Category: Berkeley

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First of 2015

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We made it to another completely artificial and arbitrary dividing point in time, which by widely accepted convention we’re calling 2015 (or 2015 CE, if you want to get ecumenical about it). But what the heck: Happy New Year all, even, as is increasingly likely the case, we haven’t met or spoken in a long time or, thanks to Googlers landing here looking for something they may or may not find, ever.

Resolutions? I have none to announce. I’m looking forward to seeing what the world brings our way in the coming arbitrary slice of months, weeks, days (12/52/365) and to seeing what meaning there is to glean from their passing.

And to say goodbye to 2014, here’s a look at one of the last shots of the year, taken last night from the Seaview Trail in Tilden Park.

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Berkeley Protests: Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

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Here you go, blog fans: An actual semi-journalistic document about last night’s protests in Berkeley. What follows is a story memo I wrote for the news staff at KQED, the public radio station where I work. It falls short of Pulitzer/Peabody importance or immortality, but it does detail a late evening, early morning in my town:

I had stuff going on early Saturday night, but went out with my wife (and with a camera and recorder, which I used) about 11:30 p.m. because I could see (from helicopters in the air and the traffic on Twitter) that stuff was still going on. I did not succeed in getting into the thick of the action, but I do have some impressions nonetheless:

–First, the caveat that there was a whole lot I didn’t see, a lot of tense moments and use of tear gas to disperse the crowd on Telegraph Avenue that I was following via social media so can’t comment on. (One reliable Twitter source I found: Evan Sernoffsky from the San Francisco Chronicle, who was right in the middle of stuff on Telegraph Avenue after 10 p.m. Another decent source, though I think it overplayed the violence/vandalism angle at first: Berkeleyside.

–After reading description of destruction along the streets — especially of the Trader Joe’s store and a Radio Shack on University Avenue — I was surprised to find that most of the windows in those stores were intact and that nothing else that I saw appeared to have been touched. (Caveat: Yes, it’s possible that there was other damage done, but again, the place the protesters spent the most time, Telegraph Avenue, was not damaged at all that I could see. Despite the general absence of property damage, I found a TV news crew at 3 a.m. set up in front of the two large boarded-up spaces at the Trader Joe’s store. Of course.

–Even though there was a faceoff going on on Telegraph Avenue at midnight, the general atmosphere in downtown Berkeley and around campus was calm and property intact.The biggest gathering I personally saw at this point, aside from the dozens of California Highway Patrol officers on the street, was a big, loud party at one of the co-op housing developments on Dwight Way. I’m sure the police could have found lots of violations of various laws and ordinances there.

–The only live account I heard of the protest at the point it turned turbulent, around 6:30 p.m. came from KCBS’ Mark Seelig. He had been moving with the protesters from campus, through downtown, where there was a takeover of one of the main intersections, and down to the Police Department a couple blocks away. Seelig gave a very confused account of what happened at the PD, but it seemed apparent from his reporting that that was the flashpoint for any vandalism that happened. It was immediately *after* the police began deploying smoke/teargas that the window-breaking occurred — that was Seelig’s witness account, anyway, which KCBS allowed to run on for minutes even though it was often a very confused account of events.

–Since I wasn’t there, I can’t really comment on or judge the police action, but it *sounds* like they responded very aggressively to *something* that happened down there — thrown objects would be my guess. Again, not having been there, I can’t judge, but I think it’s worth asking about the intensity of the police response — the smoke and tear gas that was deployed and the appearance of what I believe was an Alameda County armored vehicle on the streets.

–The part I did see more directly was after 12:45 p.m. or so. I was finally able to get on to Telegraph. Police had the intersection of Dwight blocked, so I couldn’t follow the crowd down Telegraph. But for whatever reason, the police were using tear gas as they forced the crowd south, in the direction of the Oakland border. I hung out watching a small crowd, mostly students, and a larger crowd of CHP officers in full riot equipment, gathered at Dwight and Telegraph. The small crowd was generally just curious with the exception of one guy, older, a non-student for sure, who told the cops off for violating the right to assemble.

