The truth about Desire and Content
We need biodiversity
10 a.m., June 19
Golden Dreams
Azam Ahmed travels the entire US-Mexico border to discuss “magical thinking” of immigration
How does San Diego measure up against other border towns?
Azam Ahmed, the New York Times bureau chief for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, was in town recently, after traveling the entire US-Mexico border, from Brownsville/Matamoros to San Diego/Tijuana. He talked about how it ...
Melvin Parker: making “The Block” TV show for “ourselves”
“I want to inspire people with these stories”
“I want to start my own network.” Melvin Parker reckons it was these words that won him a scholarship to study broadcasting. But that turned out to be just the beginning of a two-decade struggle ...
Signs in mind of Harry Crane, Orson Welles, and a rock-pile installation in Golden Hill Park
The collection is accompanied by something human: a face
A low-grade tag war broke out a couple of months ago on the retaining wall in front of a burnt-out motel near my home. Three letters — initials, surely — spraypainted by some poor soul ...
A hundred miles from Lake Cuyamaca to Cibbets Flat... in a day
You have to be disciplined about your time: know what you’re going to do, get in and get out as fast as possible
This Friday, Joe Seeley will embark on his fourth San Diego 100: a 100-mile exercise in physical and mental endurance that winds from Lake Cuyamaca to Cibbets Flat east of Pine Valley and back, to ...
Wounded Warrior Wolfpack whizz
For them, the wheelchair is the reality
It seems like a set-piece charity event. Wounded veterans playing wheelchair basketball against a team of Coronado City employees, and another crew from Loews’ Coronado Hotel staff. The mayor has turned up, the ex-mayor has ...
Jonathan Antonio Martínez Machain’s full-on didgeridoo
Could this be the first music in the world?
You can hear him long before you see him, the low honking sounds, a block away. This is Sunday night, Avenida Revolución, TJ, crowded. Jonathan Antonio Martínez Machain sits cross-legged on the sidewalk with a ...
Signs: at the Encinitas Pannikin; the 1889 National Hobo Convention in Saint Louis; the corner of 26th and Pershing; and the 125/94 interchange
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”
1. The croissants at the Encinitas Pannikin are as big as my head, and they aren’t even close to the most gorgeously decad ent baked goodies on display in the glass cases that greet visitors ...
Pete Verboom’s dairy farms west of the Pala Mission
He was president of the San Diego County Milk Producers’ Council
It’s an odd feeling, driving along State Route 76, to come across this ghost settlement, a few miles west of the Pala Mission. “Be careful of snakes,” my friend Kim shouts, “and people!” I’ve persuaded ...
Gani Beg: the Robin Hood of Macedonia
A hundred years later, he’s still a folk hero
The little boy was hanging in a pear tree, with a rope around his chest, crying. The rest of his family had ropes around their necks. They were dead. The rebel Gani Beg came down ...
Mr. Jeff Holland’s coping opus
Coping Cards: a physical set of affirmations,
When Jeff Holland’s aunt committed suicide around a year ago, it came as a shock. “She lived in Kansas City,” he recalls over coffee at the Leucadia Pannikin, “and she had been the primary caretaker ...
Dr. Janina Scarlet’s X-Men Storm emulation
Choose Your Own Adventure with her new book Therapy Quest
As I write this, Avengers: Endgame has passed $2 billion at the global box office. People do like superheroes. San Diego-based clinical psychologist Janina Scarlet is no exception. Radiation exposure at the Chernobyl disaster left ...
Melissa and Jon Block welcome you to the first Tiny House village in San Diego
You use less energy, you regain a kind of intimacy, you talk more, you’re closer to nature and each other
Right next to the harpists’ colony, you spot an odd sight. At first, among the trees, it looks like an RV park. But then you realize: there’s no RV in here. It’s all houses. Lilliputian ...
Phyllis and Robbie Robinson’s harp heaven
From the Beatles to the Beach Boys... people have been playing harps for at least 5000 years
I’m halfway up Mount Laguna, walking off the Sunrise Highway into a little house on the edge of the forest. Through the gate, up redwood steps, through another gate. An elderly lady appears at the ...
Car talk at the Concours D’Elegance in La Jolla
“I have 17 cars,” he says, “doesn’t everybody?”
She: “This is you in your element. I love it.” He: “I’ll show you another car I could have bought for $500,000...” The owner of a local Mercedes garage is showing a 1965 Pontiac GTO. ...
Restoring a 1936 Mercedes-Benz 500K Special Roadster with Craig Hopkins
Judged at La Jolla Concours D’Elegance after seven years of reconstruction
Craig Hopkins of Dallas, Texas has a collection of model cars in a cabinet, organized “by how much I like them. This car is on the top row.” “This car” is his restored and very ...
