Month: October 2009

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Berkeley Crime Notes

We in our little middle-class Berkeley enclave do not feel we live in a big, bad, dangerous city. Yeah, we see stuff happens. Our house was broken into seven years ago, and we’ve had a car vandalized on the street in front of our place. Offhand, I can think of more than a half-dozen burglaries on our block since we moved here 20-some years ago, including a couple that happened within the last six months. Unbeknownst to anyone here, last week there were several burglaries on the street just west of us. As it happened, one of the homes that was broken into had security cameras installed. According to the Berkeley police, here are the images captured:

burglar1.png

burglar2.png If nothing else, these two look prepared: the bags. The baggy, anonymous white T-shirts that can be taken off and thrown away (“Officer, I saw someone wearing a white shirt. …”). I’d also note that the blocks where the burglaries occurred are within a four-minute walk of the BART station. Lots of students go in and out of there, and a couple of young people carrying big bags would attract no attention at all.

Wish I had a picture of the people who got away with my two laptops back in 2002.

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‘Fight the Anti-Worker Capitalist Agenda’

socialism1.jpgsocialism2.jpg A couple of days ago, a young woman came down the aisle of my car on BART as we neared the Civic Center station. She was dropping postcards on empty seats. Strangely, she wasn’t handing them to any passengers. Maybe this is why: One of my fellow passengers picked up one of the cards, scanned it, and started to laugh. His companion said, “What’s so funny?” “Nothing,” he said. “Crap.” Then he tore up the card and discarded the scraps on the floor. Even here, the region some people would unhesitatingly dub the furthest left in all America, it’s hard to win people over to the fight against the anti-worker capitalist agenda.

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Guest Observation: Henry Reed

From “Naming of Parts“:

“They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
          For to-day we have naming of parts.”

Wonderful poem, which I encountered in a junior college composition class I needed to take to get into Berkeley. Wonderful class, too: the instructor was a poet who lived up in the Richmond hills. I groped, as I often do, for what this poem was saying. Seems pretty obvious now. (And if one wants to read more on Henry Reed, who seems worth the time, here’s a wonderful website dedicated to his work. That’s three “wonderfuls” in the same paragraph. I’m out.)