–I circled south of the crowd down to Telegraph and 63rd. There were traces of something acrid and irritating in the air there — I’m assuming it was teargas, but don’t know for sure. Again, it was quiet on that part of the street, and the action was up a couple blocks. Using the police helicopter overhead for a cue — figuring it was circling over wherever the people had gone — and I went down to Shattuck Avenue a couple blocks north of Ashby. It was about 1:45 or so by this time, and now, I had what was left of the protest marching straight at me. At this point, the police had departed — not a single officer in sight as the march moved north on Shattuck Avenue toward downtown. There were still about 150-200 protesters in the group, chanting and entirely non-menacing. The makeup of the crowd: mostly student age, I thought. Mostly white and Asian.

–I drove downtown to get in front of the march again, then accompanied the last 100 or so people up Durant to Telegraph. The only conflict at this point was with one very angry driver, a young African-American woman, I think, who wanted to get through the crowd but couldn’t. So, sometime just after 2, the marchers essentially took over the intersection of Durant and Telegraph. They held a mic session there, which mostly featured Yvette Felarca of the left-wing anti-police-violence and social justice group By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). They go back about a decade in Oakland and were very active in the Oscar Grant and Occupy Oakland protests.

–It was pretty much a party atmosphere at the intersection.. A car that had been stranded parked in the intersection and was playing music really loud during the speeches. One person was shouting, “Less BAMN, more dancing!” And Felarca announced there would be a gathering at 1 p.m. Sunday and another march frrom Bancroft and Telegraph on Monday evening at 5 p.m. I stayed until just after 2:30, then walked back downtown to get in my car and go home. The nearest police I saw were a very long block away — an unmarked car with two or three officers just observing.

–On the way home, I got to see the TV crew shooting its story about the unrest, in front of the Trader Joe’s windows.

–Two takeaways:

*I think we all know we’re going to see more of the same (gatherings, marches, scattered vandalism and arrests). My guess is for weeks at least, not days.

*I think we need to ask questions about the police response. Given that the great majority of the crowd appears to have been nonviolent, why did the police resort to aggressive crowd control so suddenly? What exactly, by their account, occurred at the police station?

–I think we ought to get an inventory of all the means police officers used. There are reports via social media that “less than lethal” projectiles (bean bags or rubber bullets) were fired. The officers on Telegraph were equipped with guns that fire less-than-lethal munitions, but I didn’t witness them being used.

–Officers used batons at several points on Telegraph, and one student displayed a scalp wound she says she suffered when she was struck — Berkeleyside has a picture.

–One student I talked to (this is on tape) said that students in one of the large residence halls near Telegraph had been affected by the gas. Wonder if the university has anything to say about that.

Last: I’m tied up today — I’m going to the potential riot at the Oakland Coliseum, where a football game is being played — so I’m not available for further coverage and/or blogging until sometime this evening.

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Frontyard Visitor: The Gulf Fritillary

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Wednesday it rained. Thursday it rained. Saturday, it rained again.

Right there’s some news. Even though the rain didn’t amount to much — I’d guess just an inch or so here in Berkeley for all three “storms” — that was the most concentrated precipitation we’ve had since April, I’d guess. Today (Sunday) was clear, and that after avoiding even looking at the yard for a long time — the front “lawn” has not been watered in several seasons and looks worse than dead — I thought I’d taken advantage of the warm, dry weather and clean things up a little.

One of my chores was to cut down the mostly dead stalks of our September-blooming sunflowers (Helianthus salicifolius). I did that, then picked up the whole bundle of stalks to stuff in our green can (the one for “yard waste). As I started to push the stuff into the can, I realized there was a beautiful orange butterfly tangled up in the mass of dead stems and leaves. I thought it was dead, but then it moved. So I pulled stalks out of the can to give it more space to wriggle free. It quickly extricated itself. I ran for my camera, but it flew before I could get a shot.

I ran and grabbed my camera and followed it for a few minutes down the block. The undersides of the butterfly’s wings are gorgeous — “spangled in iridescent silver,” as one description I found puts it. I couldn’t manage to get a clear shot of the undersides, though.

