This week's restaurant: Masala Bowl, 4200 Chino Hills Parkway, Chino Hills.

Indian food is still a mystery to most of America, unlike many other ethnic cuisines. Masala Bowl is a small chain -- locations in Irvine, Tustin, Chino Hills and Plano, Texas, with more coming -- that attempts to remedy that by offering a simplified menu and walk-up service.

The Chino Hills location is in the Chino Hills Marketplace, a sprawling shopping center just off the 71 Freeway. Inside tere's a flat screen TV with Indian music videos and a few decorative touches, but mostly it's the standard exposed-pipe, no-frills interior.

The woman at the counter (who was Indian) explained the menu. They have tandoori-cooked dishes and wraps, but the primary entree is curry. There are seven curries, from mild to spicy, and eight meats or vegetables, meaning 56 possible combinations.

I got lamb tikka masala ($7.49 on its own), which is chunks of lamb in a creamy tomato sauce. It arrived at my table in a plastic bowl with basmati rice. Pretty good stuff. I got the meal as a combo ($9.48) with a soda and samosa bites ($1.19 on its own), crispy pockets filled with potatoes. I also ordered garlic naan ($2.49) and bhel ($3.79), a puffed rice mixture with chopped onions and tomatoes.

The bhel was interesting, a sort of dry, crispy salad, but perhaps an acquired taste. The samosa bites were just okay. I couldn't finish all this, so lids were brought for the two bowls, which were easily portable.

Well, Masala Bowl is no Haandi, but it's not meant to be. As a low-priced, casual introduction to Indian food, it's worth a visit. I noticed another couple of restaurants in the Marketplace I hadn't tried and another one across the street when I exited the parking lot onto Pipeline, which means I'm already looking forward to my next excuse to head to Chino Hills.

Did you know Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner used to practice law in Ventura? Gardner had an office in a stately downtown buildiing and walked a couple of blocks to the courthouse to try cases, while writing a few of the earliest tales of the defense lawyer in his office. On my visit to Ventura, I photographed a plaque on that office building, which has been renamed in honor of Gardner.

Perry Mason used to be hugely popular in Gardner's series of 80 (!) novels as well as in movies, radio and the Raymond Burr TV drama. Like a lot of mid-century mystery novelists, Gardner, who died in Temecula in 1970, seems to have faded from public consciousness. I tried reading one of his Masons during my mystery-reading phase of childhood but didn't get far, which was probably my fault, not his.

You can read more about him here.

The elaborately named T. Willard Hunter, one of Claremont's biggest and grandest characters, died Monday night. (Tony Krickl of the Claremont Courier got it first.)

Hunter is best known for having started the Speakers Corner segment of the Fourth of July festivities in Memorial Park in which anyone is allotted 10 minutes to speak on any subject they choose. But he was also a frequent contributor to the Courier and the Bulletin, wrote a few books and spoke all over the country.

He also founded the annual Labor Day Walk from the San Gabriel Mission to Olvera Street in 1981, L.A.'s 200th birthday, to commemorate the city's founding. The nine-mile walk follows the path of the city's first settlers.

You can read more about him in the Bulletin on Thursday and in my column Friday. Here's a photo of him holding forth (Fourth?) at a previous Speakers Corner.

Know him, ever meet him or ever hear him? Post a comment below. He was one of a kind.

Well, I had a fine time, even though I ignored all your advice. (Sorry about that.) The hotel was right on the beach and represented the first time I can remember being able to see the ocean out my window.

I had a couple of decent meals and hit two bookstores and a comic shop prior to the start of the conference, which tied up the rest of my visit. Except for a side trip during some built-in free time to the Reagan Library, but I plan to write about that in Friday's column.

As a fan of downtowns, let me offer an eyewitness report. Ventura's is gentrifying with boutiques, a wine bar and interesting restaurants, but it's changing slowly enough that thrift stores, art galleries and mom and pop places haven't been priced out. There's a modern movie theater, a vintage theater now used for rock shows and very few chains, only a Starbucks and a Ben and Jerry's that I noticed.

Downtown hasn't reached its potential and it's still a little scruffy, but it's in considerably better shape than a few years ago. If Ventura were in the Inland Valley, its downtown would be second only to Claremont's. It's something for Pomona to aspire to; Upland, meanwhile, would kill for a downtown with the activity of Ventura's.

Not feeling in the mood to go to Ojai on my way home as Bob House suggested (all the bookstores except Bart's appear to have closed, Bob), I took Highway 126 to luxuriate in quasi-rural atmosphere before transitioning back to the urban fray.

A local character of the 1950s and early 1960s, Ethyl Fernbach was a housedress-wearing matron who played piano and sang the standards at Shanty Devlin's and later at Elegant Ethyl's, a bar behind the Red Griffin Inn, both in Cucamonga. She was the subject of one of my columns, which you can read as an extended entry below.

Anyway, she's been memorialized on the Find a Grave website. A woman named Kym Winkler read my column and set up the page using excerpts of my column. You can view the page here.

This stop sign in Upland near Foothill and Mountain has its message painted over. Officially? Unofficially? Unsure what to do, I stopped anyway.