Category: Berkeley

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Annals of Berkeley Solid-Waste Management

cart102110.jpgOur block today enters the Fancy-Ass Recycling Cart Era. Last week, the recycling pickup crews came around and picked up the chaff the recycling poachers had left behind, and they also distributed these nice baby blue “split carts” that are apparently 1) supposed to make it harder for the recycling poachers to grab the more lucrative materials and run off with them and 2) designed to make recycling here a more efficient and tasteful enterprise.

As to the first point, it’s obvious that all a determined poacher needs to do is flip up the lid of the container and start digging around in the “cans and bottles” side of the cart to find what they’re looking for. Those who are not content to rummage around like that can also resort to just tipping the cart over and dumping out the contents. That would be aggressive, but these folks are in it for the money, not recreation. In my late walk with The Dog last night, I didn’t see any turned-over carts; but I did come across one person bent over one of the carts, pawing through the contents.

Unknown: How the recycling upgrade will pencil out for the city financially (I’ve found one reference that suggest the price tag for the carts is $2.7 million–31,000 carts at $90 each), which I believe also includes special trucks that can divide the paper/cardboard and metal/glass/plastic components of the recycling stream. It’s also unclear to me whether the city or its recycling contractor will spend more on workers to sort what’s the material the trucks pick up. I’m sure the argument has been made that any extra costs will be at least partially defrayed by additional revenue the city realizes through its increased share of recyling proceeds (the poachers divert a lot of the potential cash now).

Live On-the-Scene Update (10:45 a.m.): Although I resorted to a tried and occasionally effective strategy of not putting the recycling out until after 7 a.m.–that increases the chances the city contractor, the Ecology Center, will pick up the stuff instead of the poachers–a pirate arrived and cleaned just about all of the bottles and cans in the cart. Looked like the same had happened up and down our block. So the next question will be: how much do the new carts actually affect the amount of recycling picked up by the contractor.

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Two Mugs, One Shot

suspect102010.jpgWe were watching KTVU’s “10 O’clock News” tonight–the Bay Area’s erstwhile decent local news broadcast (all right, KTVU: go ahead and look up “erstwhile”; the rest of us will wait here)–when a story came on about Berkeley police announcing they’d solved several recent street robberies. In one case, involving a group who was holding up pedestrians with a shotgun, the cops said they’d picked up four locals. KTVU showed pictures of four young guys. Next, the anchor said the police had announced an arrest in another stickup, and then they put the above two pictures–or one picture–up on the screen. You just hope that this is a picture of a real suspect–for extra points, one of the two in this case–because based on the stupidity of using the same picture twice, you don’t really have any reason to trust they got any of the pictures or names right.

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Helianthus whatchamacallit

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Years ago—ten, maybe—Kate found a container or two of these fall sunflowers at a local drug store or hardware store that was selling seasonal flowers. We planted them. And every September, they burst out for a month or so of glory (unkempt glory, in our case, but that's in keeping with everything else around here).

Question is: What are they? Passers-by and neighbors have sometimes asked. We still have the little plastic stick label that came with the container. It says "Helianthus salvifolius" and continues: "Perennial sunflower with stems up to 4ft. Clusters of yellow-orange ray flowers in summer. Loves sun and warm position."

Fine, but just try to find one at your friendly local nursery. Or Google (or Bing or Yahoo!) "Helianthus salvifolius." Nothing comes back. 

What you do find if you peruse Helianthus are some very, very similar looking species. Take a look at Helianthus angustifolius, also known as swamp sunflower, for instance. Pretty darn close. Or Helianthus salicifolius, or willow-leaf sunflower. Not quite as close–the leaves on the stem really are long and willowy. 

Anyway. It's our minor front-yard botanical mystery. If any plant sleuths come across this, I'd be interested in hearing your opinion. 

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Berkeley Dawn

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Not to be confused with "Delta Dawn." Thursday morning featured an unusual altocumulus filled sky (as opposed to the usual option: entirely socked in with low clouds, or entirely clear). The week's warm days have given way to cool, breezy, mostly cloudy weather. 

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Berkeley Dawn

CIMG1066
Not to be confused with "Delta Dawn." Thursday morning featured an unusual altocumulus filled sky (as opposed to the usual option: entirely socked in with low clouds, or entirely clear). The week's warm days have given way to cool, breezy, mostly cloudy weather. 

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Bail Bond Alley

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On Boardman Place, an alley that opens onto Bryant Street and the Hall of Justice, where bail bondsmen (and women) can find plenty of customers. I especially like Sheila’s/Shelia’s flexibility about her first name. (Taken during my walk from Public Radio HQ to the Ferry Building.

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The REM Chronicles

Sometimes you get a signal that maybe you’re a little preoccupied or anxious about work. Yesterday, I had the following dream:

