Category: Berkeley

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Law School Gig, Week 2

Knowles

Times I’ve locked myself out of my office: 1. Boalt Hall has one, and only one, "key lady," someone named Wendy, who made the long trek up to my little room to let me back in.


New term: "Chart strings" (University of California talk for "account numbers" when you need to bill expenses, like those for business cards or stationery.


Sight I can’t account for (above): A stone bearing the legend "Knowles" that sure looks like a grave marker. It’s in an out of the way place in the angle between stairways at Boalt’s northwest corner. I haven’t been able to find a record of anyone named Knowles who ever went to the law school, or who has figured prominently in the university’s history. An architect named Knowles did design a nearby house for a professor, but that wouldn’t explain the marker.


Odd experience: Talking to reporters who are looking for sources for stories. Hey, until not too long ago, I was on that side of the fence.


Brilliant idea that went nowhere, for now: To have Barack Obama come out and do some event for the law school. It’s too long a story for tonight. But for one thing, I hear that about 400 people have the same brainstorm every week. 

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The News: It’s Wet

Rain in Berkeley today. Light rain, for sure, but still: it’s drizzling down; gurgling in the drainpipes; creating adventurey driving conditions for weather-challenged Bay Area commuters. The reason it’s worth mentioning in a forum as august as this here scribblefest: It’s a rather rare occurrence — one of the local weatherpersons said on the radio that it’s only rained on June 8 14 times since the start of official meteorological record-keeping hereabouts 150 years or so ago.

Film at 11.

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Bye, TJ

Recent front-page news in Berkeley: Parents, students and teachers at Jefferson Elementary School voted to change the institution’s name to Sequoia. Why? Because, as a slaveholder, he was judged unworthy of the honor and influence of having a school named after him.

Sure — there’s no arguing that he owned slaves. And that he didn’t free them. And that his life fell far short in many important respects from the beautiful rhetoric of freedom he crafted. Granting all that, I still don’t buy that the way to deal with that history is to try to expunge it. I also wonder how we benefit by subjecting every figure from our past to the absolute judgment of our current keen wisdom. It’s one thing to shelve once-distinguished personages who have become less relevant to who we are as a people. In Berkeley, schools memorializing James A. Garfield and John Greenleaf Whittier, remote 19th century icons with no lasting standing in most of today’s culture, have been renamed. Garfield morphed into Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, and Whittier became Berkeley Arts Magnet.

But Jefferson isn’t like Whittier or Garfield. His ideas and flaws are still crucial to our sense of who we are. Better to face that, make his name and legacy something to study for insight into what the United States was, is, and will be than to dump his name as a gesture of multicultural sensitivity. Not too many of the Dead White Men (formerly Founding Fathers) will stand up to a close inspection for political correctness. Even the Great Emancipator — hey, Abe! — comes off as a white supremacist bigot (and a gay one, at that — go figure).

Next on the History Cleansing Hit List: Washington School. Unless it’s named for Booker T., not George. Which would create its own problems for the progressives.

(And the fun sequel to all that is this correction in our town’s semi-daily newspaper, The Daily Planet: “In a June 3 article about the vote to change the name of Jefferson Elementary, Thomas Jefferson was erroneously referred to as the second president of the United States. He was the third.”)

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The DSL Connection Gig

To continue an earlier post of astonishing importance, the DSL connection is back up here at Infospigot corporate HQ. All it involved was about an hour on the phone to India, an actual service call here at our Berkeley premises to confirm that our line was OK (it was), and the chance discovery that our provider, SBC, had actually changed the log-in required to connect to its network. Once I discovered this last fact — which was not advertised in advance, so far as I can tell, but was mentioned in a recorded service announcement I heard when I called the company for help — it was just a matter of figuring out what our account’s actual user name and password were. Thanks to Kate’s diligent retention of notes I made on our account about six or seven months ago, I realized at about Hour 54 of the Great DSL Crisis that the name and password were totally different from the ones I had been trying and trying and trying, in lab-monkey fashion, since Thursday.

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The Bike Gig

Regular readers of this space — if it is a space, but I won’t wander into that corner of linguo-journalistic inquiry for now — know I’m fond of mentioning my exploits in the world of road cycling. One of the things I’ve been aiming for this year is a Paris-Brest-Paris-length endurance event — 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) in 90 hours — to be held next month here in California. A large part of the challenge is the preparation and training involved, especially a series of four shorter (but still long) rides (called brevets) that qualify you for the ride. The qualifying distances are 200 kilometers (125 miles) in 13.5 hours; 300 kilometers (187 miles) in 20 hours; 400 kilometers (250 miles) in 27 hours; and 600 kilometers (375 miles) in 40 hours.

All in all, I had no problem doing the rides to qualify for PBP in 2003 or in doing PBP itself. By that I mean my body held up well and my motivation only flagged once, during the cold, rainy, dark middle of the 600-kilometer qualifier as I ground very, very slowly up a steep mountain road in Mendocino County. The only other significant breakdowns — I didn’t get a flat tire all year — involved my ass and my good humor, though not necessarily in that order.

But this year it’s been a different story.

