From Baja Malibu to San Miguel – best Baja surf

• Waves bigger than your house

• We are on the road to Playas de Tijuana, the stretch where the border fence acts as guardrail on the right. Jeff has agreed to tutor me in the ways of surfing Baja California. A San Diego native, Jeff surfed Baja once a week in his late-’70s high school days. Now in his 30s, he doesn’t come down as often, and he’s noticeably nervous about driving in Mexico. “This is always the scary part of the drive.” (Sept. 2, 1999)

• Tijuana is the first stop to suicide

• Tijuana has long attracted people seeking medicine and medical procedures unavailable or unaffordable in their home countries. They've been joined recently by people seeking the means to kill themselves. And some of them are coming from 8000 miles away. It’s being called suicide tourism, and Tijuana is one of its hottest destinations.(Aug. 20, 2008)

• Gompers takes a bow

• "I remember my first encounter with a student here. I was wearing a suit, and a student comes up to me at lunch with a crowbar in his hand. Tapping it against his leg, he said, ‘Why are you wearing a suit? It is just going to get ripped when you break up a fight.’ That was my very first contact with a Gompers student.” (Dec. 9, 2009)

• My gender Is bunny

• I’m sitting on a leather couch in the middle of a darkened black-walled, black-ceilinged room talking to a man who, at taxpayer expense, takes hormones to become more like a woman yet is in the middle of an experimental performance in which he seeks to become a dragon. (March 25, 2009)

• Balls

• The last 4 of my parents' 17 children are boys. I am the second to last. Being boys, we loved sports and we did little else but play them. My younger brother Peter and I challenged the older two, James and Leon, to games of basketball, baseball, football, kickball, mushball (baseball with any old, flat ball we could find in the bushes), broomball (field hockey with brooms and flat balls), anything involving a ball. (Dec. 18, 1997)

• I feel like I'm trapped

• So what is it like to be part of the largest civilian work force in the United States? A newspaper ad invited postal workers to talk about their jobs, and from the many who replied, 15 agreed to be interviewed, all of them either letter carriers or clerks, none in management. A few requested anonymity. (July 13, 1995)

Ernie Grimm was recruited by editor Judith Moore when he was a recent graduates from Thomas Aquinas College in 1995. Moore felt that he "would have learned humility" from reading the great books.

After Moore died in 2006, Grimm took over the job of editing news and feature stories.