Chef Tim's BBQ With Spices, 10431 Lemon Ave. (at Haven), Rancho Cucamonga.

Soul food, it must be admitted, is not my area of expertise. Nevertheless, I've heard good things about Chef Tim's, a barbecue and Southern-style food joint in Alta Loma right off the 210 Freeway.

It's a small operation, seating for about 20, in a neighborhood plaza next to a used textbook store and a Tio's Mexican restaurant. The eccentric decor includes a Toybox novelty vending machine. It's comforting to know that even in the sophisticated 21st century, you can buy a whoopie cushion in Alta Loma.

The menu has staples like ribs, pulled pork, fried chicken, shrimp, blackeyed peas, red beans and rice, po'boys, and chicken and waffles. This first-timer went in for lunch on Tuesday and got a two-piece entree with two sides for $8: catfish, greens and fries.

The catfish had a light, crispy batter, the greens were speckled with pieces of pork. Only the too-salty fries were left unfinished. The chef had just made cornbread and brought me out a square just to be neighborly. Unlike the crumbly cornbread commonly found, this version had a crunchy top. It's the best cornbread I can remember eating.

You won't be a stranger long at Chef Tim's. "How are you doing, Mr. Dave?" Tim Hanson called across the room as I ate. Uh-oh, there goes my anonymity. But it turned out he had no idea how he knew me or my name; he was sure that I'd been in a couple of times before and didn't know what I do for a living. He must have a great storehouse of names and faces in his head; either that, or there's another guy named David who looks like me roaming around (the poor sap).

The meat is cooked over oak and mesquite in two drum-like smokers out back. Hanson has 20 years of restaurant experience, but Tim's, which opened in January 2009, is his first venture. I'll have to go back for a po'boy sometime. Especially since he already knows my name.

Here's a charming YouTube video about Chef Tim's. Dig his puffy hat.

The Museum of Neon Art in downtown L.A. (136 W. 4th), which already has Montclair's old Midway Building Materials sign with its animated bricklayer in its collection (albeit in storage), is now displaying a familiar sign from Pomona: County Fair Pie A La Mode.

It's on loan from James McDemas and John English and will be displayed indefinitely. Nice setting, too.

Museum executive director Kim Koga told me the duo "got all three of the pie-a-la-mode neon signage and all of the smaller hand-painted signs that went along with it." They apparently did not get any pie or ice cream, however.

Here's an earlier blog post about the museum.

Like I said in Wednesday's column, that singular downtown L.A. attraction is back. Here are two photos I took. This was covered more formally by the Los Angeles Downtown News and by the L.A. Times, which had a story and photos.

Related: Millard Sheets' painting "Angels Flight" is getting renewed attention. Here's a link to the image and a short writeup from LA Observed. It's my favorite Sheets painting too -- even if it does leave out Angels Flight!

In a troubling sign for our 401(k)s, a Montclair clothing store named the New Bonds has gone out of business. Uh-oh.

Apparently the new bonds are no more stable than the old bonds.

(Click on the thumbnail photos above for larger images.)

"Dark Carnival" was listed on the "Books by Ray Bradbury" page in all of his old Bantam paperbacks of my childhood, and yet I could never find a copy. Somewhere along the way I learned why: The 1947 story collection, Bradbury's first, was published only in hardcover by a small publisher, Arkham House.

Only 3,112 copies were printed and the book often goes for $3,000. Original price: $3. "Ray Bradbury brings something surprisingly new and delightfully different to the field of the supernatural," reads the jacket copy. The book was reprinted in 2001 in a limited edition, not that I knew about it, and (sigh) it now sells for about the same price as the original.

I had been okay with missing out on "Dark Carnival" until embarking on my quest to read all the Bradbury stuff I'd never read. Then I decided to take this gap in my knowledge more seriously, compiling a list of all the "Dark Carnival" stories -- 27 in all -- and figuring out which ones had been reprinted, and where.

Many appeared with minor rewriting in the Bradbury collection "The October Country" in 1955, and more showed up in later anthologies and collections; a few more are in a British-only paperback. Four stories, however, have never been reprinted, with RB deeming them too poor for re-release.

I know someone who owns the original: Dwain Kaiser, owner of Magic Door Books in downtown Pomona. Kaiser is a longtime science fiction fan and collector who believes he paid $10 for his copy.

I made a deal with Kaiser, a friend of mine: Since the book is too expensive to buy and too valuable to borrow, could I sit in his store and read those four stories? I could.

And so I went in, sat down on a rainy Saturday and polished 'em off. Frankly, two of the four, "The Maiden" and "The Night Sets," were indeed lame, but "Interim" and "Reunion" were okay. In any event, I read them.

