Category: Berkeley

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Monarch

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The star of this show: a sort of extended family member — a monarch butterfly that hatched from its chrysalis late last week in Kate’s second-grade class. She brought it home today and let it go in our yard. It flew directly to a big potato flower bush in front of the house, then sunned itself for awhile on a jasmine plant just across our neighbor’s fence. Then after a few minutes, it fluttered along the side of our house toward the backyard, and we didn’t see it again.

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A Sports Sunday

Today’s best football name: Derek Belch, Stanford kicker.

California 31, Oregon 24: Wow — a matter of divided loyalties in our house. Kate and I went to Cal (she even graduated) and we’ve lived in Berkeley for decades. On the other side of the coin, Thom is a Duck and enough of a fan that a couple years ago he went out to Autzen Stadium in Eugene to watch Cal and Oregon play in a cold, windy, soaking rain. Oregon won in overtime that day, then got thumped in Berkeley last year (Thom and some friends came down here for that one). If you’re a fan, you know yesterday was a big deal; if you’re not, suffice it to say that both teams are very good and the game actually got some national attention. It was far from a perfect game — Oregon gave the ball to Cal four times in the fourth quarter, and still Cal just squeaked by.

For Kate and me, the game was a different kind of challenge. We turned off our TV earlier in the week. So while the Ducks and Bears engaged in a great gridiron struggle far to the north, we were in Berkeley testing whether a household so deprived of video capability could long endure a game with Cal’s radio guy Joe Starkey as the only source of play-by-play. It’s altogether fitting and proper for me to report that despite the usually frustrating and occasionally comic shortcomings of Starkey’s work, we stuck with the game to the end.

Guest observation: Dave Barry, who grew up in Pittsburgh, recalling the denouement of the 1960 Pirates-Yankees World Series:

“That series went seven games, and I vividly remember how it ended. School was out for the day, and I was heading home, pushing my bike up a step hill, listening to my cheapo little radio, my eyes staring vacantly ahead, my mind locked on the game. A delivery truck came by, and the driver stopped and asked if he could listen. Actually, he more or less told me he was going to listen; I said OK.

“The truck driver turned out to be a rabid Yankee fan. The game was very close, and we stood on opposite sides of my bike for the final two innings, rooting for opposite teams, he chain-smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes, both of us hanging on every word coming out of my tinny little speaker.

“And, of course, if you were around back then and did not live in Russia, you know what happened: God, in a sincere effort to make for all those fly balls he directed toward me in Little League, had Bill Mazeroski — Bill Mazeroski! — hit a home run to win it for the Pirates.

“I was insane with joy. The truck driver was devastated. But I will never forget what he said to me. He looked me square in the eye, one baseball fan to another, after a tough but fair fight, and he said a seriously bad word. Several, in fact. Then he got in his truck and drove away.”

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Bureau of Nonessential Information

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Somewhere or other in my reading yesterday I came across a mention of “reassurance shields.” In the context, it was clear that the term referred to highway route markers rather than, say, some sort of adult incontinence product.

Reassurance shield? Specifically, they’re highway markers placed strategically to reassure us drivers that we’re on the route we want to be on. They’re also called confirmation shields; because, you know, they confirm what route you’re on. And if they’re combined with a sign that also indicated the direction the road is traveling, then you have a reassurance assembly (or confirmation assembly, which to a Catholic has a whole different ring to it).

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And if you want to immerse yourself in the world of highway signage — the standards, the rules for where which signs with which arrows and whatnot are appropriate, and other nonessential knowledge that will make you an indispensable party bore — you want to visit Section 2 of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices.

