Baja

Re "If Trump lent name, does he get blame?" May 5 One of the investors in a Baja resort gone bust says, "I can't believe a person with the reputation of Donald Trump and all that he represents on 'The Apprentice' ... let this happen to us ... it's unbelievable." All that Trump represents on "The Apprentice"? What would that be -- corporate ethics, wise investing, sound business practice? What's unbelievable is that people would believe anything coming out of Trump's mouth.

Danny Ashcraft's favorite movie is "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and for good reason. Ashcraft is Indiana Jones in an off-road vehicle, kicking up dust from Barstow to Baja in adventures that require a crash helmet instead of a fedora. A three-sport letterman in college, Ashcraft, 39, a company president from Vista, loves fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants movies and goes for the same thing in real life. "I like the action-adventure film, the science fiction stuff," says our reviewer.

May I suggest to Maria Cowell, to go back to her gentle picnics in the park, and leave the remodeling to someone qualified to do the job. Her winning formula was, to say the least, "tacky, tacky." Maria you can't have your cake and eat it too! Those "little old men in the smocks at the hardware store" are getting fewer and farther between. I can't believe you took advantage of them and then bragged about it. They are not here as a public service. They need to eat like you and me, and have probably never seen Hawaii or Baja.

Oscar Pena had visited Guadalajara for the first time since he left Mexico a dozen years earlier, and on Sunday he was on his way back to Los Angeles. The Van Nuys man had vowed that he would not return to Mexico until he could openly fly back into Los Angeles International Airport, and not creep across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Police are asking the public's help in finding a 20-year-old woman who disappeared nearly three weeks ago. Andrea Lee Garland of Newport Beach was last seen Aug. 17 when she dropped off her boyfriend at Pinafini, the Costa Mesa restaurant where he works, and drove off in his pickup truck to appointments she never kept, Sgt. Mike Jackson said. "We thought she might have just disappeared on her own. She was confused about where her life was going," Jackson said.

"Thanks for inviting me to write about fishing for your magazine. If this had come 20 years ago, I'd have said yes at the drop of a Royal Coachman fly. However, it has been quite some time since I went fishing; my days seem to be filled with golf and travel now. Perhaps you could ask some of the boys on 'Hill Street Blues' if they like to fish. Sincerely, Fred MacMurray" "I first went fishing with my grandmother at a pond in Pennsylvania when I was 6 or 7.

The white sea bass is found from San Francisco south to the Bay of Magdalena in Baja and in the northern Gulf of California. The fish appear off the coast of Mexico in late spring, and they occasionally find their way to California markets. This month, the California sea bass season opened for three months. At this time, the supply should be consistent and the quality greatly improved over the Mexican fish, which takes considerably longer to reach the marketplace.

It will be easier to get from Los Angeles to La Paz, Mexico, after June 20, when AeroMexico launches a new route . The twice-weekly flights will allow passengers to leave LAX at 2:20 p.m. Thursdays and return about noon on Sundays. Or fly south to La Paz on Sundays and return on Thursdays.   When I tried to book the round-trip flight for June 27-30, the cost was $267.44 per person, including taxes and fees. The new flights are considered a boon for La Paz, the capital of Baja Sur, and come on the heels of more good news for the city, an improvement in highway access to Cabo San Lucas and its airport.

The rare, ribbon-shaped sea creature was far from home when it washed ashore in Malibu this week. Darrell Rae was on a Sunday morning stroll on Malibu Colony beach when he spotted the 12-foot-long silvery fish with a brilliant red mane and scarlet dorsal fin floundering in the water a few dozen feet from the shore. "I grew up on the beaches and I had never seen or even heard of anything like it," the 40-year-old marketing manager said, "so I knew it had to be something that came from far away and deep in the ocean.

Ten years ago, Elizabeth Schneider, the doyenne of produce writers, called for "a cucumber revolution" in her definitive book, "Vegetables From Amaranth to Zucchini" . Denouncing the standard American slicing varieties, she implored, "Refuse to buy pumped-up, tasteless, seedy blimps with greasy, thick, nasty skin masquerading as cucumbers!" Around the United States, coarse, watery commercial varieties still predominate, but they have largely been displaced at Southern California farmers markets by wondrous Persian cucumbers.