InBerkeley

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