A bunch of contrails in the evening sky tonight. Here’s a westbound plane crossing the trail left by a southbound jet about seven or eight minutes earlier.
Technorati Tags: berkeley
Powerful Sports Car
Parked outside the main branch of the Berkeley Public Library: a Lamborghini Countach. Right out there on the street with all the Volvos and Nissans and VWs. But what got our attention was the fact the car was parked in the primo disabled parking spot in front of the library–parking is becoming very, very challenging in downtown Berkeley–with a disabled placard hanging from the rear-view mirror. In California, disabled plates or placards are available for drivers or passengers with serious mobility or sight issues. Now, I’m just guessing that you need to be pretty limber to get in an out of this car. which is built very close to the ground and doesn’t look like it has a luxurious amount of cockpit space for driver or passenger (sure–looks can be deceiving). And while I can imagine circumstances in which the driver or a regular passenger of this beast might have need of disabled parking dispensation, I find it easier to believe that this is a scam. I mean, if you’re able to climb out of this thing, you’re not impaired enough to require the best parking spot on the block. (Seeing this does make me wonder about the distribution of disabled plates and placards by vehicle, though; how many Lamborghini operators have them? How many high-step vehicles, like Hummers and big pickup trucks? )
[Update: On Monday (March 26), the Chronicle published a story on the increasing use of disabled placards throughout the state: According to the stats the paper published, the number of placards issued has doubled in the last decade, “with 1 issued for every 16 residents” statewide. With 36.5 million residents, that means almost 2.5 million placards are floating around out there (U.S. Census Bureau stats provide some interesting context: In 2005, the agency put the number of residents age 18 and over at 25 million, meaning about 1 in 10 people of driving age have disabled placards. The bureau estimated California’s over-65 population, the group that I’d expect to hold the most placards, to be about 3 million. One upshot of the Chron’s story, which is underwhelming in scope and detail, is that the widespread use of disabled placards, which exempts users from feeding parking meters, is cutting into local government revenues. I still want to know how many Lamborghini owners have disabled plates.]
Technorati Tags: berkeley, california
Powerful Vacuum Cleaner
Left on the sidewalk out by Ohlone Park for the lucky passerby: a Hoover upright featuring so many little gizmos, features, slogans and claims it ought to be able to clean up Baghdad all by itself:
- Self Propelled (note to Hoover: use the hyphen next time)
- Premium
- Wind Tunnel Technology (accompanied by image of cyclone for dramatic emphasis)
- Bag Check Indicator
- “Picks up more dirt than any other clean-air upright” (Hoover: that hypen’s a good one)
- Green and red lights labeled “clean” and “dirty” respectively
- “Carpet is Clean When Light Is Green”
- Embedded Dirt FINDER
- WindTunnel by Hoover
- Mach 6.9
- Patented Windtunnel
This machine looks like it’s survived a few IED attacks, or at least confrontations with pets that gnawed on its attachments. I like the accompanying Post-it note that explains: “Powerful Vacuum Cleaner/needs new belts & cleaning.”
This Berkeley habit of leaving spent vacuum cleaners out on the sidewalk–it’s starting to grow on me.
Schoolyard, Sky
OK, I’m cheating. This was actually Wednesday night, up at King Middle School, walking the dog. It’s really warmed up here over the last week or two, and you sort of wonder the way the weather has been whether we’re just about done with our rain for the year. Anyway, I”m using a picture from last night because I’ve been busy trying to turn out a piece on the Stardust implosion in Las Vegas. You can read my draft after the jump. Comments, complaints and great thoughts welcome, as always.
Technorati Tags: berkeley
As Seen on TV
First: Tyra Banks. Kate had put on her show because she said some of the teachers she works with are always talking about have mentioned her. Kate didn’t know from Tyra Banks. All I thought I knew was that she was a model (sorry–supermodel) who might have done some acting. I didn’t know she had a show, but there it was, an Oprah/Montel-esque self-help fest on the subject of anorexia and bulimia. We tuned in long enough, about 45 seconds, to hear Ms. Banks cry out to her audience, “You don’t have to be consumed by an eating disorder!” There–that’s Tyra Banks.
Next.
KTVU’s 10’Clock News. One of the stories teased on the show open was about the “Nobel Peace Prize” that had gone missing at the University of California at Berkeley. The story: Police had located the medallion and a suspect. I puzzled over what Nobel Peace Prize might be on the Cal campus; though the university is given to tiresome boasting about the number of Nobel laureates among its faculty, I don’t recall ever hearing of anyone who got the peace prize.
But before I could think more about that, the anchors launched into tonight’s top story: A burglary rampage in a rich little town, Orinda, on the other side of the hills. Then the details emerged: Over the last two weeks, police say, five burglaries have been reported in the town. The M.O.? Scary: Someone’s entering residences during the day through unlocked doors. The loot? Oh, big-ticket stuff: iPods, laptop computers, “even jewelry.” In other words, the kind of garden-variety rip-offs that urban dwellers are all too familiar with. It wasn’t even clear from the cop who appeared on camera that the police think it’s an unusual occurrence. The KTVU reporter did locate a woman who had a harrowing story about a confrontation with a burglar last summer; the intruder beat her and threatened her before getting away with $13,000 in jewelry. But as the on-camera cop said, that incident apparently has nothing to do with the current spate of thefts.
You could make a case for having the story somewhere on the show: “Genteel folk fret over predators in sylvan paradise.” But why was it the lead story? Probably because someone at KTVU lives in Orinda and either had their home broken into or knows a neighbor or two who have.
