InBerkeley

Now with added links! Starting today, Berkeley Tweets will link to the Twitter pages of the people whose tweets we publish. Some of us think this is a good idea. What do you think?

Overheard on the Twitterstream today:

jamaicanjerk: I won’t leave Berkeley until I have one last Carne Asada with everything at Gordo’s.

mejiacarlos: To drive in Berkeley is to be perpetually dodging the never-ending throng of pedestrians and cyclists who don’t follow the rules!

stevegoodwin: Spent Sunday at Berkeley Zen Center. The world seems sunny and reasonable today. Can a day of mindfulness practice really do that?

PunkHM: Walking around Berkeley by myself. Not really lost. Don’t you need to be going somewhere to be lost?

elizabethkarin: Only in Berkeley do parents yell at their kids on the playground, “Be conscious!” I <3 this town: free entertainment EVERYWHERE.

louispeitzman: The Berkeley hipster population has bred like rabbits. Rabbits with ironic facial hair and skinny jeans.

Berkeley Tweets, General

The locally all-powerful Michael Bauer, food critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, reviews the new Five restaurant in the Hotel Shattuck Plaza (introduced on InBerkeley here).  He rates it at two-and-a-half stars, which is midway between good and excellent, and pretty high praise from Bauer.

It’s clear Bauer likes chef Scott Howard’s work, but has some hesitations about the quality of the service. It’s worth reading the whole review.

Downtown, Food, restaurants

Chloe, the pennywise reporter on Broke-Ass Stuart’s Goddamn Website, recently posted a wonderful account of how to make a garden in Berkeley for free. In the course of it, she introduced me to something I’d never heard of — the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library, or BASIL.

BASIL is part of Berkeley’s Ecology Center, on San Pablo Avenue. It’s a natural counterpart of another Berkeley social innovation, the city’s Tool Lending Library. Here’s BASIL’s own description:

The Bay Area Seed Interchange Library (BASIL) Project is part of a growing network of concerned farmers and community gardeners dedicated to conserving the remaining genetic diversity of our planet’s seed stock. We have created a library of healthy vegetable, herb, and flower seeds that are being made available free to the public.

Members of BASIL can sign out seeds for free, with the agreement that they try to grow them and will “return” seeds of the next generation at the end of the season. A fabulous idea.

Environment, Green, Green living

Lunch Poems, a noontime poetry reading series, kicks off this Thursday, September 3, between 12:10 and 12:50 p.m. at the Morrison Library in Doe Library on the UC Berkeley campus.

Hosted by Robert Hass and University Librarian Thomas C. Leonard, the kickoff features distinguished new members of the English Department faculty introducing and reading a favorite poem. This year’s participants: Melanie Abrams, C. D. Blanton, Vikram Chandra, Eric Falci, Mark Goble, David Landreth, Namwali Serpell, and Emily Thornbury.

Subsequent readings will take place on the first Thursday of each month (except January), and run through May 6, 2010. Admission is free. More information on the Lunch Poems web site.

Arts, Events, General, UC Berkeley

An insider’s account of the demise of Eccolo on Fourth Street:

Fifty hardworking people lost their jobs when Eccolo closed on Berkeley’s Fourth Street strip last week, released into a vast ocean of unemployed restaurant workers. But the ripple effect is even more discouraging. Farmers, handymen, our cleaning crew and the neighborhood preschool we made lunch for daily are only a few of the dozens of local small businesses affected.

Ultimately, it was the piddling state of the economy that made us decide to close. Most restaurants never make much money, and Eccolo was no exception.

via SFGate.

Business, Food, Issues, West Berkeley, restaurants

Overhear on the Twitterstream today:

Brandileigha: That’s what i love about sf/berkeley, you can walk around dressed as a pirate at 7:30 in the am and not feel particularly odd.

Claudiatweets: I love how you can see the clouds move in berkeley. And you’re so close to them.

Marcusslaterus: The drunk chicks in the shuttle were the same drunk chicks behind us at the Berkeley concert last year.

Mgreene2700: Found $40 on the ground next to a jewelry stand in Berkeley today. Convinced it was fate so…new turquoise ring! yes:)

Justeennaa: Berkeley made me forget reality =]

Ncecire: Lavender fig jam: delicious, or just ridiculously Berkeley?

Berkeley Tweets, General

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have reached a new milestone in laser physics by creating the world’s smallest semiconductor laser, capable of generating visible light in a space smaller than a single protein molecule.

…

The achievement helps enable the development of such innovations as nanolasers that can probe, manipulate and characterize DNA molecules; optics-based telecommunications many times faster than current technology; and optical computing in which light replaces electronic circuitry with a corresponding leap in speed and processing power.

via Science Daily.

