InBerkeley

A recent tweet from Kcecelia got me curious about a place she had referred to as the Berkeley Bulb, which I had never heard of before even though I’ve lived in this area now for 26 years.  Googling the phrase turned up a few references to it, but it turned out that most didn’t really provide much information. Finally, I discovered this article on SFGate from four years ago.

It wasn’t the Berkeley Bulb, but the Albany Bulb. I must have driven right by this place hundreds of times over the years, never thinking there was much out there besides a parking lot for the racetrack. While I watched them dumping trash at the Berkeley Marina and then turn it into Cesar Chavez Park, I had no idea that another dumping ground nearby had met a similar, though less refined, fate.

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Art, General, In the wild, Nature, Recreation

Wild turkeys, we’ve seen a few. But peacocks? Berkeley hills resident Dana Welch reports on her new neighbor:

A male peacock has taken residence in the Berkeley hills above the Claremont hotel.  Well, maybe not Berkeley — it’s that slice of Oakland that has a Berkeley mailing address and where everyone considers themselves Berkeley residents.

The peacock can be seen strolling from driveway to driveway, yard to yard, pecking out its meals like a chicken.  Unclear if it is a domesticated peacock roaming or a wild peacock spawned from a domesticated flock.

Residents either love it  — daily view of plumage, iridescence beyond description; or hate it — cawing that actually sounds like loud mewing  tends to wake one up at the most inconvenient hours.  But all are unified in a concern with his safety as he wanders obliviously on streets where cars fly by and dogs and cats proliferate.

But proof can be had that peacocks do fly — or at least can catapult.  He narrowly escaped an encounter with my wildlife-loving dog by leaping twenty feet in the air to land safely on a roof, honking at the startled canine to show who’s the new boss of the neighborhood.

Hyperlocal, In the wild Hyperlocal, In the wild

I’m regularly struck by how many times our little city of only 100,000 people appears in other media. It seems to be a rule, for example, at The New York Times, that Berkeley’s Alice Waters has to be mentioned at least once a week. So I thought it might be fun to track these sightings from time to time on InBerkeley.

Here’s Bookride looking at character types in the book business:

The polymath. A few are to be found in the trade. Ridiculously over educated, versed in several languages with the ability (usually) to decipher titles in Russian, Greek, Arabic, Chinese and even Japanese. Their natural home is Berkeley California. Often of unkempt appearance; their books, too, are sometimes a little scruffy. Colleagues in the trade, some barely literate, urge them to go on ‘Who Wants to be Millionaire’ but their trash knowledge (or lack of it) would let them down.

Sounds fairly accurate on a certain class of Berkeleyites, but I suspect the steady disappearance of bookstores in Berkeley hasn’t yet reached the London-based bookseller who writes Bookride.

In the wild