Kate went online to make the identification: a Gulf fritillary (Agraulis vanillae). The Bay Area is about as far north as these get in California, though they have been seen recently in the Davis and Sacramento areas. Here are a couple links with details:

The name “Gulf fritillary”: Well, “Gulf” comes from their association with areas bordering the Gulf of Mexico. And “fritillary”? A U.S. Forest Service “pollinator of the month” page explains:

The common name comes from a Latin word, fritillus, which means chessboard or dice box. Fritillary is also the name of a flower with an interesting checkered pattern; it is obvious that both the flower and the butterfly get their common name because of such pattern. Another name for these handsome butterflies is silverspots because of the metallic markings on their wings undersides. It is possible that this pattern, similar to a leopard’s spots, serves as camouflage when they are resting in places of dappled sun and shade spots.

Getting in further over my head: It should be noted that the Gulf fritillary is a member of the same butterfly subfamily, Nymphalidae (brush-footed butterflies) but a different tribe (Heliconiini) from the rest of the fritillaries (Argynnini). I didn’t know butterflies had tribes. And that’s as far as I’m going to take the fritillary story for this evening.

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Live at North Berkeley BART: The Dan Nhi

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I’ve been seeing this man at the North Berkeley BART station for, gosh, at least a couple of years (time flies when you’re halfway paying attention). He’s one of a number of musicians who show up and perform for a few spare bucks during the evening commute. He plays a two-stringed instrument that I’ve always guessed is from eastern Asia, and I’ve always guessed that he’s Vietnamese.

I wouldn’t consider the guesses well-informed. Maybe sometime in the distant past I saw this instrument played somewhere and learned its origins. In any case, when I played the audio above for Kate and described what made it, she went online and quickly found a description of a two-string Vietnamese “fiddle” — the dan nhi.

I wanted to ask the man, who was wearing a Raiders cap, about himself, the instrument and his playing, which I found quite beautiful. But our conversation was very brief. When I asked whether he’s speak to me, he pointed to one of his ears and said, “I — no English.”

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Dining-Room Visitor

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Earlier this month, Kate spotted some wild fennel stuffed into a yard-waste bin here in the neighborhood. Wild fennel, which has become profuse here, is kind of weedy and annoying; once it takes root, it’s very hard to get rid of.

But it’s also a host plant for a butterfly called the anise swallowtail (Papilio zelicaon), whose image has graced this blog before. It’s a largish black-and-yellow beauty, at least in the eye of this beholder.

So, having spotted the fennel in the bin, Kate took a look to see if any anise swallowtail caterpillars might be there, too. To her surprise, she found 10, including a couple that were probably close to going into their chrysalides. So she brought the caterpillar and their host sprigs of fennel back home, where they took up residence in our dining room.

Within just a few days, one of the caterpillars crawled onto the vase that held the fennel and began preparing to go into its chrysalis. We left town for a couple of days, and when we came back, the chrysalis was complete. (See the photos below; click for bigger versions of the images.) That was less than two weeks ago. Since we’ve sometimes watched chrysalides for months and months before a butterfly appears (if one appears at all), I was kind of thinking we’d be into the autumn before anything more happened.

But this morning, Kate got up, walked into the dining room, then called out, “We have a butterfly out here now!”

So now, it’s doing what it needs to do for the next stage in its life cycle. We’ll watch.

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No Tools Required

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We have a bathroom sink with a broken stopper — or at least a stopper I’ve been ineffective at fixing. So I followed up on a months-old resolution and bought an old-fashioned rubber stopper. To cover all bets, I got one that fits a range of drain sizes. And it works great. I run water into the sink, and the imperturbable stopper makes sure it just stays there.

I admit I thought the device was self-explanatory. But Kate pointed out after I’d removed the stopper and left the package just lying around on the kitchen counter that it came with installation instructions. Or “installation instructions,” since nothing there really tells you what you need to do with the drain plug to achieve total stopper satisfaction.

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Polyester Pants

I was out for a walk with The Dog late this afternoon. We hit several of the usual stops: the house of a neighbor who is a soft touch for dog biscuits; the schoolyard where every once in a while other dogs are running around; the chicken coop in the adjacent school garden. Then we looped around a long block and started to walk down the street past the school’s track. A man was approaching. Maybe my age (mid-Baby Boom), wearing a sort of black sea captain’s hat, a black pea jacket and heavy black trousers. He had big mutton-chop whiskers and was otherwise rather roughly shaven. He looked — well, not quite like he was living on the street, but like he was used to living outdoors.

As we passed each other, he stopped and said, “Can I ask you a really random question?”

