Tea Cups

These are fish-conscious times, and one result is Simply Seafood ($1.95), a new magazine sold only in supermarkets--usually right in the seafood section. The first issue is slickly produced and has a lot of the things you'd expect: features on salmon, mussels and pan poaching, quick recipes, a wine column, a nutrition column and a couple of celebrity cook articles. However, it covers seafood in somewhat more detail than you might expect.

Our find of the day: Punched metal candle holders from Made by DWC, the gift shop launched last year by the Downtown Women's Center in Los Angeles. This week the center, which helps women overcome homelessness and chronic unemployment, opened a second store, a resale clothing boutique that also carries some of the home decor and gifts from Made by DWC. If you missed it the first time around, read L.A. Times staff writer Mary MacVean's post from a year ago on the original gift store's offerings . Many of the Made by DWC products -- lavender soaps, soy candles poured into vintage china   tea cups and felt Christmas ornaments -- were crafted by women on L.A.'s skid row as part of a vocational training program.

I stared in astonishment at its 10,000 caves on my first visit in 1945 to the isolated Chinese communist capital of Yan'an, next to the Gobi Desert. My wonder grew as I spotted the Stars and Stripes fluttering from a flagpole of the U.S. Army Observer Group. Popularly known as the Dixie Mission, this small encampment of officers and enlisted men is almost forgotten. But in its four years of existence, it set a record. It was the first official U.S.

At first glance, Coffee Junction looks like a country store, with large wooden shelves holding a variety of flavored coffee and tea, cups and saucers, mugs, kettles and coffeepots for sale. Yet once you settle in and look around, it becomes apparent that there is much more to this coffeehouse than coffee. THE SCENE: "This place is a reflection of me," said Sharon Benson, the owner of Coffee Junction, whose eclectic coffeehouse could be mistaken for an oversized booth at Venice Beach.

Two troupes of Chinese acrobats representing opposite ends of the political spectrum are touring the Southland this week. One is from the Mainland, and one is from the Republic of Taiwan. The Taiwanese group, the Chinese Golden Dragon Acrobats, appeared Tuesday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, and almost any act on their program could be sampled to find the essential ingredients that make this art-form appealing.

When the smoke clears, the art remains. "A Winding River: The Journey of Contemporary Art in Vietnam" is a meander through the last 70 years of Vietnamese art, and despite well-publicized protests by anti-Communist Vietnamese activists, the exhibit at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana is surprising for being both aesthetically accessible and politically benign. The exhibit includes some 75 works from 53 artists in a range of media--from ink on paper or silk to woodblock prints to oil paintings.

Flexible miles American Airlines is letting its 60 million-plus AAdvantage members book award travel on a one-way basis. Each one-way segment can be booked for half the miles of a round-trip award. American is not the first airline to do this. Alaska Airlines, for instance, allows mix-and-match awards. But American is by far the biggest.

Dear Prince Charles: Hear you've been invited to preside over a Royal Luncheon here May 4 that will celebrate a Guinness world record for the "longest line of Rolls-Royces on a public highway." Charles, they're making plans to parade 500 Rolls-Royces around Fashion Island Newport Beach! The cavalcade will contain automobiles from some of the most prized collections in the world, including 30 pre-World War I designs.

Do people living in Beverly Hills throw out better junk than the rest of us? To find out, hundreds of curiosity seekers on Saturday mobbed the second annual Beverly Hills Garage Sale, sponsored by the Beverly Hills Education Foundation. They pawed through racks of Giorgio dresses, mink jackets and what volunteers called "gently worn designer clothes." They snapped up sterling silver knickknacks, an antique demitasse set and bone china tea cups that seemed as fragile as spider webs.

Transforming the gallery into a suggestive, but always enigmatic narrative, Mark Lere's latest sculptures at Margo Leavin Gallery make a game of reading visual language. Instead of cyclone stacks these are abstract objects haunted by vaguely familiar secrets. Some hint at figurative form, others at utilitarian objects like dumbbells, umbrellas or saddles. Still others recall Lere's familiar mobius strip tea cups. They recycle their own emptiness.