On to the Nobel Peace Prize story: Well, it turns out that someone tipped off UC police that a student had stolen the solid gold medal from Lawrence Hall of Science the other day. The cops went out and picked up the kid, who said he took the medallion from a display case “on a whim.” But it was the physics prize awarded to Ernest O. Lawrence in 1939, not the peace prize. If you care, and news people are paid to and should be doing something else if they don’t, there’s a big difference between the two medals.
Eventually, way down in the show, KTVU got around to the less important stories like Iraq and the Scooter Libby fallout and what have you. Overall, 60 minutes that barely moves the needle from “bad” to “mediocre.”
Big O
This morning, from Chavez Park on the Berkeley waterfront, via my phone camera. I was down there with The Dog after dropping Kate off to catch the train to Sacramento. After the sun rose, this big smoke-ring-like thing was visible over the city, drifting south with all the other mornng clouds. Yes, those are steam plumes rising from west Berkeley, but they didn’t appear to have anything to do with the cloud overhead. Between this apparition and the Eugene contrails the other day, I’m getting ready for the next part of the message.
Technorati Tags: berkeley, california
Sunset
Wrath of the Bird Man
Among the various schizoid tendencies evident in Berkeley life is the battle between the town’s self-conscious live-and-let-live creed and the habit of instructing fellow citizens about how they ought to behave. The laissez-faire creed honors panhandlers, naked pedestrians, tree sitters, borderline and full-blown mental cases and a panoply of other truth- and attention-seekers; the knee-jerk impulse to correct targets every manner of real and imagined infraction, public and private.
Today’s case in point: I took the dog down to the marina early in the afternoon. The weather was showery and there were few people around. As I usually do when the park is deserted, I let the dog run across the southeast meadow unleashed; he romps the quarter-mile or to the official off-leash area, stopping fifteen or twenty times along the way to check on ground-squirrel excavations.
This afternoon, an older woman walking a young black Lab preceded me across the open area As she walked along, she was intercepted by a long-haired, bearded man of middle age who was holding something up and shouting at her. When I got closer, I heard him yell, “Your dog should be on a leash! This is an extremely rare bird that a dog just killed!” And then, as I neared him, he turned on his heel and marched straight at me, thrusting the bird carcass toward me. “You have to leash your dog!” he shouted. “This bird was just killed by dogs.”
The guy (pictured above, in an actual action photo) was wearing a cap, and he had a dark green-and-black-plaid jacket on, and from a distance I wondered if he was some sort of park volunteer. So I said, “On whose authority?”
“What?” he asked.
“On whose authority do I need to put my dog on a leash?”
“On my authority — as a citizen!” he shouted.
OK: letter of the law, he was right. The place we were, dogs are supposed to be leashed. But like I said, with no one around, I let him run and follow the municipal code by picking up after him if he takes a dump. And I do keep an eye on whether he harasses birds, and although he occasionally will take a run at one of the big herons and egrets who show up to hunt in the meadow themselves, he has shown no interest in smaller birds like the unfortunate one the Unofficial Nature Warden was holding aloft. I told the man that as I walked on. I must have been a little too dismissive.
“This is not your property!” he screamed, stepping toward me. “This is not your fucking backyard!”
I looked at him for a moment, then remembered I had my camera. “Wait a minute–I want to take your picture,” I said. When I took the camera out, turned it on, and pointed it toward him, he threw the dead bird at my feet and turned and walked away. I noticed then that he had a plastic bag in which he was carrying his own camera. I told him I wanted him to come back and tell me about the bird, but he stalked off, saying that if he had to take his camera out and snap my picture, then the incident would become a matter for the police. He didn’t stop walking.
I looked at the bird. I couldn’t tell what kind it was. It could have been a shore bird, or it might have been one of the killdeer who settle down in the meadow after dark. It was impossible to tell what did it in, though there are feral cats around and other small predators that would be more likely to dispatch birds than dogs would. In fact, in all the times I’ve been down to the park, I’ve only seen one dog chase small birds, and it wasn’t close to catching anything, let alone killing it.
But protecting the birds down there wasn’t what the Unofficial Nature Warden was trying to do, anyway. He was just bearing witness to his sense of grievance about other park users flouting the rules. And for just a little extra spice in his existence, he might get off on bullying and intimidating the dog walkers he encounters. Several other people I met today said they’ve encountered him before and reported he was just as angry and confrontational as he was today.
Technorati Tags: berkeley, berkeley photography
Luminaria Streets
Here’s what it looked like last night on our street and some of the streets in our neighborhood. If you added up all the blocks that are putting out luminaria around us now, there are miles of streets lined with the lights. My impression from doing a late-night tour was that there was one major expansion–a one-third mile stretch of Curtis Street, to the west of us. Later, I’ll post a map of what we saw last night. For now, here are some pictures I took on Holly Street and surrounding blocks.
Hot Xmas Eve Bag Action
The epicenter of the neighborhood luminaria fest that started on Holly Street in the early ’90s has moved to the corner of California and Buena. A woman up there–Betsy, don’t know her last name–started organizing her block around ’98 or ’99. Other blocks followed, usually organized by people Betsy knows, until now there are 30 or 40 blocks involved.
Anyway, the California Street tradition is a little different from ours just a block to the west. The folks get together in the mid-afternoon, fold bags and put them out on the street. In fact, almost all the blocks except ours on Holly are done and ready to light by sundown. Last year, in fact, people were coming by our street and asking if we did the luminaria any more. Anyway–very cool to see the activity spread to all the places it has.
(Picture above is the luminaria get-together in front of Betsy’s; picture below looks up California to Rose from Buena.)