Now I'm reading the last of the reprinted stories so that I can say, after 30 years of Bradbury fandom, that I've read "Dark Carnival" -- without going broke.

Thanks, Dwain.

Aoki, 2307 D St. (at 3rd), La Verne.

Aoki has been a fixture in downtown La Verne since the '90s, anchoring a busy corner near the university. Outside there's a protected patio; the interior is homey, with photos of customers along one wall and a mom and pop atmosphere.

I've been there a few times over the years and dropped in for lunch on Wednesday.

I got a two-combination lunch ($7.95), choosing sushi and sashimi. This comes with a bowl of miso soup and, as can be seen above, rice and a small salad. The sushi and sashimi both included salmon, tuna and yellowtail. It was a satisfying lunch and a good deal for the price.

It may be another year or two before I make it back, but I suspect Aoki will be there waiting.

A week after a Metrolink/Gold Line jaunt to try out Good Girl Dinette in Highland Park, Sunday saw me repeating the experiment, this time at Wurstkuche in downtown L.A.

I got off the Gold Line Extension at its first stop, at Alameda and 1st, and walked about four blocks to Wurstkuche, a well-regarded Belgian beer and housemade hot dog place in the Arts District. (Like Good Girl Dinette, it's on LA Weekly's LA 99 list.)

There was a line to get in, but that was fine, and an employee handed out copies of the menu. I had the sundried tomato and mozzarella dog of smoked chicken and turkey with caramelized onions and sweet peppers, plus Belgian fries with curry ketchup, a Manhattan Special cream soda and, for dessert, a toasted apple pie ice cream sandwich between oatmeal raisin cookies. Total: $19.48.

The bar/dining room, in exposed brick, features communal tables covered in butcher block paper. A nice ambience. As for the food, it was fine stuff. The dog had a good snap and it was cradled by a dense, crisped bun. The fries were disappointing, but maybe I'm not a Belgian fry guy. I like 'em better at Back Abbey in Claremont.

I got through another couple of chapters of "Roughing It" before heading for home. Another satisfying outing to a new-to-me part of L.A.

One of the best moves I ever made -- not that that was obvious at the time.

Photo: Will Plunkett

Reader Will Plunkett of Rancho Cucamonga noticed this lineup of everything-under-the-(desert)-sun recycling containers while visiting Death Valley and wondered about the one at the far left. He asks: "Is this the mysterious way California will help its struggling economy, with an unknown product?"

In the Claremont Village, the former All Ways Travel storefront (Yale between Bonita and Fourth) is being converted into the Cheese Cave, a frommage-centric shop. While the space is being renovated, butcher block paper covers the windows. But those windows have also become the best site for poetry outside the Folk Music Center down the street.

First the owners put up a self-penned poem about their venture, above. Then, it appears, a would-be customer responded with a second poem, which is now displayed alongside the first, at right.

Click on the images to see larger, readable versions. (Sorry about the glare that obscures a few words of the shop's poem.)

Rocco's Taccos, 669 Indian Hill Blvd. (at Holt), Pomona.

Yes, Rocco's really does spell its product that way, a joke that may or may not be worth the confusion. Rocco's recently filled a space where every tenant, it seems, is doomed to failure after its year is up. (The most recent victim of the curse was Pittsburgh Broasted Chicken.) But perhaps Rocco's will escape that fate.

I had a quick dinner there Monday before a council meeting. The woman behind the counter was cheerful. I asked if there were any specialties and she recommended the fish and shrimp tacos. At $1.75 each, they were pretty good.

Besides the usual tacos ($1.15 to $1.75) and burritos ($4.50 to $5.50), Rocco's also has an array of tortas ($5). One is the La Cubana. I wonder what's in the one named La Pomona?

I wouldn't say Rocco's lives up to its slogan of "Best tacos in town" (see photo); in fact, last time I checked you could get better tacos across the street at Mariscos de Ensenada No. 5, although you'd have to factor in the time and money for table service. But as a taqueria, and for the money, Rocco's is okay.

If the name or logo ring any bells, the same family also owns Rocco's Pizza in Montclair. Can Rocco's Sushi be next?

There are numerous good restaurants near a transit stop in L.A. Why not just go have lunch somewhere new and fun? I decided to try Good Girl Dinette, a Highland Park cafe that bills itself as "American diner meets Vietnamese comfort food" and which made LA Weekly's LA 99 list of notable restaurants.

So I got on the 11:39 a.m. train from Claremont with an armful of reading material (Sunday papers, an LA Weekly, an IE Weekly, Westways magazine, two Record Collector News issues and Mark Twain's "Roughing It"), took the Gold Line light rail trolley to the Highland Park stop, walked two blocks in an unfamiliar part of L.A. to the restaurant, had a satisfying repast (beef stew, housemade lemon pop, bread pudding) for $24, walked back to the light rail stop, took the Gold Line back to Union Station and immediately got on Metrolink for the ride back home, arriving in Claremont at 4:20 p.m. carrying only the Twain book, having shed everything else as I read it.

