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