To its fans, the world of professional baseball is a dreamland where grown-ups can live out their childhood fantasies, tracking batting averages and swapping stories about heroic home runs. Behind the curtain is a more …

Nobody expected anything big to be decided at last Tuesday's electric-power summit. The California Public Utilities Utilities Commision (PUC) had called for the roundtable at the Al Bahr Shrine Temple auditorium on Kearny Mesa Road. …

The sister of Hall of Fame running back Franco Harris has filed suit against the San Diego Chargers, alleging that the team fired her "as a result of racial discrimination and harassment," a San Diego …

"I made 473 drawings on one assignment in Vietnam. February and March of 1967, in Dong Ha in the DMZ. Sometimes I could use art to shield myself from what was going on around me. …

"It started in 1991 and peaked in ’94. We identified two major mail-theft gangs in ’95, and by ’98 every blue collection box in the four-county area, 7500 of them, had a new locking mechanism.”

Adults are just degenerated youths with driver’s licenses, credit cards, academic degrees, and degrees of bad habits. They do come in handy, however, when you need to borrow money or jump-start your car.

Hike across Death Valley’s salt pan to the lowest spot in the Western Hemisphere. Death Valley’s salt pan was inundated by 2 feet of runoff from the surrounding mountains during the wet winter of 2005.

Dear Matthew Alice: I work in Mission Valley, and I spend a lot of time waiting at red lights on top of the bridge that crosses Interstate 8 at Mission Center Road and Auto Circle. …

Dear Matt: Why do letters to complete strangers commonly begin with a seemingly intimate term of endearment like "dear"? Are there other terms in current use in the English language for written salutations? Do other …