RIVERSIDE BLAZE

By the time the blaze at the former Riverside Downs race track was tamped out Friday evening, six horses out of a total of 25 lay dead, their corpses covered by a collection of twisted and charred metal.

It was the third fire in a little more than four years at the property owned by Cross International, and it was one those who saw it wouldn't soon forget — not the men who used a truck as a battering ram to burst through the barn, and not the men who pulled horses out one by one, choking on smoke throughout it all.


TALES & SCALES

It was an ordinary fist, the kind you'd use to rap at a door. But this time it formed an imaginary knob, and the door it was attached to was the tall, stiff body of a second-grade girl.

On the floor below her lay five of her fellow students at East Heights Elementary School. Rolling back and forth, their voices shushed and shushed, their movements convincingly like the sea.

WINE COLUMN NO. 50:

They are tall, contain varying shades of green and white, and can be a bit awkward to bag. But that’s the seductive lure of the leek. Unlike carrots, which are orange and common and as a result are often easier to toss into your shopping cart, you can’t find leeks everywhere.

What is a leek? A cousin to the odorous and more pronounced onions and garlic, it’s essentially a whisper in the produce aisle. Relatively unused in these parts, this vegetable is rarely hawked from some corner farm stand. In fact, not many people even know what a leek is, much less where it comes from. Nor might they care. But with the right chef, a leek — or two or three or four — can become a delicacy.

WINE COLUMN NO. 67:

Many remember when two men killed 12 people in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical weekly, on Jan. 7. The shootings were allegedly prompted by cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The violence contributed to a continuing global conversation about the impact of political and religious satire, the likes of which also has a long history here in the United States.

What do Charlie Hebdo and freedom of expression have to do with wine? Plenty, and in different ways. According to Robert Camuto’s story in the March 31 issue of Wine Spectator, three of the 12 people killed in those attacks were among France’s most outrageous wine-label designers: Stéphane Charbonnier, Georges Wolinski and Bernard Verlhac.

'PROUD OF WHO I AM'

It was like, BAM — a philosophical sock to the jaw, right where Calvin Leonard needed it, from a man who had been young once, too, and who knew what it meant to be on the wrong path.

So when Jamie Heistand discovered that the son of his new employee needed a little guidance, boxing seemed like one way to give it to him.