Science, UC Berkeley

When I was a child in Brooklyn, I watched as they constructed the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to Staten Island.  At the time, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world with a center span of 4,260 feet.  I remember at the time hearing that the span was so long that the distance between the two supporting towers was greater between their tops than their bottoms because of the curvature of the earth.  Construction on the bridge began August 13, 1959, and the upper deck was opened on November 21, 1964; just over five years.

The new eastern half of the Bay Bridge comprises two parts, the so-called Skyway portion, which is mostly completed, and the SAS (self-anchored suspension) portion. The SAS, with a total length of just 2047 feet, began construction in May, 2006, and is not expected to be completed until sometime in 2013 — roughly seven years, or two years longer than it took to build the entire Verrazano-Narrows Bridge five decades ago. If you also consider the Skyway, which began construction sometime in 2002, the entire project will have taken more than 11 years to build.  And this does not include all the delays in the design process before construction even began.

I haven’t been able to figure out why it’s taking so long.

Regardless, you will not be able to use the Bay Bridge to drive to San Francisco (or even Yerba Buena Island) from the East Bay starting at 8 p.m. this Thursday, September 3.  The bridge will be closed all Labor Day weekend, and then some.  It is scheduled to reopen by 5 a.m. on Tuesday, September 8.

While the bridge is closed, a 300-foot-long, double-deck section of the East Span will be cut and rolled out of the way, 150-feet above Yerba Buena Island (YBI). A new double-deck section will be slid into place to connect the bridge with a detour that will route traffic off the existing tunnel approach, allowing crews to connect the new East Span to the YBI tunnel.

When the bridge reopens, the speed limit will be reduced to 40-mph in both directions on the detour section for the next three to four years (i.e., until the new East Span opens).

Get up to the moment information on the Bay Bridge closure at the Bay Bridge Info web site, or follow them on Twitter at @BayBridgeInfo.

Forewarned is forearmed.

General, Uncategorized

Overheard on the Twitterstream today:

Lisa Campbell and Ally Jacobs, new American Heroes in the Jaycee Dugard case, way to go, UC Berkeley!!

Wearing tie-dyed t-shirt today to remind me I’m in Berkeley and not, say, Dallas, despite the heat.

Hot & bothered. A restless night in Berkeley where the high temps left every living being agitated and awake all night, at least in my hood.

I am a fan of the hash at Saul’s in Berkeley. Yum. Now I want hash for breakfast, darn you.

Warm night in Berkeley lying on the lawn outside PFA with a crowd of college kids watching a free outdoor movie projected onto the building.

From atop the Berkeley Hills, where the view often thrills. More stunning cloudscapes than usual this summer! http://bit.ly/c1rrus

Berkeley pedestrians are orthodox about traffic lights BUT THERE ARE NEVER ANY CARS.

Earlier sunset from Berkeley hills. Next time we’re bringing the pup! http://yfrog.com/2l7cxj

On the BART to Berkeley! Good public transportation makes me happy. LA makes me appreciate these basic civic necessities.

On telegraph, drinking ethiopian coffee while reading Heart of Darkness after buying antique french curtain clips. Oh, how i love berkeley.

Got my tix for “American Idiot” @ Berkeley Rep. Love that they warn you multiple times that Green Day won’t actually be there . LOLZ.

Berkeley Tweets, General

What do you get when you combine poetry with storytelling, comedy, dramatic monologue, battle rap, song and dance?  You have a new art form called Performance Poetry!

What happens when these new performers compete, judged by members of the audience?  You get a Poetry Slam.

And what elite final event remains after thousands of poets from across the globe compete for a year?  You get the Individual World Poetry Slam 2009.

Seventy-two poets from around the world will converge on Berkeley in October to compete in this event.  Preliminary competition, daytime workshops, themed open mics and late-night events will be held October 8 and 9 in South Berkeley at the Starry Plough, La Pena Cultural Center and the Long Haul.  Finals will start at 8:00 p.m. on October 10 at Wheeler Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus.  Click here and here for the full schedule of events.

Tickets must be purchased in advance for preliminary and semifinal bouts, late-night events and the final competition. Other events are free. Tickets go on sale September 10. Discounts are available for group ticket sales to schools and youth groups.

Visit the Individual World Poetry Slam web site for more information.

Arts, Events, South Berkeley, UC Berkeley

Ally Jacobs and Lisa Campbell (Cathy Cockrell, NewsCenter photo)

Alert action by two members of the UC Berkeley police force played a key role in Wednesday’s arrest of kidnapping suspect Phillip Garrido and the return of Jaycee Lee Dugard, who in 1991 at age 11 was abducted from her South Lake Tahoe neighborhood.

