"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
… And other notes:
Apropos of — well, you’ll have to figure it out: Al Prazolam, mayor of the Jersey shore town Swamp River Island Beach.
Berkeley has designated the barn owl as its official city bird. Oakland concedes it has no city bird but says through a spokesperson that it “welcomes and embraces all birds.”
Triptych
This has nothing to do with the famous Dr. Shabubu. (But it is part of a long-running Telegraph Avenue poster drama.)
Wednesday looked like we were in the middle of a season that would never stop. Rainy and cool and not to be complained about but still: Since when did we decide to live in Sitka? Something was different today from sunrise: First, that you could see the sun when it rose. And then the day warmed and warmed, and you could hardly believe a day like today was possible after a day like yesterday. Up in the low 70s here and in most of the Bay Area. Kate and I went for a lunch time walk up on the northern end of Shattuck Avenue. Here’s a development the parallels the rise of the pizza business at the neighborhood’s venerable Cheese Board (it’s a cheese shop and bakery): People are buying pies and taking them out to the narrow, uncommodious little median strip for picnics. I count seven groups of diners in the pictures, some with pizza boxes in plain sight, some exhibiting tell-tale pizza-eating behavior. Even though it’s not a high-speed street, the traffic’s a little too close for my comfort. On the other hand, maybe this is the first step toward a street shutdown.
Technorati Tags: berkeley, california
We’ll remember this April a long time; at least until the next one. Nothing’s been washed away yet, but that’s not for lack of water. (From the window of Fatapple’s a restaurant at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Rose Street).
Technorati Tags: berkeley, california, rain, weather
It rained again last night, before midnight, then after, making today the seventh out of eight days this month we’ve had measurable precipitation. But today is beautiful. Sunny and a little warmer than it has been. Still: There’s water everywhere, and the creeks that run mostly underground from the hills down to the bay are high for this time of year. Here’s Codornices Creek where it emerges from a culvert on the west side of Colusa Avenue, about a half mile from our house.
Technorati Tags: berkeley, california, rain, weather
I admit it: At some point, you just want to say, “Basta!” Today makes it 28 or 29 days out of the last 35 that we’ve had measurable rain. Everything’s sodden, and the curbs along every street have turned into permanent streams. But people adapt, like the guy on the bike. Spotted him while walking to work this morning and barely managed to get a shot.
Technorati Tags: berkeley, california, rain, san francisco, weather
The end of our rainiest March just about ever, as seen in the Kragen Auto Parts parking lot at Martin Luther King Jr. Way and University Avenue, where by city ordinance no one’s ever supposed to work on their car.
April Fool’s is next, and I’ll be out on my bike from sunup to sundown. More about that later.
Technorati Tags: berkeley, california, weather
Heard on the street on my walk to work as clouds rolled in from the west and swallowed up our brief morning sunshine: “Rain, rain, g–d–n m—–f—–‘ rain.” Except my fellow stroller didn’t use the dashes.
Although I’m coming perilously close to a weather whine, our March rain has mounted into wetness of historic magnitude: We’ve had 23 days of measurable rain this month. If it rains today or tomorrow — and that’s almost certain — that will set a new record for most rainy days here in March. As my friend Pete pointed out the other day, forecasters say some large-scale global weather patterns have kept it wet here for weeks (and will for at least the next week, it looks like).
Technorati Tags: berkeley, california, san francisco, weather
Activist judges shrink our basic freedoms just a little bit more (and the Chronicle strikes a blow for nonsensical headline wordplay). And in a case from my adopted hometown no less:
There is no ‘pee’ in public
State appeals court rules act is illegal“It’s a crime in California to urinate in a public place, a state appeals court ruled today.
“The case before the court came from Berkeley, where a police officer detained a man urinating in the parking lot of a closed restaurant one Sunday morning in January 2003. …
“…To deal with the question, a Court of Appeal panel in San Francisco turned to a 19th century state law that defines a public nuisance as an act that is ‘injurious to health, or is indecent, or offensive to the senses.’ …
“…The criteria spelled out in the nuisance law might not always apply to urinating in the great outdoors, the judges added. For example, ‘a hiker responding to an irrepressible call of nature in an isolated area in the backwoods cannot reasonably be seen as interfering with any right common to the public.”
Apropos of the subject of public decency in Berkeley, or lack of same, I got a slice of (very healthy vegetarian) pizza yesterday and sat down to watch ESPN’s early coverage of the Barry Bonds crisis. I was the only one in the restaurant, but a few minutes later a guy walked past me toward the bathroom. I ignored him at first, but something made me look over. He was — maybe you should take the kids out of the room now — digging very assiduously in his ass. I mean really going at it. He saw me glance over, looked me in the eye, pulled out the napkin he’d been wiping his crack with, threw it on the floor and walked out. All I could think was, “What was that?” I finished my pizza, though, then got out of there before the next freedom-loving Berkeleyite appeared.
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I thought this might herald the return of the cobbler’s bench as a symbol of American craftsmanship and industry. Turns out that it’s a come-on from Puccio & Mackay, the U.S. incarnation of a high-end London custom accessory business. From looking at the P&M site, the “Introduction to Shoemaking” class runs $900. Nice shoes.
Stenciled on a wall along an outdoor walk on the wall of one of UC Berkeley’s life sciences buildings. Something like this, you’d think if you saw it once on campus you’d see it everywhere. But so far — over the past eight months — it’s shown up in just that one spot.
(Naturally, though, when you start rummaging through Google’s trunk of odds and ends, you find more of the same. For instance, this T-shirt. )