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Dog 101: Sensitivity Training

Here’s one way to tell if you rely too much on four-letter words, and in particular the strongest Anglo-Saxon variety beginning with the letter “F”: your dog reacts when you say them. It’s no surprise that dogs react when they hear angry language; they may not understand the words literally, but they’re faultless interpreters of tone and mood and body language. But the last time I was around a dog on a daily basis, back when I was a kid, really, I didn’t pick up so much on how dogs responded to the tenor of someone’s speech. Since Scout has been around, nearly a year and a half, I’ve been surprised to find that he’s really put off when he hears me swear. Today, driving home from picking up the van at the garage, I made an angry comment about one of my fellow drivers. Scout had been sitting next to me, but he immediately got down and went to the back of the car; he didn’t want to be around if I was pissed off. He also seems to be especially sensitive to hearing the F-word; maybe it’s because he hears it only when someone is really angry. I don’t know. But it’s something I find myself more and more conscious of; again, I don’t know, but maybe it’s because he reacts so viscerally and visibly. Ironic that it has taken a dog, and not wife, kids, siblings, parents, coworkers, softball umpires or other unfortunate ear witnesses to demonstrate the emotional effect of my swearing habit.

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My Name’s Dan, and I Boggle

I’m telling you this so that maybe you won’t have to go through what I have.

During a short but pleasant family game of Boggle — that game where you try to make words out of a tray full of randomly arranged letters — my son Thom mentioned there was a website where you could play online. Later that same night, I found and visited the site.The intervening days are a blur.

The game is like crack. Except you don’t have to buy or smoke anything. You just sit down at your computer and type in the Web site. That quickly, you’re on the road to becoming an unshaven, unbathed lout with his hair sticking out at odd angles, his eyes bloodshot and unfocused, his grimy T-shirt stained with coffee dribblings and crusted with the leavings of granola bars

Also, unlike the popular media depiction of crack smoking, this online “game play” brings no moment of enjoyment, no momentary euphoria, no relief.

There’s screen after screen of letters arranged in the same deceptively simply 5×5 square. Full of possibilities. There’s a time clock counting down from three minutes. There’s the puzzlement at the failure to find a word more complex than b-u-t-t. There’s the automatic scoring at the end of the round, which comes with the revelation that everyone else has found words like “permanganate” and “perplexity” and “propinquity,” whatever those things are. There’s your name again, way down toward the bottom with the people who are just being introduced to written language and those who type with their elbows.

You’re sure you can do better. Really well. Give the player who goes by the handle ShazaMaster something to remember you by. Then it’s time to play. Again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

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Berkeley Walk

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Tuesday, my friend Pete showed up from Portland. We went for a walk from our place in the North Berkeley flats, elevation about 120 feet above sea level, up to one of the ridges immediately above Grizzly Peak Boulevard but still inside the city limits, about 1,200 feet in elevation. On the way up Shasta Road, we spotted a pretty well-hidden (though marked) public path that cuts across a sizable loop as the street climbs toward Grizzly Peak (for local reference: between Sterling Avenue and Miller Avenue; picture from the top of the path is below). We took the shortcut, which seems to go right through several private yards (“Dad, the party crashers are out in the yard again!”).

The air was pristine Monday, a little less so Tuesday, but still bright and clear. We walked down to the Lawrence Hall of Science in search of a water fountain and didn’t find any that worked; there’s a nice fountain up there, though (above). The sun set as we walked down to Shattuck Avenue, where we finally found water — in the restaurant where we ate dinner.

Tonight, the sky is smoky. I assumed the source was a big fire burning in the scrubby mountains southeast of San Jose, the Diablo Range, about 60 or 70 miles away. The smoke rolled across the sky early this afternoon, and it’s thick enough this evening that you can see it in airplane landing lights as they head into Oakland and San Francisco. Checking the weather advisories, it turns out that the main source of the smoke up here is a fire about 250 miles from here in the northern Sierra. The blaze has got the best conflagration name of the summer: the Moonlight Fire (that link is worth checking — some amazing pictures).

