Tag: holly street

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Luminaria 2007

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It will be hours before the luminaria are out on the street, but for the first time in a long, long time, I don’t think I’ll be around for the set-up; I’m working in the KQED newsroom this afternoon, and working in the newsroom means you get out when you get out (though one hopes it will be earlier than the 9 p.m. formal end of the shift). Here’s a bundle of my luminaria posts from previous years:

2006

Luminaria Streets

Hot Xmas Eve Bag Action

2005

Luminaria ’05: Pregame Report

Luminaria ’05: First-Half Action

Luminaria ’05: Second Half, Game Summary

Luminaria ’05: Maps

2004

Blogging the Luminaria

Morning-After Disassembly Line

2003

Luminaria

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Seed Spitting

As noted in previous years, the Fourth of July party here on Holly Street in beautiful, mostly unperturbed North Berkeley features a watermelon-seed spitting contest, complete with trophy. The contest features several different divisions — for “pros,” kids, novices, and seniors — and categories — distance, accuracy and “trick spitting.” The judges award colorful home-made ribbons to each participant.

Some time back there in the early ’90s, Kate and I did a trick spit that involved us pretending to spit seeds to each other in the midst of some faux acrobatics. And then we did theme spits; for instance, one honoring the soccer World Cup (spitting a seed into a goal and celebrating), another for the X Games (spitting while skateboarding), another for the Summer Olympics (synchronized spitting). The prize ribbon would be awarded based on audience applause, and we’d win handily. Then our neighbors, the Martinuccis, started to compete with trick spits based on musicals or movies: “West Seed Story”; “The Phantom Melon” (a la “Star Wars”); “Titanic”; “Harry Potter and the Spittoon of Merlin.” Seriously daunting competition. (Though Kate has expanded her contest repertoire with a song, “You’re a Grand Old Seed,” that’s become the event anthem, and debuted a new number, cabaret style, this year: “The Street Where We Spit.”)

Anyway, eventually our performances exceeded my natural EQ (embarrassment quotient) and I faded out from the contest. The Martinuccis’ extended family became less of a factor, too. So then, Kate and our neighbor Jill would take the lead in cooperative dramatic efforts. This year’s may have been the best ever. Untitled, it was topical: It combined a nod to the recent finale of “The Sopranos” with the latest ugly brouhaha from Bush’s Washington: the Scooter Libby pardon. Yeah, it’s hard to imagine, right? But it was brief, brilliantly conceived, and full of watermelon-specific puns. The script starts below (and continues after the jump). Jill played Tony; Kate played Lewis “Spitter” Libby; Nico played Pasquale, the guard; and Ellen (Jill’s sister-in-law) played the Narrator.

Narrator: For all of you who don’t have HBO, and for those of you who do and are still wondering what happened to Tony Soprano – here is how the Sopranos might have ended, and how the two most anticlimactic melondramas of the summer could have been resolved.

Scene: Tony is sitting alone in a café, eating watermelon. He spits out the seeds periodically. There is an empty chair across from him.

Guy 1: Hey Tony, there you are. I’ve got a rind to pick with you!

Tony: Yeah? Go talk to Pasquale over here. (Snaps his finger at bodyguard. Guy 1 is escorted off stage by guard, who returns)

Guy 2 : Hey “T”, I hear you’re looking for seed money for that new casino.

Tony: Yeah. We’ll talk. Call me next week.

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Luminaria Streets

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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.

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Hot Xmas Eve Bag Action

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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.)

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The Street Where You Live

Let’s just say you walked out to your car, the way you do every day if you have a car, and you looked in and saw the stereo was gone. Neatly and completely removed.

It happens. No sense getting too worked up. Nobody’s hurt, after all.

But what if it’s the third time it’s happened in this particular car, parked in the middle of your safe, seemingly immune little middle-class neighborhood (and when the stereo isn’t being ripped off, the car’s roof and hood are being kicked in or the windshield smashed)?

Then maybe you start thinking about all the other things that have happened on your safe, seemingly immune street since you moved in back in the late ’80s. You recall in no particular order:

The rapist who was caught after casing the house across the street.

The two laptops someone scooped up from your desk after smashing your kitchen window while you were out at the ballgame.

The innumerable late-evening front-door encounters with victims of empty gas tanks, freeway wrecks or other fictional misfortunes who just needed five or ten bucks to help them deal with the emergency.

The random misfortunate who snatched a purse from a neighbor’s house as the neighbor tried to verify the poor guy’s sketchy story.

The guy who showed up at 1 a.m., pounding on the door and demanding money from your wife while you were working.

The two or three or four other cars broken into in front of your house.

The neighbors who one day couldn’t find their car because it had been stolen overnight.

The stolen car that was dumped on the street, right in front of you, in broad daylight.

The break-in at the across-the-street neighbor’s place.

The break-in at the neighbor’s place three doors up.

The several occasions on which would-be burglars were interrupted while casing targets.

The bikes stolen from the back of your house and from behind one of your neighbors’ homes.

The commuter robbed at gunpoint up the street as he returned for his car after work.

The dad out walking with his kids who had a gun pulled on him during an attempted robbery.

The neighbor whose back-porch Sunday breakfast was interrupted by a guy coming over the fence with a suitcase. The neighbor asked what was going on, and the over-the-fence guy just said, “Stay out of my way” and kept on going.