Continue reading “The Bike Gig”

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The Law School Gig

Lawbook

I’ve only been at my new job at Boalt Hall (UC-Berkeley’s law school) for three days, but already I’m gaining insights into the profession and how future practitioners are trained. For instance, on the hike up to my temporary office, which is in an annex to Boalt’s main building, I pass an open window in the stairwell. What’s eye-catching is how the window is held open. A fresh-air lover in the greater Boalt community, showing laudable imagination in finding new uses for the law, has pressed a volume of "West’s Annotated California Codes" into service as a prop.

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Whatever Happened to …

… Infospigot?

Well, I started this new job, and that’s been absorbing my attention. And a few other things have been going on. And for reasons currently beyond my understanding and/or technical ability, our DSL connection is down right now. So I’m sitting on our front porch, listening to the traffic half a block away on Cedar Street, watching the cat watch the night come down on the neighborhood out of the corner of my eye. If everything works, I’ll post this using an unknown neighbors open Wi-Fi connection (their network is called “Martha,” but that doesn’t ring a bell).

Anyway, so that’s where I’ve been. More on the first few ays working for the University of California, and on other stuff, a bit later.

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Mileage Scoreboard: 05.28.05

Posting from our friends Larry and Ursula’s place in Fair Oaks, California, after a long evening, a very fine dinner Larry cooked for all of us, and another long ride: It’s about 93 miles up here by car from Berkeley. It’s longer by bike, and longer still the way I do it: about 130 miles. Not the hardest ride — lots of flat, and a good wind most of the day. But the thing is, even if it’s flat and tail-windy, you’ve still got to ride the distance. More about the ride tomorrow. We’re going to clear out of here soon (somehow, it’s become 11:30 p.m.) and drive back to Berkeley.

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Employment Notes

In an unexpected turn of events, I’ve just been hired for a public-affairs position at the University of California’s law school, Boalt Hall. What’s unexpected is that two weeks ago, I didn’t even know this job was out there. But taking a look at the university’s job listings the Saturday before last, I noticed an opening for a senior writer doing media relations and development (fund-raising) work at Boalt. I posted my resume online and heard back pretty much immediately. A couple of interviews and several reference calls later, I got the job. I’m both excited and a little amazed; not that I was hired, because I’m not a complete bum; but because it happened so fast. Anyway, it’s going to be an intellectually challenging experience — the school’s dean, Christopher Edley Jr., is a recent Harvard transplant who has big plans on every front (expanding the school, for instance, hiring more faculty, and launching initiatives like the new Berkeley Civil Rights Project (a cousin of the project he started at Harvard in 1996). It ought to be pretty interesting to be close to the middle of all that. I start next Wednesday, and I’m going to walk to work.

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Unfocused Group

I got a call last week asking whether I’d submit to a brief interview to see whether I was qualified for some focus group or other. I said yes, replied to a some questions about my age and health, then got invited to participate in a group that had something to do with flu vaccine.

The group met tonight in downtown Oakland. Eight guys between 50 and 64 years old, all with some sort of chronic health issue that put us at higher risk for complications if we get the flu (mine is asthma; someone else in the group mentioned they had diabetes, which is also a risk factor).

One guy drew everyone’s attention when he came into the research office before the group met. He was wearing what looked like pajama bottoms — or maybe they were some sort of high-fashion lounge pants — and slippers. The guy — let’s call him Larry — began to listen to his cellphone messages with the speaker volume turned all the way up and couldn’t figure how to make it stop. He kind of laughed about it. Innocuous stuff.

Then we went into the room where the group would be observed from behind a two-way mirror. The first thing Larry says to the moderator after she explained we’d be observed and videorecorded is, “Is it OK if I sit on the floor?” The moderator reluctantly went along with that, even though it meant it would be a little harder for everyone else to talk to him. Then she asked us all to introduce ourselves and say what sorts of things we like to do. Larry was first and said he likes to travel and go to the theater. In fact, he said he’d just been to New York and saw a fabulous play on Broadway that’s certain to win a bunch of Tonys. “What’s the name of the play?” the moderator asked. Larry struggled for a while and couldn’t come up with the title, then said it was about a priest abusing a child (looking that much up suggests it’s John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” which has gotten great reviews).

Then the rest of us spoke, then started to discuss influenza. Hardly a peep out of Larry, who was still sitting on the floor. About 15 minutes into the proceedings, the door to the room opened and one of the research firm’s staff members said, “Larry, would you step out here please?” Larry said something like, “What?” in an alarmed kind of way, and she repeated her request. He stood up and walked out. It looked like he had an erection (yes, I looked). There were raised voices out in the hall for a couple of minutes, and a few minutes later, another staff member came in and gathered his belongings. What was remarkable, and added to the impression that Larry had been sitting on the floor, you know, entertaining himself, was the fact the moderator ignored his departure completely. Didn’t bat an eye. Just kept up with the flu talk.

For that gratuitous slice of life, and for spending a couple hours critiquing a few Centers for Disease Control “get your flu shots” posters, we each got 75 bucks. Wonder if Larry got his.