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Daily Planet
Belarus cracks down on bottle traders
Customs officials stop empty bottles from crossing borders.
By J.A. Getzlaff
[03/10/00]

Travel Food Feature
Krazy kravings
L.A. lines up for Krispy Kreme and other doughnut spots.
By Mary MacVean
[03/10/00]

Daily Planet
Aussie prostitutes limber up for 2000 Olympics
They're ready to entertain Down Under.
By J.A. Getzlaff
[03/09/00]

Burt Wolf
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Next time you sing "Happy Birthday," you'll know what you're singing about.
By Burt Wolf
[03/09/00]

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Olympics or bust
Expert advice on cheap flights to Sydney, plus arranging a Tuscany tour and getting to the core of the Big Apple.
By Donald D. Groff
[03/09/00]

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It was an ordinary West Coast garden drama, right out of Sunset magazine: The guests arrived and hit their marks on cue, the standard poolside blocking on a flagstone stage played against a background of blooming lavender, terra cotta and palm trees as the sun slouched into an angry purple scrim of spent hydrocarbons.

Sometime before 11, after the coals had cooled and the police helicopters descended into the L.A. basin to begin trolling in earnest, the party considered a number of after-dinner entertainments. The debate quickly split into two factions: venturesome cosmopolitan nature-lovers advocating a steep hike into the hills for a dance with coyotes (while gingerly sidestepping other semi-feral, leather-clad scrub dwellers exercising more urban libidos) and dipsomaniacal couch-dwellers listing sharply in favor of a downhill expedition to the Tiki Bar of the moment.

Also Today Krazy kravings L.A. lines up for Krispy Kreme and other doughnut spots. By Mary MacVean Crapulous with Krispy Kremes? Fill the Cruet with this.

Parallel Dimension Girl introduced a surreal alternative: "Or," she bleated, conspiratorially twirling her wine glass, "Or, we could get doughnuts."

I thought this was just a little weird. And not just because I'd just polished off a cornucopia of delicious, low fat, au courant forage, either. I love high-octane confections as much -- no, a lot more, actually -- than the next person. But doughnuts just never appear on my gastronomic radar. Doughnuts, I think: official pastry of the hopeless. Sometimes garishly embalmed in atrocities of colored sugar. Most often seen in the company of bad drip coffee. Definitive emblem of bungling law enforcement.

On the other hand, Parallel Dimension Girl is something of a legend for her unerring cool-hunting and Zeitgeist-homing powers. Over the decade I'd known her, she had been on the very leading edge -- and had occasionally been the wildly inventive perpetrator -- of a number of bona fide pop culture phenomena. If she was saying doughnuts, well, doughnuts.

There are times when the epic conceals itself behind a mundane account: Captain Ahab goes fishing; Madame Bovary shops for a matching handbag; Whitley Strieber is surprised by unexpected guests. And we were just going out for doughnuts.

We piled like teenagers into PDG's sport-ute, and drove. I was still a little shaky on the whole concept, wondering what to expect: retro chic, perhaps; a charmingly lurid little shack staffed by beehived waitresses from a bygone era, propped up defiantly in the center of some forgotten patch of asphalt. Maybe there would be a drive-up window, I thought hopefully. Maybe we wouldn't even have to get out of the car.

What we encountered was more like a major social upheaval, the effects of which could be felt well in advance of arrival; the left-hand turn lane on Van Nuys Boulevard was packed solid for two blocks. We were approaching, we would later learn, a kind of low-intensity doughnut riot. PDG's instincts were on target -- there was, in California, a new hysteria afoot. Doughnut hysteria. And the madness had a name; and the name was Krispy Kreme.

I was, of course, to be informed later that there was nothing particularly new about Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Apparently, Krispy Kreme has for decades been part of the hidden, good-ol'-boy culinary arcana of the deep South, along with other institutions like Waffle House and Piggly Wiggly. The only thing really new about these fat-fried, sugar-glazed cyclopses was their sudden debut in trendier urban climes.

But the appearance of the Krispy Kreme star in the firmament of Southern California fast food was being greeted as the Second Coming. Certainly the police had recognized it as some kind of apocalyptic event; this newly opened Krispy Kreme franchise was causing a traffic jam of near-biblical proportions. No bungling here; the patrolmen stood in the streets like grim blue prophets signifying with ominous, staccato arm movements. Blazing flares and phalanxes of orange cones created a strangely festive, end-of-the-world atmosphere.

We parked blocks away and approached on foot, through streets congested by stalled cars and throngs of doughnut-eaters munching dreamily down the middle of ordinarily perilous intersections that had become parking lots. I was agog; I feared the popular predictions might belatedly be upon us, that the third millennium would precipitate all manner of mass insanity.

Next page | Doughnut fate is the same as ours