Category: Berkeley

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Last of 2013

The Dog, watchful as cattle graze and dusk comes down on 2013.

The main outing for the last day of 2013: Kate and I took The Dog out to Carquinez Strait Regional Shoreline, up near Martinez. Having contrived to leave home less than two hours before sunset, we only got a short walk in, up to the top of a ridge with a view out to everywhere — the nearby towns of Martinez and Benicia, the above-mentioned strait and Suisun Bay, Mount Diablo, the mountains in Napa and Solano counties. The light was gorgeous, and as it faded, Scout started studying one of the nearby ridges. There was a cow up there, silhouetted against the twilight. Scout kept his vigil for a couple minutes until the cow ambled off over the hill. Then we all headed back down to the car and into the end of New Year’s Eve.

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Buddhists, Meet Bootists

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The corner of Josephine and Berryman streets in Berkeley. The Three Buddhas pickup is one we see parked in the neighborhood, and in fact the firm seems to have had a very long-running remodeling job going on around the corner from where the picture was taken. I’ve seen cars booted by the half-dozen in Chicago, but rarely here in Berkeley. Given the general laxity regarding parking in most residential neighborhoods here — I’ve had a cop refuse to ticket someone who had parked partway across my driveway on the grounds that it was still possible to get a vehicle past it — I always wonder what someone had to do to wind up with their wheels locked. Probably, they’ve picked up tickets in some of the commercial districts where enforcement has been known to be on the zealous side. (Credit for the headline goes to Kate Gallagher.)

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Berkeley Cares, Then Corrects

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Out with The Dog this evening, walking along a bike path not too far from the house, I was startled to see what looked like a memorial: lots of flowers next to the barrier that separates the path from the BART tracks just north of the mouth of the Berkeley tunnel. Funny how fast I started processing possibilities: Was someone waylaid here? Had someone gone over the barrier and gotten electrocuted or hit by a train?

In the dark, I could see there was a sign. Shining a light on it, I found it said someone died 10 days ago in a cycling accident at this spot, just off the dead end of Neilson Street, just south of Gilman. Looking more carefully, I could see that the message had been edited to add details about the incident, including the name of the man who died and the fact he suffered “a heart attack” after an incident in which he apparently tried to avoid hitting someone else on the path.

Looking for the name online, I see a couple of accounts with more details. Stefano (Steve) Maranzana, a 39-year-old UC Berkeley employee, suffered cardiac arrest after he swerved to avoid a skateboarder on the path and crashed into the BART fence. Yeah — 39, with a child on the way, if the news accounts are correct. On his way home from work, just a mile or two north of this site. (Here’s one story, from Charles Burress on the Albany Patch site, and an obituary in The Daily Californian.)

I have to say there’s something about the edits to the sign that seems to go just a little beyond providing an update — like someone suggesting that the original is ill informed (as opposed to less informed). Also, what’s the whited-out portion about? I’m probably reading too much into it.

In any case, from what I read about Steve Maranzana, he was a thoroughly good guy and probably would have appreciated the original sentiment. Take care, everyone.

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Live at North Berkeley: Winter Evening Rush-Hour Guitar

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Up above, that’s Dave Gardner — I’m not sure I’ve got his last name right — sitting on his amplifier and playing guitar as commuters emerged from the North Berkley BART station last night. I asked him how things were going. “Cold,” he said. Were people responding to his playing, “Some,” he said. Mostly, he let his playing speak for him, and I got out of the way so I wouldn’t deter any passers-by from dropping a buck in his guitar case. I liked the music. I think the two numbers he plays here are takes on “All of Me” and “Sweet Georgia Brown.”     

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Meantime, Out in the Compost

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Most food scraps from our kitchen go out to a compost bin next to the back fence. The bin has been out there for years and it is populated by some sort of red earthworms — not sure what species, though I see Lumbricus rubellus and Eisenia fetida are candidates. There is lots of other life, seen and unseen, out in that bin, too. Armies of mites and other insects, the occasional millipede, and bacteria, fungi, and other unseen organisms by the millions or billions. Every day or two, I go back out there and throw whatever scraps we have to offer into the bin and stir things around with a garden fork. That was the prelude to the shot above.

