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Featured, Media, Restaurants, Restaurants, Vista January 16, 2023

Tough love, bad luck. Restaurant: Impossible returns to Rosie’s Cafe for an emotional visit

(Updated Wednesday, June 3, 2020: Rosie’s Cafe, the Escondido diner featured last month on the Food Network series “Restaurant: Impossible,” has thrown in the towel for good, its owner announced in a Facebook post Wednesday afternoon. Despite the fundraising carnival that Food Network threw for owner Kaitlyn “Rosie” Pilsbury in February, she was never able to recover financially from the restaurant’s two-month shutdown during the…

Blogs, Columns/Blogs, Dean Weissmann presents, Featured December 26, 2022

Ray Bong, S. Creamcheese, ‘Competitive Non-Drinking’

About a dozen years ago, my friend Suzy Creamcheese and I discovered the most brutal sporting concept known to the human race, we call it “Competitive Non-Drinking”.  At that time, I smugly informed him that I had made a great achievement– I had gone for two weeks, 14 whole days, without taking a drink of alcohol.  He nonchalantly replied that it had been 20 days…

Blogs, Books, Dean Weissmann presents, Featured December 25, 2022

Surveillance Pelicana Chapter 1: ‘Good Morning, New Orleans’

SURVEILLANCE PELICANA BY DAN WEISMAN The entire book appears at this link with chapters added after appearing online: Chapters 1-10: https://www.escondidograpevine.com/surveillance-pelicana-full-book-chapters-added-as-they-appear-online/. Chapters 11-20: https://www.escondidograpevine.com/surveillance-pelicana-part-ii-chapters-11-to-20-chapters-added-as-they-appear-online/ Chapters 21-30: https://www.escondidograpevine.com/surveillance-pelicana-part-iii-chapters-21-to-30-chapters-added-as-they-appear-online/ CHAPTER ONE On Christmas Day 1987, Tyger Williams, video artist, discovers a classified ad for an insurance investigator which he answers. On New Year’s Day, he burns the “box of troubles” at the abandoned 1984 World’s Fair site…

Escondido, Featured, North County, Surprising and Strange, Travel December 24, 2022

Hodgee, the friendly Lake Hodges Monster: Fact or fiction?

Go down to Hernandez Hideaway at rural Lake Drive in Del Dios and people will swear up and down the long wooden bar that Hodgee, the friendly Lake Hodges monster, really truly — well, almost definitely exists. “The Lake Hodges Hodgee monster is kind of like the Loch Ness monster,” said Stan Smith, a long-time Del Dios resident. Smith, a cowboy poet and man about…

Education, Escondido, Featured, Surprising and Strange December 16, 2022

Idiosyncratic dinosaur ‘museum’ went extinct

Always a bit of an oddity, and itself a colorful exhibition of an Escondido antique dealer’s lifelong hobby, the Roynon Museum celebrating all things dinosaur, went the way of the creatures celebrated within, that is to say, extinct, on June 30, 2019. Applying the lofty title of Roynon Museum of Earth Sciences and Paleontology to its decidedly idiosyncratic exhibit and purpose, museum officials this week…

Featured, Sports, The World November 20, 2022

‘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…

Blogs, Columns/Blogs, Escondido, Featured, Fire, History, Media, North County, Opinion, Rancho Santa Fe, Riverside County, San Marcos, Valley Center, Vista October 27, 2022

Remembering the 2007 Witch Creek Fire

Fifteen years ago this week the Witch Creek Fire devastated Escondido, Rancho Santa Fe and North County San Diego. This is part of my first-hand coverage done as editor of the Rancho Santa Fe Record. I won the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s first place prize for local news coverage for this, and the other 26 stories, numerous photos, and overall coverage I produced during, and…

Featured, History, The World September 10, 2022

Local ironworker Paul Pursley spent 10 weeks at Ground Zero following Sept. 11

Sept. 11, 2001: Local ironworker Paul Pursley spent 10 weeks at “Ground Zero” following the terrorist attack. His major complaint in the years following concerned his inability to get correct, and affordable, treatment due to the costs involved, costs that Congress finally agreed to add funding to the 9/11 First Responders fund almost 18 years later. “Ironworkers worked every day,” Pursley said. “We went on 12-hour shifts…

Blogs, Books, Dean Weissmann presents, Featured January 15, 2022

Surveillance Pelicana Chapter 2: ‘Night of the Living Poets’

SURVEILLANCE PELICANA BY DAN WEISMAN The entire book appears at this link with chapters added after appearing online: Chapters 1-10: https://www.escondidograpevine.com/surveillance-pelicana-full-book-chapters-added-as-they-appear-online/. Chapters 11-20: https://www.escondidograpevine.com/surveillance-pelicana-part-ii-chapters-11-to-20-chapters-added-as-they-appear-online/ Chapters 21-30: https://www.escondidograpevine.com/surveillance-pelicana-part-iii-chapters-21-to-30-chapters-added-as-they-appear-online/ CHAPTER TWO Following the Saints playoff loss, Tyger and his friend Armor’s Tungsten attend an open-mike poetry night at the Blue Bayou club on Tchopitoulas Street.   CHAPTER 2 “Night of the Living Poets”   “SURVEILLANCE PELICANA” Chapter…

Blogs, Books, Dean Weissmann presents, Featured January 15, 2022

Surveillance Pelicana Chapter 3: ‘What a Revolting Development This Is’

SURVEILLANCE PELICANA BY DAN WEISMAN The entire book appears at this link with chapters added after appearing online: Chapters 1-10: https://www.escondidograpevine.com/surveillance-pelicana-full-book-chapters-added-as-they-appear-online/. Chapters 11-20: https://www.escondidograpevine.com/surveillance-pelicana-part-ii-chapters-11-to-20-chapters-added-as-they-appear-online/ Chapters 21-30: https://www.escondidograpevine.com/surveillance-pelicana-part-iii-chapters-21-to-30-chapters-added-as-they-appear-online/   CHAPTER  THREE Poetry night continues at the Blue Bayou. Events take an unpropitious turn towards ugliness due to a convergence of circumstances attributable to karmic order. Mona Mona and her friend Roger initiate a riot resulting in…