Yes, the ride cost $11, making this a long and slightly pricey meal, but it was worth the extra time and cost to have a mini-adventure, one with almost no unproductive time. The smooth, air-conditioned ride certainly wasn't roughing it (ahem).

Books bought this month: "Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed," Harlan Ellison.

Books read this month: "The Thin Man," Dashiell Hammett; "Pulp Culture," Frank M. Robinson and Lawrence Davidson; "Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust," Nathanael West; "The Sign of the Four," A. Conan Doyle; "Best Music Writing 2002," Jonathan Lethem, ed.

Choosing to ignore Chairman Mao's dictum "To read too many books is harmful," I made it through five books in January and, as seen above, five more in February: two mysteries, a classic L.A. novel, a collection of music essays and a coffee table book about pulp magazines.

I've owned Hammett's "The Thin Man" for a very long time and have intended to get to it since reading his "The Maltese Falcon" in fall 2008. I liked "Thin Man" more than "Falcon," as it turns out, although this could be because the movie version of "Falcon" overshadows the book and because I've never seen the Thin Man movies (but now I want to).

I read "The Sign of the Four," Doyle's second Sherlock Holmes novel, in the 1970s and had long wanted to revisit it. From the first paragraph about Holmes' cocaine and morphine addiction, it's a grabber, moreso than "A Study in Scarlet." A noncompletist reader could start here.

"The Day of the Locust" is often called the best Hollywood novel ever, despite having been written in the 1930s; I haven't read enough Hollywood novels to compare, but despite some startlingly good passages, "Locust" is sour and grotesque. "Lonelyhearts," a 60-page piece that shares the book, is about an advice columnist and is even more disturbing. They're both okay but not my cup of tea. I bought this one used in 2008 in L.A. at Gene de Chene Bookseller (which has since closed).

"Pulp Culture," which I bought last summer at Rhino Records, is a collection of eye-popping, lurid and lovely covers to pulp magazines of the Depression era, when a dime or quarter could buy you a thick magazine of fiction on cheap pulpwood paper. "Culture" has wry captions (the authors don't take this stuff too seriously) and short chapters that give an overview of the various pulp genres. Breezy, informative and fun.

"The Best Music Writing 2002," bought used a year ago at Book Alley in Pasadena, might seem dated, but most of the essays are as interesting for a committed music fan as ever and aren't about music of that year anyway. Topics include Ralph Stanley, J-Lo, the Beatles, the Strokes, power ballads, the recording of "Help Me Make It Through the Night" and Korla Pandit, who was a turban-wearing organist on TV in L.A. in the '50s who is posthumously discovered to be black, not Indian. That one might be the best piece in the book.

As for the lone book I bought, I own almost all of Ellison's stuff, but this one's a rarity, a small-press collection of essays. Up until now it was known to me only as a listing in his "other books by the author" page. It was so far off my radar I didn't even have it on my want list. So when I found it at Book Alley, I snapped it up.

Now, a few words about strategy. To try to finish 50 books in 2010, I arranged to read five per month in January and February. With 10 books behind me, I can (if I choose) "relax" with four per month for the rest of the year. This might allow me to work in a handful of longer books to go along with the 200-page average I've been hitting.

My big book of the year may be Mark Twain's "Roughing It," his travel memoir of the Western U.S. of the 1860s; my edition runs 800 pages with textual notes and such and after a month of off-and-on reading I'm around page 200. I could devote all my reading time in March to it and might not finish, which would really blow my schedule (and result in a photo of a blank floor), but I'm going to read it as I can and try to finish in April or May.

So: Have you read any of the above? What are you reading now?

The cult food favorite Kogi BBQ sent one of its trucks to Pomona and Diamond Bar on Saturday night and Twitter followers were there for its fusion of Korean and Mexican foods. A friend from L.A. advised me to get there an hour early, which I did, but then the problem became figuring out exactly where at Valley and Temple the truck was going to park. Hmmm...the minimall? the business park? the Cal Poly residence hall? the muddy field? or just on the street?

I shuttled back and forth between the residence halls (SW corner) and minimall (NE corner), finding nothing. Just as I was returning to the minimall to eat at the curry place, I saw a line at the business park. Success!

I waited in line 45 minutes, then another 15 minutes for the food itself, but the short rib taco, the spicy pork taco, the kimchi quesadilla and the tres leches chocolate cake (see menu and pictures here) were worth the inconvenience. At least once.