“Sure,” I said, thinking that I was about to hear a roundabout request for any money I could spare.

“Do you know where I can buy some polyester pants?”

“Uh…”

“You know, some slacks, some polyester dress slacks.”

That did qualify as a really random question. But I tried to think of where you could go in Berkeley, even late on a Sunday afternoon, to find the desired item. Ross in downtown Berkeley. Or maybe the Halmar work clothes store on University Avenue. Or the J.C. Penney up at Hilltop Mall …

And that was it. Maybe that line of questioning would have led to the subject of money. But my new acquaintance just thanked me, turned, and walked up the street. The dog and I walked on toward home, and I’m still wondering if I’ve ever worn polyester pants.

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Berkeley Trashcan Battle, Round 2

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Though I’m spending the week in Seattle, an informant alerts me that the simmering hyperlocal brouhaha over trash receptacles on the sidewalk in the 1500 block of McGee Avenue (just north of Cedar) appears to have entered a new phase. The disgruntled and anonymous resident who recently offered a neighborly chiding to those who had failed to remove their garbage cans from the sidewalk after trash pickup — see “Berkeley: Your Absolutely Free Advice of the Week” — has upped the ante. He or she has now duct-taping an official-looking notice informing them that they’re in violation of city ordinances.

On the off-chance that the person who’s posting these notices reads this (it’s a long shot): I’d love to talk to you about the history of your grievance. Send me an email or leave me a comment.

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Berkeley: Your Absolutely Free Advice of the Week

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For those seeking random, sometimes helpful and often stern advice from anonymous strangers, a stroll through Berkeley rarely disappoints. On a walk back from downtown to our manse in the North Berkeley flatlands yesterday, I encountered a detailed sign posted on one resident’s fence advising those who park at the curb that they face fines if they don’t have the appropriate residential sticker. That could certainly be interpreted as helpful information (as well as a warning to out-of-neighborhood interlopers to keep moving).

A few blocks farther on, I found the sheet printed above inserted into several waste and recycling bins that someone had left along the sidewalk. The advisory: It’s against the law to leave your garbage cans in the public way. For its officiousness and snide tone — “thank you for helping keep the neighborhood tidy and attractive” — it’s one of my all-time favorite pieces of posted advice.

There are all sorts of things this makes me wonder. There are all sorts of irritants introduced into our daily lives by dint of living in society, and yeah, part of me really understands being bothered by something as trivial as this (ask me how I feel about parking in our neighborhood and I can come up with a long list of grievances that I’ve decided I need to get over in the interest of my mental health). This note makes me curious about how long this particular complaint has festered before being committed to paper, how much research into the city code was undertaken, and about what sort of relationship the writer has with neighbors that she or he can’t address this subject in person.

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Tax Day Moon

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We watched the start of tonight’s/this morning’s lunar eclipse from the sidewalk in front of the house. A couple of neighbors came out to see the moon starting to enter the Earth’s shadow — but the show was a little misty and it looked like things would get more overcast as the eclipse progressed. About 25 minutes or so before the total phase was to begin, the moon was all but invisible down here at 120 feet above sea level. But the weather forecast had suggested that the marine layer, the band of atmosphere influenced most by the moisture coming in from the ocean (and thus foggy), might be just 1,500 feet deep. Grizzly Peak Boulevard, the main road through the Berkeley Hills, tops out at just below 1,700 feet — so I thought the sky might be clear, or at least clearer, up there.

We drove up, and as we wound up the road south past the city limits and above the University of California campus, ascending above 1,000 feet, more and more cars appeared. There are a few small parking areas as the road nears its summit, and those were full of cars. Soon, we were passing cars that were only pulled halfway off the pavement. Hundreds of people were up at the top of the hills at midnight watching the eclipse.

We pulled into the parking lot for the Tilden Park steam trains just as totality began. It was kind of a cool moment: We could hear people cheering and howling up at the moon from all around. A true Berkeley sky party. We stayed up in the parking lot — which had a great view and just a handful of people watching — for about an hour before heading back down. There were still dozens of cars up along the road — the partiers and die-hards watching the moon return from the dark.

(That bright star in the pictures, to the right of the moon — it’s Spica, the principal star of the constellation Virgo).