican girls because they couldn’t marry Americans. That’s why out in Calexico you’ve got so many Mexican kids named Singh."

“I moved here from San Diego and I actually prefer it. I really do. I married a Mexican girl and settled down. They’re the best people I’ve come across yet in California. Certainly the most kind.”

“Developers are basically rapists. I grew up in Uruguay and Colombia, and I saw what developers from places like Miami did there. Holiday Inns all over the place, totally messing up the coastlines.”

Mount Soledad, it is true, is one of the most haughty neighborhoods in the United States. And it’s suffocatingly quaint. Small, cracked tarmac roads weave their way arduously up the crests of canyons and through slopes of chaparral.

A $30 million development covering 69,000 square feet at the intersection of 15th Street and Camino Del Mar, it styles itself as a “European retail village.” Gone, we gather, are megalomaniac spaces of yesteryear’s malls.

The Lafayette Hotel on El Cajon Boulevard seems at first an unlikely venue for a major alternative conference dealing with the “Truth About UFOs” — or to give it its proper title, the National New …

Imagine an eight-year-old English boy arriving at LAX for the first time in his life. Having taken off from a freezing, raining London, he arrives 14 hours later to a freezing, raining Los Angeles. He …

Gated communities are the coming trend in Southern California, ad although this isn’t really a gated community, it sort of has that feel. People here feel safe because of the security measures.

There is a cult Iranian movie, popular both in Iran and among exiles in the U.S., called Agha-ye Avareh, "Mr. Exile." In it a kind of Iranian Charlie Chaplin, complete with shabby suit coat, loosened …

Its skeletal frame, with rectangles of empty space, gives it the half-ruined aspect of an ancient arena like that in Arles or the Coliseum itself, as if the architects had been unable to resist a pun.

Over the last year the powerful, sumptuous vineyards of Northern California, the Napa and Simi estates that have poured the Golden State’s vinous nectar across the globe, have been the scenes of viticultural carnage of …

New York, New York, it’s a helluva town, the song (and most New Yorkers’ pride) proclaims. The great Babylon of American cities, the true capital of the nation, and home to lots of very tall …

Unlike 1984, when Ronald Reagan made it a point to finish his campaign at a giant rally in the parking lot of Fashion Valley, George Bush came to see the All-Star game and was booed by the locals.

Sunday nights at the Lagunilla wrestling gym at Calle Primera and Ninos Heroes in Tijuana have not been designed to seduce the pacifist or the coward. Already from the street — that sloping section of …

The La Jolla facility will be the third Mormon temple in California and the first to be built in the state in more than 20 years. (Los Angeles’s temple was built in 1956, Oakland’s in 1964.)

On a quiet street in suburban Escondido, in a neighborhood dominated by warehouses and light industrial factories just off Auto Park Way, the inertia of an empty provincial evening is suddenly shattered by a burst …

Walk through Balboa Park on a weekend afternoon and there is a chance you will come upon a sight you might think had passed with the War of the Roses or the Field of the …

Until recently San Diego could boast no Saville Row, no Place des Victoires. It was content to have a few designer shops dispersed among its pastoral malls and the odd British tailor tucked away in …

When you get out of your car to investigate, you will find nothing but a circle of trailers in the middle of the desert, a corral of lights like the lanterns hung in a circle of pioneer wagons.

On Highland Avenue, in the heart of National City — a mile-and-a-half-long boulevard along which the city's gangs conduct their lethal parades on weekend nights — a red car sits in a small parking lot …

On the toy-town ferry that crosses the bay from San Diego s downtown to Coronado, noctumal romantics have taken to the water. They have come to watch a sunset, to immerse themselves in the melodrama …

The 19th-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin once noted that it is not the heart or the soul that lies at the root of human happiness and equilibrium, it is the intestine. To the French of that century, …

“They didn’t fix it, you can tell. It is all bravado. They’re hoping that when it happens the second time it’ll be in Tepic. If it doesn’t happen there, we’ll all be sleeping under the moon.”

Sitting at tables with cocktails while watching half-dressed boys and girls mime to Liza Minelli songs as they wade through a miasma of dried ice is a concept of entertainment that has died out elsewhere

When Dostoyevsky wrote The Gambler at the end of the 19th Century, the gambler was already a type. Highly strung, wild-eyed, given to unaccountable superstitions, he was the most engaging anti-hero of them all. But …

A cultivated childhood in Europe is unthinkable without a strained and sulky relationship with paintings. Even among the Anglo-Saxons, the race that during the Reformation defaced their own churches and peeled their frescoes away with …