by Mark McDermott Christine Mignola remembers how, in the early days of the pandemic, the depth of the crisis began to sink in for both her and her husband, Mike Mignola. It went from a dawning realization in February 2020 that the novel coronavirus’s arrival was inevitable to a shockingly vast pandemic quarantine by the third week of March 2020. “Wow! What do you do?” Christine recalled thinking. “First I made sure we had enough toilet paper and food, and…
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“The Olive Trees of Justice” – A sparse crop [MOVIE REVIEW]
It’s 1961 and Jean has returned to the Algeria of his birth to visit his dying father. The war against the French is still raging and the schism between the native population and the colonialist occupiers has grown even more intense. Jean, who grew up on the family farm in the Mitidja plain outside Algiers…
“The King’s Daughter” – A fantasy tail [MOVIE REVIEW]
Director Sean McNamara in collaboration with writers Ronald Bass, Barry Berman, Laura Harrington, and James Schamus conspired to turn the Vonda N. McIntyre novel The Moon and the Sun into a fairy tale like “The Princess Bride.” They didn’t. King Louis XIV has much to his credit in his rule of France. It is 1684…
DINING
Chinese, simplified. Dan Modern Chinese does a few things very well
by Richard Foss Some people find ordering at traditional Chinese restaurants intimidating thanks to the overwhelming number of items on the menu, some of which have metaphorical names. One might guess that Buddha’s Feast is a vegetarian dish because the founder of a religion that forbids meat wouldn’t want to set a bad example, but…
Back to the table: Top 10 new South Bay restaurants in 2021
by Richard Foss At the outset of 2021 I wasn’t expecting improvement in the local dining scene. Openings in 2020 had been better than expected, but those projects were already in the pipeline, and one might expect few new ones to be planned. Surely investors would be cautious due to the ban on indoor dining,…