One way I can look at all this: Hey, no one died. You can replace property, fix windows, buy a new car stereo, and get over your fear and sense of violation. But the way I looked at it when I discovered the stereo gone was not so reasoned and cool. It feels like this place asks a lot sometimes for the privilege of living here, and sometimes I detest the cost.

I’ve got no answers, or apologies, either. Just chewing it over.

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New Neighbor

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As documented elsewhere in my busy online existence, last week Kate and I saw an unfamiliar fungus-like growth next to our driveway (the one in the foreground; the red thing in the background is our ’93 Honda Civic). We called over our neighbor Jill, a mycological hobbyist, to see what she thought it might be. She agreed it might be a mushroom, but had no idea what kind. I think she talked to a more expert friend, who talked to a more expert friend, and they came up with an identification: Clathrus ruber. Or latticed stinkhorn, if you want to be less Latin about it. Sort of exciting to find some documentation about it:

“A spectacular and beautiful fungus, Clathrus ruber makes a remarkable transformation from a white, bumpy-surfaced, egg-stage, to a bright reddish-orange, hollow, fragile lattice-work structure. Unfortunately, the beauty of this fungus is overshadowed by its odor, which is of rotting flesh.”

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Luminaria ’05: Maps

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Last Christmas, I printed out a topographic map from a piece of software I have and traced out a map of the North Berkeley luminaria neighborhoods; I used different color inks to show the various years different blocks joined in. It’s not a presentation that translates to a digital format, so I’ve been thinking about how to do a map I could put online this year. There’s got to be something a semi-literate hack like myself can use to make a beautiful souvenir luminaria map; while I have faith that such a product exists, I haven’t found it yet. So back to the drawing board.

The map above is from the same software, Topo, that I used for my printouts last year. The streets that do the luminaria are traced in red using the software’s route tool. The big drawback to using the USGS maps for this purpose is that few streets are labeled. The resulting maps only make sense if you have an idea what you’re looking at to begin with.

My second option was to figure out how to present the luminaria using Google Maps. The maps are clear and easy to use and users can toggle back and forth between a regular street map and satellite pictures, or view a hybrid version. But making a Google Map from scratch using the available development tool would require more time to waste than even I have. So I decided to try to use an already-existing tool, the excellent Gmaps Pedometer, to trace out the luminaria street. As with the Topo versiion, that requires a lot of retracing to include every one of the contiguous blocks. But the result is pretty clear and you have the advantages of zooming in or out on the resulting map, and you have a very clear idea of what street is what. (Holly is in the northwest corner of the outlined luminaria streets). The biggest drawback is that the Pedometer doesn’t let you stop tracing in one spot and begin again in an unconnected spot. That means that I’ve left out several streets (shown in red on at the top of the Topo map above). This Gmaps tool also lacks any capacity (yet) for marking routes in different colors or for adding labels, so there’s no way of doing color-coding

So I’m playing with one more option: A site called MapBuilder.net that lets you build your own Google Map without recourse to any JavaScript or XML coding or access to a Web server to use the Google development resources. So what I came up with there is a Luminaria map (see if this link works: that highlights the chronology of the event (click on the arrow); and gives some idea of the geographic extent without showing all the streets involved. This is just a first try.

More later.

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Luminaria ’05: Second Half, Game Summary

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Kate and I came in around midnight from driving around to look at all the blocks that have luminaria set up in our corner of Berkeley. Partly that’s because Kate caught my cold and wasn’t up to hiking around all evening. And partly it’s a measure of how far the luminaria have spread. In addition to all the neighboring blocks that connect to ours, maybe 30 in all, we checked out a couple of other areas nearby — maybe a half mile from our neighborhood — where people have started to do luminaria (I’ll put up a link to a map tomorrow). Next thing you know, we’ll be on “60 Minutes.”

This is the 14th year that we’ve done the lights on Holly Street. Defying December expectations a little, we’ve only had rain on one Christmas Eve. That was a couple years ago, and the storm blew through about an hour before we started to put out the luminaria. Yesterday, the forecast was for rain tonight. But it became clear during our warm, clear day that rain was not imminent and wouldn’t happen until late tonight, if then. But about 8:30 or so the weather turned; first it seemed like it would rain any minute. Then a little fog blew through. Then it cleared again.

That’s it for tonight’s Luminaria ’05 broadcast. Merry nondenominational, all-inclusive Christmas to all.

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Luminaria ’05: First-Half Action

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It could be the case that if you’ve seen one luminaria picture — or at least one of mine, taken with the credit-card sized 3-megapixel Casio — you’ve seen them all. I’ll let the docents at the Ansel Adams Museum slug that one out. In the meantime: Just before 8 p.m., in front of our house, looking south (toward Cedar). Nearly all the lights on our street are lit; we hear from some of the many strollers coming through that all the other blocks are alight, too.

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We’ve Got Lights

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Thom and I put up our outside lights this afternoon. The process featured a tangled extension cord — Thom undid it, using mysterious skills he learned in the Sea Scouts — and my mostly silent concern that in my 50-plus clumsiness gravity would get the better of me, I’d pitch off the roof and wind up as a 1-column, 2-inch item in a local daily as a seasonal casualty. I’m still here, and noting the concern, so the worst didn’t come to pass. In fact, it only took us about half an hour to hang the strings, and everything was lit up by dusk.

Now we’re set till that day after the first of the year when the ladder comes out and I go back aloft to take the lights down.