Which reminds me: I got worms.

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In Transit: The Audio

Since I’ve been doing the radio thing — actually doing some writing and reporting for the air — I’ve gotten in the habit of recording stuff I hear out there in the world.

Since I got a really capable smartphone a couple years ago, I’ve come to realize what cool little field recorders they can be.

And since I ride public transit (mostly BART) a lot, I’ve long thought about the idiosyncrasies of some of the train operators as expressed in their announcements. The guy who repeats the name of the train and station about six times at every stop. The woman who lectures riders about what station they need to transfer at (I haven’t gotten her recorded yet). The super-happy and the overly dour operators and the ones you can never really understand.

Anyway, I just had a prompt to put together some audio I’ve been gathering over the last few months. It’s not a truly finished radio piece or anything, but it’s got some fun moments in it. Enjoy.

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Scorebook: Oakland 1, Detroit 0

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In just 10 hours or so, the A’s and Tigers will be back on the field, this time in Detroit, to continue their playoff series. It hardly seems possible, because Saturday night’s game in Oakland, the game the A’s won 1-0 in the bottom of the ninth, barely seems over. The epic tension of the game, the pitching, the crazy enthusiasm of the crowd (yeah, the Coliseum looks great with those third-deck tarps taken off and all those seats filled with fans), and the A’s finally breaking through to get a run home. Anyway, that’s all I’m going to say on the matter for now. Here’s Kate’s scorecard for Game 2–Tigers up above, A’s below (click the pages for bigger images).

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September

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Warm and clear. Our most fog-free month. Our warmest month. Nothing in the yards and gardens wants to quit. The fauna, the flora, they just keep going as the light gets shorter, the dark gets longer, the world cools toward what even here we call winter.

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Berkeley: Sidewalk History Underfoot

A ubiquitous feature of pedestrian life here: contractor stamps in the local sidewalks, saying who built the walk and, sometimes, when they did it. I assume the practice is much wider-spread than here in the Bay Area. When we were in Portland the week before last, I noticed a stamp on SE Ankeny Street, at SE 27th Avenue, that recorded a contractor’s name (Ryan) and year (1915).

What I like about the stamps: They give some sense of the history of the place. Walking around my neighborhood, you get a real sense of how development proceeded block by block. two blocks south and three blocks east, there are sidewalks dated 1910 or a little earlier. On the blocks immediately surrounding, the walks didn’t go in until the late 1910s or early ’20s.

I’m also impressed by some of the work I see. There’s a patchwork of replaced sidewalk here in Berkeley to replace walks damaged by tree roots or age. But a lot of the vintage walks have last nearly a century or more and look like they’re good for another 100 years. (I’m guessing that the climate here helps: There’s no hard freeze in the winter.)

Anyway, here’s a slideshow–a small collection of local sidewalk stamps and a handful of other notable sidewalk finds:

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West Oakland Roadside Attraction

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Here’s a set of pictures that’s been sitting on my hard drive for a while. Last fall, some creative folks–artists and performers and super-capable do-it-yourselfers–created a sort of carnival on a vacant lot in West Oakland. I had heard about it from a reporter of ours who did a little story on it, then Kate spotted a piece about it in one of the local papers. So late one afternoon in November, we drove over there–10 or 15 minutes from home–to see what was up.

The attraction was called Peralta Junction, and involved a sideshow, a calliope, a life-size version of the game Mouse Trap (a performance that happened well after sunset, and my pictures didn’t turn out well), and local artisans selling a range of old-timey clothing and other modern-antique wares. It was really fun.

Here’s the slideshow, below, mostly featuring the guy who did the sideshow act. He hammered a butter knife into one of his nostrils. He passed his body through a tennis racket. He lay on a bed of nails while a second bed of nails was placed on his chest and someone from the crowd stood on it. I don’t know the performer’s name and wish I did–it was a funny and thoroughly engaging show.