Thirty Years Ago In the wake of Grape's demise, Mosley returned to San Diego and worked in high schools as a janitor and later joined the Marines.What made you decide to go into the Marines?

"I wanted to straighten myself out. I had gotten into a heavy scene with the music thing. I got tired of trying to be hip and shooting the bull and such. I thought the Marines could help me be more the person I wanted to be." -- "A MOBY GRAPE SURVIVOR," Ted Navin Burke, January 29, 1976

Twenty-Five Years Ago During the Christmas holiday, my sister and I waited in vain for a bus that would take us to the center of La Jolla. After we had tired of craning our necks, my sister approached a woman and her child. They were entering their car and my sister asked whether "two nice women" could be driven into town. Though the driver of the car may have been somewhat startled by the request, she gave us a ride. As we entered the car, she told us that she was headed for the Baltimore Bagel Company, and we all cried out in unison, "For bialys!" -- RESTAURANTS: "BAGELS AND BIALYS," Eleanor Widmer, February 5, 1981

Twenty Years Ago Roger Hedgecock complained about the cozy friendship between San Diego Union publisher Helen Copley and mayoral candidate Maureen O'Connor and how the relationship tainted the Union 's coverage of the 1983 mayoral campaign. Bill Cleator and his strategists are further refining the art of Copley-bashing in the current primary contest, which they've nicknamed "the O'Copley campaign." -- THE INSIDE STORY, Paul Krueger, February 6, 1986

Fifteen Years Ago I know a girl who loves the Replacements so much that when she bought a new car, the first thing she did was transfer singer Paul Westerberg's cigarette butts (hoarded for years in her old car's ashtray) into the new one for luck. That's the kind of devotion for the Replacements I understand, since I've indulged in it for the last eight years. In 1986, I flew to Europe to see the band's first three dates there. -- "HIS TONGUE DOWN THE THROAT OF A HAPLESS 14-YEAR-OLD," Gina Arnold, February 7, 1991

Ten Years Ago The Zona Norte is an outback, sunken and depraved, a sort of necessary afterthought of pockmarked pavement to the rest of the avenida, purposely set off by some invisible barrier. It is the famous red-light district of Tijuana, a network of slum courts or vecindades, bedraggled love hotels, and sex cabarets like the Diamante Disco and the Cielito Lindo, from which are heard shouts of £Olé! and £Mucha ropa! (Take it off!) The ten-block zona runs east to west, between the lower avenida and H Street (Avenida Cristobal Colón); it is like Hong Kong's tattered Wanchai, Bangkok's notorious Patpong Road, or Taipei's Sugar Daddy Row, but for its rumpled, out-of-date seediness, right out of Zola or a daguerreotype scene from dust-drab New York City 100 years ago. -- "THE STREET WHERE NOTHING EVER HAPPENS UNTIL IT DOES," Alexander Theroux, February 1, 1996

Five Years Ago Every now and then an Aztec priest would skin a human sacrifice and, wearing the skin like a costume, dance about in it. To the Aztec layperson, this was business as usual. The same mouths that had eaten human stew and found it agreeable knew avocado and set their imaginations to work on it. Without realizing avocado was related to the laurel, and to cinnamon, they knew that when toasted its leaves tasted like anise, a flavor they incorporated into mole. As for the green smooth flesh, it needed something acid, like lime, or tomato, to cut its richness, and maybe some chopped onion and minced coriander to enliven it. -- TIP OF MY TONGUE: "AVOCADO," Max Nash, February 1, 2001