Read their story in this article from the UC Berkeley News.

UPDATE: See the exclusive interview with Ally Jacobs and Lisa Campbell on Nightline.

UPDATE II: CBS interview.

Crime, UC Berkeley

The two big news items of the day, obviously, have been the the heat and the key role played by two UC Berkeley police officers in tracking down the kidnappers of Jaycee Lee Dugard, who had been missing for 18 years.  And they were also the subjects of a large number of today’s Berkeley tweets.

Kudos to the UC Berkeley campus police!! I’m not reading enuf about their phenomenal role in the Dugard case.

ABC’s “Nightline” claims to have exclusive interview tonight with UC Berkeley cop who played key role in Jaycee Dugard case.

Just saw [news reporter] Lisa Ling downstairs in Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley!! So exciting….@hlf and I got her autograph!!

I always had a sneaking suspicion that all the non students that hang out at the uc berkeley campus are actually child raping lunatics.

The air is so clean up here in Berkeley – it’s disgusting!

Nap at berkeley library= relaxing

Omg, it feels just like greece today in berkeley. I really need to go back to athens…

Too hot in berkeley, going to pass out from the heat.

80° in Berkeley today ☺

Cool? At 70 degrees fahrenheit the people in Berkeley start to break a sweat…

It’s soooo hot in Berkeley…ugh.

WTF??? Why does Berkeley have LA weather?! I am very confused!

I have heard no less than three people in Berkeley today complaining about how hot it is outside. It is 80 degrees.

Every year SoCal students pack a tiny bit of heat & collectively free it in Berkeley the first week of school to remind them of home.

Dropped my keys running across the street…And nice Berkeley folk in their cars hollered at me to let me know. Phew.

Daily Science Fact: The cyclotron was invented by Ernest Lawrence at Cal Berkeley in 1934 to study the nuclear structure of the atom.

Berkeley Tweets, General

I wrote to my neighbors, a couple of weeks ago, in desperation — help — the construction noise is driving me out of my mind. In the summer there’s always a major construction job on the street. Often two or three. Just as one is finishing, promising a respite from the nerve-rattling noise, a new project starts. And the crews scream, often nonsense — their lifestyle is different from mine, writer and software developer. My work requires concentration. I suppose theirs requires a different kind. The two are incompatible. Mine doesn’t interfere with theirs, but theirs interferes with mine.

What’s to be done? Nothing, but endure it. That’s the way it goes in California. Every neighborhood I’ve lived in, from Los Gatos to Palo Alto to Berkeley has been like this. It’s quiet in the rainy season but in the summer it’s crazy loud with construction.

Solutions? None. Work-arounds? Crank up the music. Buy an air conditioner, turn on a fan. But none really solve the problem, because as steady as the white noise distractions are there’s some saw or drill that penetrates. And the annoyance of knowing you’re listening to music not for the joy of it but to drown out something worse somehow generates more resentment than concentration.

Then you get a summer cold and need to take naps instead of working. Ear plugs! Great — just the thing when your head is already congested and you’re coughing your brains out.

Today I’ve got the Rolling Stones cranked up asking if I can hear them knocking, and it’s wonderful because this week there’s no construction! Somehow the gods heard my plea, and now when there’s no music playing all you can hear is the occasional train rolling by and the steady hum of Interstate 80 and the traffic going through the Solano Ave tunnel. Shhhh. You can hear the keyboard click, and you can hear your thoughts and when the music is cranked up it’s because that’s the way you want it.

Ahhhh life’s little pleasures!

General

It’s too hot for Berkeley.

One of the wonderful things about our weather is how rarely it reaches extremes of hot or cold. Not so today, with temperatures hitting 90 degrees, even though there’s a fair amount of cloud cover. Apparently we can blame Tropical Storm Ignacio, which is raging in the Pacific, west of Baja California. That provokes the hot, humid weather we’re experiencing, despite being hundreds of miles away from northern California.

The good news is that the forecast for the weekend is a return to our usual Berkeley eden.

Photo by programwitch from Flickr

Nature

I have to admit that there are times when the ubiquity of Alice Waters irritates me. I think it must be a rule at The New York Times, for example, to mention her at least once a week in either the Dining & Wine section or the Home & Garden section. But the truth is Berkeley should count its lucky stars for Waters and the movement she spawned from Chez Panisse.