I was at the radio station editing the afternoon newscasts as usual. We had a stand-in anchor doing the casts, and our regular anchor was in the office but on some sort of special assignment. We had our lineup ready for the 5 o’clock newscast, but about half an hour before air time, I couldn’t find our sub anchor. She had gone out somewhere and not returned. I couldn’t get her on her cellphone. Newscast time approached, and I asked the regular anchor to do the cast. He was busy and didn’t want to. Still no sign of the stand-in newscaster. I thought I’d better call master control to tell them we were going to have to blow off the cast and they should stay with the network, but I couldn’t remember the master control phone number. No worries—I’d walk down there. Except I couldn’t find it—the layout of the office seemed to have changed. Now it was getting very, very close to air time, and I was hoping that maybe our regular afternoon guy would relent and go and do the cast, but my first priority was to get to master control and let them know we had no cast. I happened upon some other employees and asked them to steer me to master control, as nothing I was seeing looked familiar. Oh, they said, they moved that to the fourth floor (fourth floor? I thought our building only had three floors) and they pointed the way to an elevator. I wound up in one of our TV studios instead, with no elevator in sight. I did see a stairway, though, and started bounding up two steps at a time. But the stairs got narrower and steeper as I went up. I remember thinking, “Whoa—this is a dangerous flight of stairs” as I looked down. I kept going, but soon the stairs were nothing more than strips of carpet hanging from the wall. I thought about whether I could use them as handholds to pull myself up and decided that was a bad idea. I turned and very gingerly climbed back down. I set out again to find master control, but before I did, I ran into the stand-in anchor. “Oh, man—we’re about to miss the newscast,” I said. “Where have you been?” I noticed she was kind of wobbly, like maybe she’d just come from a bar. She said she had been really exhausted and simply had to take a nap and had just awakened. She set off in search of the regular newscaster, while I continued to look for master control, though by this time I knew it was probably too late to warn them. I then started thinking about how I would explain all the above in an email to my bosses.

And then–I was taught in high school never to end a story this way–I woke up. I have to say that this was very vivid, but didn’t feel like a nightmare. Just one of those familiar (to me) stress-type dreams where a relatively simple,straightforward goal continually shrinks from your grasp.

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Post-Weekend Rumination

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*Had planned a visit to the East Bay Municipal Utility District’s fish hatchery, on the Mokelumne River northeast of Stockton. But other stuff intervened. We got up late and indulged in our long Saturday morning dog-walk routine. We were due in Fair Oaks, out at the very edge of the foothills on the American River east of Sacramento, to read poetry with friends early in the evening (the picture: dinner before the reading began). So the hatchery never happened.

**And then yesterday, I thought I might make an early start to beat the heat of the day and get out to that hatchery early. But we slept in, did our Sunday dog-walk routine, which is different from Saturday’s, and found a football game on the tube (flat screen, actually) when we got home. We were due in the afternoon at a memorial for a friend who died this summer. I thought maybe I’d finish some take-home work from my Public Radio Job, too. Well, we made it to the memorial, anyway. Maybe the hatchery will happen next week. I’ll be taking the take-home work back to the office.

***Birthdays: Saturday, my brother John (who’s now reached the Double Nickel). (I meant to call.) Sunday, my niece Maddie. (I meant to send something out there, though belated gifts are good, too.) Today, Niko Danko, who I remember seeing the first weekend he was here on planet Earth. That was in 1999. Hard to believe the time has gone so fast. (See note about belated gifts.) Tomorrow — my late identical-twin uncles, Tom and Ed, born in 1934. Still missed.

****You have got to love a poem that starts:
“my grandmother had a serious gas
problem.”
It’s from Charles Bukowksi, here. We did not read this on Saturday night.

*****You also have to love a poem, also from The Writer’s Almanac, that compares the travails of modern office life with a Homeric bloodbath.

“…I too have come home in a bad mood.

Yesterday, for instance, after the department meeting,
when I ended up losing my choice parking spot
behind the library to the new provost.

I slammed the door. I threw down my book bag
in this particular way I have perfected over the years
that lets my wife understand
the contempt I have for my enemies,
which is prodigious. And then with great skill
she built a gin and tonic
that would have pleased the very gods,
and with epic patience she listened
as I told her of my wrath, and of what I intended to do
to so-and-so, and also to what’s-his-name.

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Berkeley Infrastructure Notes

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This probably happens everywhere: An old utility pole reaches the end of its useful life and gets replaced. There are several places in our neighborhood where an old pole has been splinted to a brand new one installed next to it. This one, on Short Street (a little stub of a lane just west of Sacramento Street; it runs between Hearst and Lincoln streets and is interrupted by the North Berkeley BART station), is unique. The old pole is loosely lashed to the new one. The old pole still carries power lines and maybe some phone and cable TV lines. It doesn’t look like it would take much to knock it over.

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Berkeley Butterfly Ranch

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One of Kate’s sideline projects the past couple of years–part of her elementary school science teaching–has been to raise anise swallowtail caterpillars to the point where they go into the chrysalis, then harbor the chrysalides until the butterflies emerge. It’s not easy. We had a couple of chrysalides on the back porch that some predator–a bird, probably–came and picked off. After that, Kate improvised some netting to protect the five remaining caterpillars, which in due course changed to chrysalis form.

The last of them changed probably a month ago, and what we’ve had, first on the sometimes very warm back porch and then in a shadier spot in a side yard, is a green plastic box with some sticks in it that have had some dead-looking mummy-type things hanging from them. Honestly–when you look at these objects, it’s a little hard to believe anything living can emerge from them. But we’ve been checking every morning anyway.

Yesterday, a surprise: a newly metamorphosed anise swallowtail butterfly, perched on one of the net-supporting hoops in the green box. We were headed out for the afternoon, but we lifted the netting to give it a chance to fly away when it was ready. When we got home, well after dark, it was gone. I’d like to think it got a chance to feed and perhaps eluded for a few hours anyway whatever out there in the world will look at it and see food. I’d like to think that it might find a like-minded anise swallowtail of the opposite sex and get a shot at perpetuating their kind.

Long damn odds, but beautiful to behold.