Downtown Pomona now has its own trolley bus, the subject of Friday’s column. Above, Larry Egan of the Downtown Pomona Owners Association and the trolley; photo by yours truly. Middle, a view of the old-fashioned interior, and below, I climb aboard; photos by Liset Marquez.
Reader John Bredehoft brings to our attention one of Johnny Carson’s Carnac the Magnificent skits from the “Tonight Show” with a local angle. For the uninitiated, Carson would pose as a great seer who would accept a sealed envelope from sidekick Ed McMahon, hold it to his forehead and offer up the answer. Then, “Jeopardy”-style, he would open the envelope and read the question or lead-in.
In this May 21, 1974 segment (see the clip here), one joke involves Mount Baldy and starts about 3:15 in, but the whole thing, at 7 minutes, is fun to watch.
Sample: “UCLA.”
Question: “What happens when there isn’t any smog.”
In a milestone for Fontana, new population statistics show the city has topped 200,000. Wednesday’s column has more, as well as updated stats for our other cities — see how yours compares! — and a few unrelated short items.
In Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which is a journalistic exploration of where our food comes from, he mentions being an accident-prone individual. He says, parenthetically, that “childhood mishaps included getting bitten in the cheek by a seagull and breaking my nose falling out of bed.”
Ha ha! But we can all sympathize, right? I never had either of those things happen, and in fact made it through childhood without breaking any bones, but three accidents quickly came to mind.
I once poked my head between two bars in a wrought iron stair railing and couldn’t dislodge myself for a few scary minutes.
Attempting to carve a soapbox derby car from a block of wood with a pocketknife, I cut my hand because I was carving toward myself, not away. (The project, only a few shavings in, was abandoned.)
And when a moving van was in our driveway, I walked into the edge of the loading platform while bouncing a basketball and cut my face about an inch above my eye. I still have a scar, but it could’ve been a lot worse. Yikes!
Your turn. What physical mishaps, the more absurd the better, occurred to you in childhood?
An L.A. Times editorial last week said Ontario’s airport ought to be renamed, inspiring a blog post here last week. Some of your responses, as well as letters to the editor about the editorial, inspired Sunday’s column. Thanks for the help!
50/Fifty Asian Fusion Cuisine, 201 N. Indian Hill Blvd. (at 2nd), Claremont
The new restaurant by the former owner of Bangkok Blue in La Verne, 50/Fifty opened in Februaryxx in Claremont’s Village West, in a space previously occupied by a wine shop. Relatively small, it’s got floor-to-ceiling windows along its frontage and a menu posted in the window, both inviting touches.
I met a couple of friends there for lunch recently. The atmosphere is quiet and restful. The color-sensitive one described the walls as pumpkin and the cloth napkins as coral. I’ll take her word for it.
“Asian fusion” seems like a misnomer; the dishes strike me as original spins on Thai and other Asian cuisines rather than true fusion. We got wok-fired Asian noodles ($12), Mandalay curry with chicken ($12) and Joyce’s beef and vegetable stew ($15). One or two bites into the latter, the foodie who ordered it said, “This is amazing!” And it was, the beef tender and flavorful. That dish might qualify as fusion since it’s a sort of American beef stew with Asian touches.
The noodles and curry weren’t amazing but were good. My accompanying brown rice was the best I’ve had. One had an Thai iced coffee and really liked it.
We shared some of our dishes, but I returned a week later on my own to get the stew for myself, and it was just as good as the previous week. I look forward to more meals here. The prices here are a couple of bucks too high, but this is Claremont’s high-rent district and thus understandable. The service was polite but too reserved.
My friends, who faced the windows, liked the view; someone had to have their back to the windows and that was me. They kept remarking on what was going on outside, such as a fellow diner who went outside to take a call and spat on the sidewalk. “I feel like I’m missing out,” I lamented.
“Is that orangutan going to slip on that banana peel?” one friend said by way of reply, pretending to look over my shoulder. “He might drop that wedding cake!”
I didn’t even turn around.
Friday’s column is about a comic shop, the cleverly named A Shop Called Quest, that opened recently in Claremont. It’s downtown, a rarity for a (these days) niche product like comic books, meaning that plenty of people who aren’t looking for comics are passing by and, in some cases, walking in.
Saturday, not coincidentally to the timing of today’s column, is Free Comic Book Day, a national promotion in which you can walk into a comic shop and get a free comic book. The FCBD website lists all the free comics and has a store locator. My column also gives the names and addresses of our handful of local comic shops.
Books acquired:Â “Gather Yourselves Together,” “Ubik: The Screenplay,” Philip K. Dick; “Beginning to See the Light,” Ellen Willis; “Diners,” John Baeder.
Books read: “The Early Worm,” Robert Benchley; “The Columnist,” Jeffrey Frank; “The Best of Jack Williamson”; “Over the Edge,” Harlan Ellison; “The Planet of the Apes Chronicles,” Paul Woods.
Welcome back, book nerds! Time for another installment of my monthly series of what books I read the previous month. As predicted here last month, April saw me back to my usual five books, as opposed to the 22 super-slim volumes (almost an oxymoron) that I read in March.
My 2013 total is now an even 40. While that would seem to put me on track to read 120, 80 seems more likely, given that I’ve read all the very short books I own and that there are some longer books I want to get to this year (including a complex one for June).
My April books have one thing in common: They were purchased at the same store, Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., in the course of visits in 2007 and 2010. Powell’s is a book-lover’s mecca, four floors and one city block of books, both new and used. I’ve been thinking of another trip to Portland but have felt sheepish because not only don’t I need any more books, I haven’t even read all the ones I’ve bought in that very city. Reading those would make me feel better about buying more.
What I read this time was, in the order listed above, a solid collection of Benchley’s humor essays, a very funny novel about a blowhard Washington columnist, a best-of story collection spanning 50 years (1928-1978) by a SF grand master, a so-so story collection by Ellison and a book about my guilty pleasure, the Planet of the Apes series.
I was embarrassed to buy it, of course. I do have that much self-awareness. As I opened it up, three years later, to read a few pages each night at bedtime, I thought, why am I reading this? Why would I spend a month of my life reading about Planet of the Apes? But I stuck with it, soon loved it and almost wish it were longer.
Best book of the month, though, is “The Columnist,” which pulls off the neat trick of being narrated by someone who’s clueless (the classic unreliable narrator) and yet still imparting all the information we need to judge him by.
I had 10 Portland-purchased books left to read and now I’m down to five. Not sure when I’ll get to those, as I have other things right now I want to read, but at least I’ve read all the ones from my first visit and cut the total in half.
Your turn. What have you been reading? Surely nothing about the Planet of the Apes.
Next month: Three or four random books, one of them from a library.
A former Tastee Freez at 9617 Central Ave. in Montclair that dates to 1961, and has had a series of taquerias and other businesses in recent years, will soon reopen as a new taco shop, Taco Man. They’re sharp enough to have produced a video. It’s cute.
In Upland, people are reading Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which the library is promoting as its first Upland Reads One Book choice. A panel discussion is slated for Saturday at 1 p.m. That’s the leadoff item in Wednesday’s column, which also has a few vignettes and the news that Rancho Cucamonga’s library won national honors.