“They’re like squiggles with different colors.” Anita, from Nashville Tennessee, is squinting into the middle distance of Horton Plaza trying to summon an image of exactly what was hanging on the wall of her room …

To: Matthew Alice: Every time I drive down Sixth Avenue to 163 north, I see a strange pinkish building on my left on the grounds of Mercy Hospital. It's strange because the highest five or …

Your Mattness: The other day I was reduced to making myself a cup of (ugh!) instant coffee. I put a cup of water in the microwave, zapped it for a couple of minutes, took it …

“During World War II,” a retired San Diego policeman told me, “the hoods in the downtown bars made plenty of money. Don’t let anybody fool you. The reason they made more money than anyone else …

After flowing across the pristine, oak- and sycamore-dotted Pamo Valley north of Ramona, Santa Ysabel Creek cuts southwest down a steep gorge and finally emerges on the flatlands of San Pasqual Valley. In the '70s …

Until his junior year of college, when he decided he needed to save the world, my dad wanted to be a sportswriter. His career began when he didn’t make the cut for his freshman basketball …

Anyone who has passed through the San Diego Union-Tribune during Gene Bell's stint as publisher has heard the mantra, the talk of management's intention to take things at the paper "to the next level." Harmless …

Moscow, Helsinki, Stockholm, Minneapolis; these are the places that come to mind when one thinks of fur clothing, places where the temperature can drop below zero and stay there for weeks. But since last April, …

When John Simpson, a 53-year-old vacationing music teacher from Birmingham, England, was found strangled to death last month in his room at La Mesa's Rodeway Inn, the Union-Tribune was most circumspect. The paper's plea for …