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…
My days at the department store weren’t the most memorable, but a friend I knew briefly stands out, and the job had its moments. Who knows who makes these personnel decisions. Some genius at store management had the brilliant idea of assigning me, at first, to women’s shoes. It didn’t take long to realize that women, at least the ones who shopped at our store,…
It rained a lot this past winter. However, as we all know, that hasn’t always been the natural state for the arid San Diego region. It took Charles Hatfield to make it rain 107 years ago in San Diego. The only problem was he couldn’t make it stop. A deep dive through the San Diego Historical Society archives courtesy of the OB Rag reveals the…
“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…
Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego is celebrating the arrival of more than 70 tiny newborn Weedy Seadragons, which are incredibly difficult to breed and rear in captivity. Only a handful of facilities have successfully hatched and reared this unique species of fish that are related to seahorses and pipefish. “This is huge for us. We’ve been working on this…
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…
(RIP CHUCK ALSTON AKA ALSO ASWELL, GRAND FOUNDER AND POOBAH OF THE COSMIC RAY DEFLECTION SOCIETY AKA KRUDZNA INK. A native of Greensboro, North Carolina, Aswell worked for many years as a chef at New Orleans. Also, a prolific artist and thinker, Aswell led the way for numerous storied events and adventures. Following a long series of health battles, he died peacefully in his sleep…
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…
In “an extremely rare occurrence,” a pregnant male seadragon made history at a La Jolla aquarium. The weedy seadragon’s pregnancy marks “the first successful transfer of eggs from a female seadragon to a male” at the Seadragons & Seahorses habitat at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, a Jan. 9 news release from the aquarium said. “We’re elated to…
(Editor’s note: Mild-mannered student and Escondido t-shirt designer by day, Ricky Fang flies through the cartooned sky at night. He draws girls, cartoon characters and comics. Other than art, he enjoys playing video games, listening to music, taking walks around the block and hanging around with friends. For more of the inimitable Mr. Fang’s DPT and such, check out his work at http://hooksnfangs.com/.) It’s about…