The World

Sending in the llamas and clowns on 9/11

Sept. 10, 2001 was pretty much like any other day. That is to say honored only in its passing, don’t remember what happened. Sept. 11, 2001, as we all know, was a day seared in our personal and national memories like few others. Don’t know when the carnage began, but at my Del Dios home phones started ringing way too early in the morning and…


Simply San Marcos: Clown, for world peace

(Editor’s Note: Originally published Sept. 22, 2001 in the North County Times…) Clown came to town. He was talking peace by the freeway as others spoke of war. “I’m mainly out here for world peace,” said the thin, wispy-bearded 22-year-old who blew in from a Sonoma organic farm to visit his “girl,” and child in Ramona. In case you missed Clown — his nom d’pax…


‘Lord of All Indoors’ soccer legend Steve Zungul lives quietly in Escondido retirement

Reclusive and sitting in a luxury home high above the San Pasqual Valley, the charismatic  “Lord of All Indoors” Steve Zungul continues to mystify and impress, albeit out of the public eye. He hasn’t spoken to anybody in the media for over a decade. His legendary indoor soccer career continues to do all the talking. Fans of the Croatian indoor soccer scoring machine, perhaps the…


Where have all the payphones gone?

“A payphone (alternative spelling: pay phone) is typically a coin-operated public telephone, often located in a telephone booth or a privacy hood, with pre-payment by inserting money (usually coins) or by billing a credit or debit card, or a telephone card. Around the Big Apple, Google Sidewalk Labs is replacing them with free city-wide Wi-Fi. In Ireland, units now are used less than once every…


Heaven’s Gate coming to the big screen in blockbuster

Considering the spectacular nature of the nation’s largest mass suicide on March 26, 1997 when 21 men and 18 women wearing the same black Nike shoes, covered in purple blankets killed themselves at a rented Rancho Santa Fe estate, it seemed only a matter of time when the incident would go Hollywood.. That time has come, according to Britta DeVore of entertainment news site Collider. Vera…


President Biden fundraises at Rancho Santa Fe, visits San Diego region with British, Australian PMs

President Joe Biden went to an undisclosed Rancho Santa Fe location Monday evening where he met with Rep. Scott Peters and 40 guests for about 40 minutes in an effort to raise $1 million for the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Grassroots Victory Fund, sources said. This was his final stop after a daylong visit to the San Diego area Monday where he met with…


Death and dying with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

The archive of the influential psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who developed the theory of the five stages of grief, has been given to Stanford Libraries, Stanford University officials said this week. What does that have to do with Escondido? Plenty. Of special note in the archive are complete runs of newsletters from the Shanti Nilaya Healing Center, which Kübler-Ross founded in Escondido, as well as manuscript…


Who invented the Electoral College?

The delegates in Philadelphia agreed, in the summer of 1787, that the new country they were creating would not have a king but rather an elected executive. But they did not agree on how to choose that president. Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson called the problem of picking a president “in truth, one of the most difficult of all we have to decide.” Other delegates, when…


Forget ChatGPT, spinach sending emails thanks to MIT

It may sound like something out of a futuristic science fiction film, but scientists have managed to engineer spinach plants which are capable of sending emails, according to Marthe de Ferrer of Euronews.green. Through nanotechnology, engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have transformed spinach into sensors capable of detecting explosive materials. These plants are then able to wirelessly relay this information back to…


Palomar eye on the sky right in our back yard

Little doubt a great many among our younger generations are unaware that the one-time world’s largest astronomical telescope is located on nearby Palomar Mountain, which is less than an hour’s drive from the North San Diego County communities of Oceanside, Vista, San Marcos or Escondido. With a $6 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, astronomer George Ellery Hale orchestrated the planning, design and construction of the…