Fun Spot

If you've ever read the Ernest Hemingway short story called "The Killers," you'll recall that it's about a couple of hoods who walk into a lunchroom in a small Midwestern town, tie up the cook, counterman and the one customer, put them in the kitchen, then sit around drinking coffee and waiting for their victim, who is a regular at the joint.

So this is what a blowout feels like at UC Irvine. Never a team to coast to victory--it's always more fun to spot the opponent seven or eight points and then battle back--the Anteaters did it the easy way Saturday, drubbing UC Riverside, 72-53, in a Big West Conference game before 3,299 at the Bren Events Center. No heroic comebacks. No off-balance game-winners. No nonsense. The Anteaters, whose average margin of victory had been 3.

The decor is cheesy. Fish nets hang from the ceiling and a mirrored disco ball and two orange globes float above the wooden dance floor. But when David Faustino (the Beaver of the '90s in his role as Bud Bundy on Fox-TV's "Married . . . With Children") and his crew take over Friday nights, they make Hollywood's 836 Club feel like the Bronx has hit the beach. The 18-year-old opened this weekly club seven months ago with partners Nic Adler, also 18, and Robert Gavin, 19.

There is no sight more bizarre than a native walking along the beach in any resort town developed for gringos in Latin Third World countries. Local men, with their heavy boots, long trousers and long-sleeved shirts, and local women with their ruffled but humble dresses, seem completely out of context in their own towns where Ralph Lauren and Banana Republic are the arbiters of fashion.

The two-lane, desert highway from Be'er Sheva to Israel's 25-mile-long Makhtesh Ramon (Ramon Crater) stretches through an archipelago of Bedouin camps, past a few modest clumps of trees and then on for mile after hypnotic mile of rocks and rolling hills of sand. If you like the desert, then you'll love the Negev. There's no mistaking it for anything else.

LIKE so many other people in America, I'm working on a groundbreaking book. Never mind the precise subject, but trust me: I've identified a narrow crack on the social science shelf, accessed a number of little-known theories, and I plan to have my moment in the sun. OK, few of the actual ideas in this book will be original. I mean, how could I hope to have an original idea? Not with 150 million-plus blogs churning out ideas 24/7, not with 2.

WHEN it comes to food and wine, $90 can buy you a lot. At Sushi Dokoro Ki Ra La in Beverly Hills, for instance, it buys you a complete omakase (chef's choice) lunch, including a couple of glasses of Otokoyama junmai sake. At Hatfield's in Los Angeles, it buys you a three-course market menu for two people. At Sona in West Hollywood, it buys you chef David Myers' six-course tasting menu.

Like his Pulitzer Prize winner, "The Hours," Michael Cunningham's new novel, "Specimen Days," is a trio of narratives juxtaposed in a way that makes 1+1+1 equal a whole lot more than three. In "The Hours," Cunningham cut up his stories (two set in the past, one in the present, each haunted in its own way by Virginia Woolf and "Mrs. Dalloway") and restitched them in a manner that evoked Woolf's kinetic writing.

IT takes a blessedly brief two minutes to realize that the sommelier -- one of several -- at B&B Ristorante, Mario Batali's new restaurant in Las Vegas, knows his stuff. Our first order of business as we settle in at the restaurant in the Venetian Resort is a cool, uncomplicated wine. We're parched. It's 109 outside, and we've just come from the sweltering underground valet station, where it's who-knows-how-many degrees hotter.

FOR a young chef, finally getting the chance to command your own kitchen after years of working under someone else can be heady stuff. The temptation is wanting to do everything at once. The first couple of times I ate at Maple Drive under the new chef, Vincent Manna, I felt assaulted by too many ingredients and too many rich dishes.