Golden Dreams
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
Pablo Cantua picks up the phone. “Hey man: Want to play Antarctica? I can get you the gig.” “Antarctica? Haven’t heard of that bar.” “No man. Not a bar, the continent.” And so began the …
My friend Joe and I are standing at the edge of the water on Coronado’s Central Beach. He’s a surfer. I’m a body surfer. “So do waves come in batches?” I ask him. “Can you …
One of the real pleasures of feeling lousy enough to stay home in bed is the YouTube deep dive. Flu’d up a couple years ago, I watched maybe 15 straight hours’ worth of stuff about …
Hello, lamppost, whatcha knowin’? You remember the line, right? Simon & Garfunkel, “59th Street Bridge Song,” feelin’ groovy? They were big with the anti-war set a couple of generations ago. But it’s only today that …
“Mantiques,” says the sign. “SD Tuff Stuff. The Mancave Store.” This I’ve got to see. We’re on a less-visited stretch of W. Main in El Cajon. Guy’s in the next room, working on a weld. …