Overheard today on the Twitterstream:
adrianmcintyre: Inspired by what UC Berkeley undergrads in the Global Poverty & Practice minor are out there doing in the world. Such passion & commitment!
CraigFaulk: Is in Berkeley @ work. Working on my farmer tan and the “racoon/ski goggle” look that the ladies go wild for 
jacquelinegu: Heard the loveliest love story today from a French lady at Berkeley Bowl, while picking tomatoes.
When she’s not eating at her mom’s place, Fanny Singer, daughter of Alice Waters, likes Vik’s Chaat Corner in Berkeley and Bakesale Betty’s in Oakland, among others (well, who doesn’t?)
In a contribution to Gourmet, Singer says she gravitates towards low-key restaurants that serve ethnic dishes and lists her 10 favorite food spots in the Bay Area.
Waters named Cafe Fanny after her daughter whose father is Stephen Singer, a former wine buyer for Chez Panisse.
[Source and photo: Eater SF.]
Ashkenaz Music & Dance Community Center, a nationally recognized nonprofit music and culture venue that specializes in presenting live world and roots music, is once again holding its Dance-A-Thon fundraiser event next week at its Berkeley venue on San Pablo Ave., just south of Gilman St. This is the first Dance-A-Thon since the 1998-2002 annual series, which helped raise funds toward the purchase of the current Ashkenaz building from the late founder David Nadel’s estate.
This year’s Dance-A-Thon will be held on Saturday, September 26, 2009 from 2:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., and will feature 12 hours of live music from around the world. It’s an event for the whole family, and will feature activities for the kids, great raffle prizes and good food in the Back Studio.
There are two ways you can attend the event: You can pay a $20 door price the day of the event, or for $10 you can preregister as a sponsored dancer. Anyone who gets sponsorships totaling $100 or more gets their Dance Card number entered into a drawing for one year admission to Ashkenaz. All the proceeds are tax-deductible and will go toward Ashkenaz operating expenses.
Ashkenaz was founded in 1973 by David Nadel, a dedicated human rights activist and folk dancer who pioneered the presentation of world music long before the genre had a name. For 24 years he led Ashkenaz to become a community watering hole presenting music as diverse as Balkan, Cajun, Zydeco, African Highlife, Brazilian Samba, Afrobeat, Calypso, Soca, Blues, Contra Dance, Eastern European Folk Music, Flamenco, Reggae, Salsa, Ska, Soukous, Bluegrass, East & West Coast Swing and more. In 1996 David was murdered by a drunk he refused to let back into the building.
Visit the Ashkenaz web site for more information about the Dance-A-Thon event, or about being a sponsored dancer, volunteering or donating prizes or cash.
We’ve had the birds and the bees on InBerkeley. What about spiders?
I’ve noticed a sudden increase of spiders in my neighborhood, most of them looking like the magnificent specimen above, photographed just outside my door. Any experts on arachnids out there?
Update Well, there are experts out there, or at least people who are good at researching a specific problem. The spider outside my door (and probably yours as well) seems to be Araneus diadematus. You can find a trove of Araneus diadematus photos here, some of which are as good as mine.
You’re invited! Come join in a lively local conversation about mothers, families and the women’s movement. The Hillside Club in Berkeley is hosting the event with MomsRising’s co-founder Joan Blades leading the conversation.
WHAT: “Mothers, Family, and the Women’s Movement in the 21st Century”
WHERE: Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley CA 94709
WHEN: Sunday, Sept. 20, 7:00 PM
WHO: You, your kids, friends, neighbors– all are welcome!
This Hillside Club event is $10, or $5 for club members and members of momsRising.
Tickets available online and at the door. Seating is limited.
We’d love to see you there!
A Woman’s Voice will present Joan Blades in conversation with friends and audience members discussing the role of mothers, families and how they relate to the on-going women’s movement now and in the future. Joan is a co-founder of both MoveOn.org and MomsRising.org. The former is a political education and advocacy group; the latter
works to bring together millions of people who share a common concern about the need to build a more family-friendly America.
This is the first in a monthly series of lectures at the Club. The series, A Woman’s Voice, gives women an opportunity to express their passion to a new or wider audience.
Joan Blades is a co-founder of MoveOn.org, which has an online membership of over 5 million. Mother’s Day 2006 she co-founded MomsRising.org with Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner to tap the power of online grassroots organizing for mothers and families in the U.S. MomsRising has an online membership of over 1 million. She is the co-author of The Motherhood Manifesto, which won the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize in 2007. Last century she co-founded Berkeley Systems, taught mediation at Golden Gate Law School, practiced mediation, and wrote Mediate Your Divorce. She is also a mother, a writer, an artist, a jeweler, a soccer player, and a Hillside Club member.
Being raised first by parents with drug abuse and mental illness problems in a house filled with homeless people, prostitutes and drug dealers and then from the age of 12 in some truly Dickensian homes in the foster care system doesn’t usually result in a childhood with much potential for success. Oh, and by the way, add dyslexia to the mix.
But don’t tell that to Lily Dorman-Colby, a Berkeley High School graduate who was just named by Glamour magazine as one of the top 10 college women of 2009.
Despite the fact that only 2 percent of foster children graduate from college, Lily is now in her senior year at Yale, has been an advocate for foster care reform, and intends to go to law school.
You can read more about Lily’s inspiring story in this article by Martin Snapp in the El Cerrito Journal, and on page 240 of the October 2009 issue of Glamour with Gwen Stefani on the cover.
Two UCB researchers out searching for birds (Allison Shultz photo)
Another bit of sobering news of the “climate change is already happening” variety comes this week from a group of UC Berkeley researchers.
The team spent six years tracking the breeding ranges of 53 bird species in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and compared their data to surveys done between 1911 and 1929. They found that more than 90% of the species had shifted their ranges due to changes in temperature and/or precipitation. To read more about the research, check out this article in Science News.
While the team’s findings are certainly important — one unaffiliated expert calls it a “landmark paper” in the story linked above — it’s their methods that seem worth mentioning here.
The research depended on the historical information that is housed at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UCB. Like, say the Cal Academy of Sciences across the Bay in SF, the MVZ has an extensive collection of specimens that scientists can use in all kinds of research.
Unlike the Cal Academy, the MVZ is not geared toward showing those things off to the public, so it’s easy to forget it’s even there. It takes research like this to remind us how great and important it is that someone’s keeping track of all that old stuff, even if most of us will never see it.
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