Fortune Small Business tells the tale (which has been told before, not least in Thomas McNamee’s recent biography) in a feature about “superstar entrepreneurs”. Sharing the spotlight with Waters are the stories of Costco, Kiss My Face, Re/Max and Viking Range.

Here’s a nice snippet from Fortune’s conversation with Waters:

Part of my philosophy is to try to give employees a great quality of life. My guiding principle is to put myself in their place and ask what I would find desirable in a job. That’s why the waiters’ changing room is just as beautiful as the Chez Panisse kitchen and bathrooms. I also feel that it’s impossible for a chef to work productively six days a week. Chez Panisse chefs work three and are paid for five. This way they have a day to go to the market and get inspired to cook. It also gives them time to have dinners at home with their families.

I never tell the chefs what to cook. That’s up to them. I’m here to taste. I love walking into the restaurant and being surprised. They work within certain parameters, of course. For example, we’re driven by fresh, seasonal food that we buy at farmers’ markets. From the very beginning we have worked to develop relationships with farmers. And we’re Mediterranean in spirit in that Chez Panisse was inspired by my travels throughout that region. But you will also find Indian and Middle Eastern dishes on our menu because we love those cuisines as well.

Food, General, restaurants

Berkeley Arts & Letters has only been around for a year, and if this fall’s line up is any indication, it has already moved into the top echelon of Bay Area speaking series. Twelve months to becoming a major cultural force.  Wow.

I attended my first Berkeley Arts & Letters talk this spring, when I went to hear Michael Pollan talk food and farms with Novella Carpenter. The event was held in the First Congregational Church in Berkeley, on Channing and Dana, which is an extremely pleasant place to be. The nave is airy and light and there is ample seating with good sight lines.

The event truly felt like a Berkeley community shindig. In the hallway, I recognized and chatted with lots of people. Michael Pollan stood by the front door for a bit, which meant people could approach him informally to ask questions. (He was also available during the book signing.) Anne Leyhe, a co-owner of Mrs. Dalloway’s on College, was selling books. The producers of Berkeley Arts & Letters, Melissa Mytinger, the former events manager at Cody’s Books,  and Praveen Maden, the owner of the Booksmith in San Francisco, have made the lecture series inclusive by inviting a rotating roster of booksellers to sell books at the events. In addition to Mrs. Dalloways, Moe’s Books on Telepgraph, University Press Books on Bancroft Avenue, and Pegasus and Pendragon Books  participate in the series.

This fall’s line-up is exciting. More than a dozen instantly recognizable public figures will be talking, including 2006 Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, God-doubter Richard Dawkins, Rebecca Solnit, who has a new book out on the human reaction to natural disasters,  Diane Ackerman, the nature writer, Po Bronson, who has a book out on the dos and don’t and unexpected perils of praising children, Depak Chopra, Terry Tempest Williams, Sherman Alexie, Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, and Mary Karr, to name a few.

Other interesting authors include Peter Richardson and Robert Scheer, who will discuss Richardson’s new history of Ramparts Magazine, called A Bomb in Every Issue. Max Blumenthal, whose new book deals with the Republican Party and the religious right, will talk, as will Gary Vaynerchuk, a wine writer who has created a huge following through the innovative use of social media, (at one point he had 17,000 pending friend requests on Facebook), Irene Kahn, the International Secretary General of Amnesty International, and more.

(Mary Karr)

You can see some previous talks on Fora.TV.

Arts, Books

Overheard today on Twitter:

I just asked the lady @ the Berkeley bread workshop if they make their own bread…WOW I need to lay off the ganja!

Amethyst clouds and silver diamond lights reflect the moonrise on Berkeley Hills houses. A fog bank hovers above the pine and cypress trees.

The best thing about getting lost, is finding your way through it and getting there. I Love Berkeley.

Overheard while walking the dog – two young people flirting on street corner, discussing Balkan politics. Only in #Berkeley o_O

“How Berkeley Can You Be” meatloaf: grass-fed hamburger ($8 per lb!) with some organic flax meal snuck in.

Before I forget: there are crazy homeless people in Berkeley who will point at people and repeat: “You’re a Jap! You’re a Jap!”

@ Berkeley farmers market. overheard some1 says global warming is a military issue- soon we’d be seeing tanks rolling down our streets. Huh?

I like how Berkeley dining halls are not “all you can eat” but “all you care to eat.”

First class ever taken at Berkeley: an entire course on Lolita. Grinned like an idiot through the whole first hour.

If there isn’t some sort of protest on the Berkeley campus, then you know something is very very wrong!!

Went up to the hills behind the stadium for my last Berkeley sunset. Has to be the damned prettiest place I’ve ever lived.

Berkeley Tweets, General