Last June, San Diego assemblyman Juan Vargas received a brief, if dubious, burst of fame for his role in the failure of Senate Bill 1, a financial privacy measure sponsored by Democratic senate member Jackie …

The Las Vegas city council last week finalized its million-dollar deal with Cheetahs Las Vegas strip-club owner Jack Galardi, who took over after his son Michael, the previous co-owner, copped a plea to federal bribery …

One of the guests told me he was surprised that a few of the Jazzercise students were overweight. Maybe it's not as physically demanding as other aerobic workouts. They all seemed to be great dancers.

I hear it all the time. “Wow, I wish I had your job — you get paid to have fun and hang out with famous people!” What folks don’t seem to understand is that first, …

Dear Matthew Alice: To determine if food items have outlived their edibility, expiration dates and pungent odors are probably the two most obvious ways to make a conclusion. Recently I was given a sizable chunk …

Matt: Given the ancient Romans' achievements in the sciences, they must have understood the concept of quantities between zero and one. So how did they notate fractions? I/VII would get cumbersome and wouldn't aid in …

Hey Matt: What happens when one species of spider accidentally falls into the web of another species? -- Black Widower Paul, San Diego Weeeel, depends, according to the staff bug guy at our sister institution, …

Rising like a scruffy whaleback above a sea of luxury homes and ranchettes in Jamul, McGinty Mountain hosts a rich but circumspect treasure of botanical oddities. Several rare and endangered plant species make their home …

The West African nation of Benin is best known as the birthplace of voodoo. More than two-thirds of the residents still practice voodoo, with its ecstatic trances and magical dances. Benin (pronounced behneen) is also …

How it works is an industrial secret, say the founders of Aqua Genesis LLC, a San Diego company that intends to clean up the Salton Sea and in the process make thousands of acre-feet (one …

Chapter One: The Damned and the Lost I have been here so long that even the sea gulls must recognize me. They must pass the word along about me from generation to generation, from egg …

I asked the Cowboys fan if she was from Dallas or if she just jumped on the bandwagon when the team was winning in the '90s. She said she had been a fan since she was a kid.

Heymatt: I seem to roll around and move a lot when I sleep. Why don't I ever roll right out of bed? -- Bedbug, La Jolla A question we've asked here in Rancho de Alice …

Hey Matt: My friend Ian thinks that ingesting a chunk of human dookie will kill you and that half of dookie content is bacteria. Is this true?! I don�t believe it! -- Snuggles, the net …

Matt: Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems that when I'm at the beach on a windy day, I can hear sounds that are being blown toward me, but I can't hear sounds that …

Early in the past century, Riverside, Washington, was a disreputable dockside community on a bluff above the Snohomish River. Max Carlton Miller, born in Traverse City, Michigan, spent his youth in Riverside, as some residents …

Dozens of elephant trees cling to the walls of Torote Canyon, a tributary of Indian Gorge in the southern reaches of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. In Mexico, this tree is called torote, which means "twisted," …

Speculation about the ultimate fate of the San Diego Union-Tribune is once again raging though the U-T newsroom, Mission Valley watering holes, and all other traditional haunts of old and new hands who've worked at …

Rescuing city finances may be futile as long as the society remains feudal. That is to say, San Diego's overlords are making sure they will get their corporate welfare -- no matter how broke the …

Fernando Suarez del Solar didn't even know who actor/director Sean Penn was. But Penn already knew Suarez. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on January 14, Penn, while in the Amsterdam airport Schiphol on …

The assistant suggested that the Millers were short on funds. “He said I should pay Max double what I normally paid. He asked me what I usually paid. I said $1000 — five times what I normally paid.”

When I first visited, Craig was living in Escondido and Lisa in Valley Center. But Valley Center, says Shelby, “was a very small little farm town, and I got tired of it."

Romance often leads to marriage, and marriage often leads to divorce. The latter is not only emotionally painful but legally complicated, which is why most people hire lawyers to help them. The following conversations are …

Paul pulled out a roach clip, which was attached to a car antenna. One guy said, "Cool, you got some weed we can smoke?" Paul said, "No, this is for my cigarettes,"

Heymatt: When we cross the border at San Ysidro, my husband always comments on how excited the drug dogs look when they're sniffing all the cars. He thinks it's because the dogs are drug addicts, …

Matthew: What's so practical about a practical joke? Where did the term come from? -- AV, Golden Hill Welcome to another episode of As the Word Turns, the Matthew Alice College of Etymological Knowledge. A …

Heymatt: Were there "switch" pitchers ever in baseball history? -- J, BP Three switch pitchers played in the pre-1900 era, but the only contemporary major leaguer to do it was ex-Padre, officially listed as a …

Laurel Spring, a mini-oasis tucked into an upper crease of the Santa Ana Mountains, lies just three air miles away from the expanding edge of Orange County's outer suburbs. Groundwater coming to the surface here …

What do you get when you launder money in a henhouse or a pigsty? Filthy lucre, according to proponents of Proposition A, the Rural Lands Initiative that would attempt to thwart development sprawl into the …

Both sides agree the seeds of the dispute were planted in 2000 when the County Board of Supervisors announced that the three county animal shelters -- in Carlsbad, Linda Vista, and Bonita -- would be …

1. Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante is facing a lawsuit alleging that he took from Indian tribes $3.8 million more than is allowed by the state's campaign limits. Who is the plaintiff in the lawsuit? A. …

The three San Diego city councilmen under indictment for bribery and other alleged nefarious activity in the Cheetahs strip-club scandal have been raking in the big money for their legal-defense funds from an array of …

“Linda Vista, with its rows of yellow houses, is where we eventually washed to shore. Before Linda Vista, we lived in the Green Apartment on Thirtieth and Adams, in Normal Heights. Before the Green Apartment, …

The hardest event was actually here in San Diego at Planet Hollywood's grand opening. The week before. Junior Seau had a party there. I was actually invited to that. Inside, I cased the joint.

Matt: I'm building my own house. It's a pain. But it got me to thinking, what is the tallest building in the world, now that the World Trade Center is gone? -- Tool Guy, Ramona …

Dear Mr. Alice: When I walk on the beach, I notice that rocks of the same size seem to be clustered together. All the big ones are together, and all the small ones are with …

Heymatt: Are there any laws about how small "fine print" can be in a contract? Broadly speaing, where there is a legal mandate that a document, label, warning notice, etc. be legible, the standard is …

A sparrow hawk alights upon a sycamore limb, then launches with outstretched wings to catch a puff of sea breeze moving up the canyon. A mule deer bounces across the pathway, pausing to take your …

The City of San Diego has admitted in official filings what its critics have been saying for months: unless it raises taxes or cuts city worker pension benefits, it will have to slash city services. …

The aging Chevy Blazer struggles to climb the grade into the Tijuana neighborhood of El Pípila, about ten miles southwest of downtown. Atop the hill, the dirty, potholed street wanders through one of the grittiest …

Some residents of North County are upset about a delay in disclosure of a potentially dangerous crack in a radioactive water pipe discovered at the San Onofre nuclear-generating Unit 3 two weeks ago. The incident …