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The Feral Parrots of B-Town

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A flying squad of feral parrots visited out street this morning. They’ve been around Berkeley for years, but we’ve never had them appear so close before. They sat up at the top of the power pole across the street and squawked; one peeled off and starting gnawing leaves or stems at the top of our neighbor’s oak.

These guys, of whatever gender, have been around the North Berkeley flats for years. It seems like they must have been successful reproduciing up to a point, because sometimes you’d see a dozen or more at a time, and I don’t think a whole flock escaped. But they don’t seem to have flourished beyond that. I don’t know much about how they survive in their native habitat, but I guess Berkeley offers slim pickings.

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(Late) Friday Notebook

My keys: An ever-popular household line: Have you seen my keys? No — seriously. I haven’t seen them since about Tuesday. I missed an appointment — a casual one, on Thursday — because I was stuck at home searching for them. So far, the usual thing — finding them in some obvious place that I never thought to look — has not happened and they remain MIA. So if you see them. …

Peet’s: I first went to Peet’s Coffee, the original store up at Walnut and Vine, in the late ’70s. The first time I really remember being there was when I was working as a construction laborer in early 1979. One day it rained and we couldn’t work — I think we were in the middle of digging a garage foundation by hand, since it was on a steep slope — and the carpenters on the crew said we ought to go to Peet’s. We hung out for awhile, mostly under the eaves out on the sidewalk, with about a dozen other people. It was chilly and wet, but it didn’t seem so bad because the coffee was so … well, it was really like a drug. I went home after two cups, and I probably didn’t sit down for the rest of the day. The foregoing reminiscence is prompted by the news, passed on by KTVU this evening, that Alfred Peet, the guy who really is responsible for both Peet’s and Starbuck’s, has died. He was a true coffee visionary, though uninterested in a commercial empire, and a first-rate drug pusher. (“Coffee Pioneer Alfred Peet dies,” San Francisco Chronicle.)

Poem: “After Reading T’ao Ch’ing, I wander Untethered Through the Short Grass,” by Charles Wright (from The Writer’s Almanac).

And last: The Bay Bridge is closed tonight. Closed, completely. For four days. As part of the generations-long project to make the bridge seismically sound, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans, not Caldot) has shut it down for the holiday weekend. That’s all the time it needs to demolish a section of the bridge on the Oakland side of the Yerba Buena Tunnel and slide in a pre-built piece to replace it. The last time the bridge was closed so long: 1989, from October 17 to November 17, after the Loma Prieta Earthquake lifted up the east end of the bridge and let it drop, causing a section to collapse. That was a generation ago, and we have a ways to go before the bridge rehab and rebuild is complete.

Oh, and give me a holler if you see those keys.

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Tuesday Notebook

Today’s best journal titles: Thorax and Chest, both encountered in the midst of a writing project.

Today’s top concern: Getting everything packed as I get ready to take my slow-motion, long-distance cycling thing on the road (translation: I’m leaving Berkeley for a cross-country road trip today; we’ll wind up in New York, where I’ll get on a plane for Paris-Brest-Paris).

Today’s related concern: Gas mileage. We’re renting a car to drive across the country. I’m bringing too much bike-related crap to do the smart thing and get a small, relatively fuel-efficient car. So I opted for a Subaru Outback, which is actually OK mileage- and emissions-wise. I booked it last week and showed up at the Hertz counter at the Oakland airport today to pick it up. My reserved car wasn’t ready because it turned out they had no Subaru Outbacks; when I complained — mildly, for me, mentioning that it was “weird” that there was no car since I made the reservation last week — I was told that the outlet was expecting an Outback but the current renter hadn’t returned it. Uh huh. It just so happened that they had a not-so-spanking new Toyota Highlander, non-hybrid version, ready to roll. So that’s what we’ve got. Crude oil just hit an all-time high today. Gas prices in the Bay Area are at about $3.10-$3.20 per gallon of regular, ethanol-doctored fuel. Big surprise — we’re going to get murdered on our gasoline bill.