1222| Dec 22

Holy Mole

Flor de Oaxaca shuttles customers south.

As good as it can taste, the best part about good mole might be its first stages: when your chef (in my case, it was my sexagenarian pal Evanhelina) moves through the bustling block-sized market ...

Lost and Found

Miracles: A diver’s dark night and her uncanny rescue.

When a blue light pierced the darkness last Easter Sunday, 32-year-old scuba diver Jennifer Thomas thought she was dreaming. After five hours drifting in the 54-degree water of Monterey Bay, she was exhausted and afraid ...

15 Great Books

Some of the best books of the year.

ADRIAN MOLE AND THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION | By Sue Townsend | Soho, 327 pages, $24 Townsend uses the weight of her 23-year-old literary project to create an expert entertainment that’s also a cogent, ...

News Briefs

MIIS, Middlebury Make it Official The Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS) and Vermont’s Middlebury College tied the knot earlier this month at a private ceremony on the Monterey campus. The agreement made MIIS an ...

Bouncing Back

Miracles: A happy kid beats a brain tumor.

On July 21, 2004, then-8-year-old Ethan Halbach and his mother Marya visited the emergency room at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula. Ethan’s recurring headaches, which had been diagnosed as tension headaches, had gotten so ...

Fossil Record

Collaboration by local artist and writer on myth of extinct sea creature is released as animation DVD.

On a day like any other, Gordon Freedman was working at his office when artist Jeffrey Sax walked in with two fossilized ammonites in his pocket. Sitting on Freedman’s desk was his own ammonite. The ...

Learn To Drive

A recent arrival to Monterey County notices something we all try hard to ignore—bad drivers.

Multiple choice quiz: There’s a stoplight ahead. It just turned red. There’s a car in front of you and it starts to slow down. What do you do? A: Slow down. B: Grab your cell ...

Bush Had No Choice

Evidence of ‘enhanced interrogation’ just kept piling up.

Nothing in the [Geneva] Conventions precludes directed interrogations. They do, however, prohibit torture and humiliation of detainees, whether or not they are deemed POWs. These are standards that are never obsolete—they cut to the heart ...

Spurning Japanese

The focus of Arthur Golden’s novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, focus was on the day-to-day minutiae that made the world of the geishas so uniquely compelling. But the film version of the book hones in ...

The Sweetest Holiday

I love Christmas. I can sing the song “Sisters” from the movie White Christmas almost word for word. (See Martha? I told you.) When I start thinking about “We’ll follow the old man wherever he ...

Reefing Madness

Northern California businessman says sinking a ship in the Monterey Bay will bring divers and dollars.

Hours after the HCMS Yukon came to rest 105 feet below the surface on the barren sand flats off San Diego’s Mission Beach in 2000, scuba divers reported seeing a school of perch swimming through ...

DiscSpace

MARIANNE FAITHFULL | Live in Hollywood | MVD/DVD The companion piece of a sort to A Bigger Bang, this 2005 concert speaks volumes. Shattered sounding, croaky and more or less the ultimate example of rock ...

Squidfry

MR. PARTY…Party invitations are cool. Squid’s gotten quite a few for the holiday season. And Squid will even make brief, albeit meaningful, appearances at a few holiday parties. Sadly, though, one invitation is notably absent. ...

Letters

TYRONE’S A GOOD DOG In a world full of big issues, big ideas and big thoughts comes a story that shows how each individual life is as important, compelling and close to the heart as ...

The Best of 2005

Alternapop, hip hop and hard rock classics from this year’s batch.

FRANK BLACK | Honeycomb | Back Porch While publications were hyping the Pixies reunion tour this summer, the band’s singer/guitarist Frank Black quietly released Honeycomb, a “country” album recorded in Nashville. Honeycomb, which features a ...

Home On the Range

In director Ang Lee’s beautiful Brokeback Mountain, two cowboys became enamored with one another during a summer in Wyoming.

Enough with the “gay cowboy” label. The term is more or less accurate, I suppose, but the phrase has a way of diminishing this amazing movie’s focus and reach. Brokeback Mountain is a love story ...

TheaterListings

| theater opening | Christmas Bent: Selected Shorts To Soothe the Savage Shopper Opens 8pm Thu; continues 8pm Fri. Non-traditional literary works, presented in reader’s theater format. The perfect counterpoint to this season’s flood of ...

Learning to Move

Miracles: Guillain-Barré could not stop Maria Corona.

Maria Corona was preparing food at Red Lobster in Salinas on Aug. 6 when her hands went numb. “The next day, my left leg was hurting a lot,” she says. So her daughter, Myra Corona, ...

Street Talk

You Gotta Believe: Asked in downtown Pacific Grove

Q: What’s the closest thing to a miracle you’ve ever experienced? Follow-up: What sports team needs a miracle? Michael StalelyWriter | Berkeley A: An out-of-body experience. I was lying in bed when I felt a ...

Tracking Progress

Rail service plan could come as early as next year.

It takes about 15 minutes to drive a car from Marina to Monterey. But it takes twice that long to travel the same route by bus—and that’s not counting a wait of up to another ...

ArtListings

Bordering on Mean

Immigration debate in Congress gets ugly.

Some of the toughest, most radical anti-immigration proposals in the nation hit the floor of the House of Representatives late last week as some Republicans pushed hard to legislate a crack down on undocumented immigrants. ...

The Miracle of Love

Miracles: A big family came together to support Haley Baxter.

There are miracles—like 13-year-old Haley Baxter surviving a six-pound malignant ovarian tumor and returning to captain the Salinas Christian School cheerleaders in under nine months. Then there are miracles—like seven full-grown women voluntarily shaving off ...