Bummer

This from a local listserv: "Anyone know where to buy Bisquick-Gluten-Free (a relatively new product) around here?  Our baseball team is gluten-free, dairy free and chocolate-free, and I’m up first on snack!  (Stuck out at Whole Foods, Berkeley Bowl…)"

Musings

A lot of people think that the internet is speeding up information - that by having the internet available we can get information overload. I'm starting to find it has the opposite use. I'm not unique to notice this. Many critics argue that, on the internet, you never get exposed to alternative perspectives, or get news that's outside your interest, because you stay exclusively on sites that share your world view. I'm noticing a different kind of filter. Rather than only visiting sites that have content that I already care about, I am using the internet to block real time information that I might find upsetting. Like I can't watch this miner rescue on CNN, even though the TV is about 30 inches away from me. I'd rather have it filtered and screened by the internet, just in case something terrible happens.

And speaking of terrible things happening, did you know that squirrels can get depressed?!?!? Thanks to my mother-in-law who vigilantly reads the Bay Area news so I don't have to, I can now worry about renegade animal shelters. And what is the word where you believe certain species have a greater entitlement to rescue then others? Species-ist? That's me. DON'T RESCUE SQUIRRELS AND RACCOONS. It's called natural selection, bee-otches. Get used to it.

And speaking of Bay Area news, I strongly encourage you to read the Bay Citizen. They have some sort of strategic synergy etc etc with the NY Times, which has greatly enhanced the NYT's California coverage, and they are miles better than the SF Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune, truly two of the most craptastic papers in any major metropolis. If in fact that's what this is.

Other things you should read:

Sassydotnet: River Heights - My friend Beth is reading all the Nancy Drew books sequentially.

Irons in the Ring of Fire - My friend Edie is in Bali

Skin and Scares - My friend Jason covered True Blood all season for Slate and I didn't pay any attention but if you're the kind of person who is going through withdrawal for that show, then have at it.

One of these days, I will do an endorsement post, Oaklanders, I promise.

Much Less Baffling

Huzzah!! The How Berkeley Can You Be? Parade has been cancelled. A very teeny part of me says, "Wow, passing of an era," and the rest of me says, "Buh-bye."

Berzerkley Parents, East and West

Sorry that I've been gone so long. I haven't had much to blog about, plus my tiny random thoughts tend to get put on Facebook. If you are desperate to know the minutia of my life, I suggest you join me there. Otherwise, enjoy the respite from my nonsense while you have it.

Then yesterday I got a one-two punch of stupid parenting stuff. First, from the West Coast, a listserv post from the mother of a one year old:

Is there a spot on Kindergarten applications that asks what preschool your child went to? If so, does the preschool affect the chances of getting into said kindergarten? Is Preschool a pre-req for some kindergartens? As in, you absolutely can not get in unless your child has attended some type of preschool?

I'm starting to feel like my need to find the perfect preschool is similar to my hunt for the perfect hospital to deliver my baby at, then realized that I could just do it at home. (but if I follow that analogy, homebirth didn't work out that well, so maybe homeschooling wouldn't, either, but if I'm really considering ALL my options...)

ARGH. And this isn't even unusual, right? But in case you East Coasters are feeling smug and thinking, "ahhh, ha ha! All our preschools are feeder schools for Harvard!", I came across this article in the Food section of the, yes, New York Times, Soft Serve and Jingle Jangle Moms.

A few observations about this article: First of all, the NYT really knows it audience. Second, a really sad percentage of people do not know how to parent, meaning that when your kid wants ice cream, you either just buy it or you say no, and deal with the aftermath, including the tantrum. That's how kids learn self-control (or how to get shit their parents don't want to give them). Third, Mr. Softee employees know more about parenting than your average New Yorker. Finally, a few parts that speak for themselves:

• New York City principals received letters from the advocacy group Asthma Free School Zone, urging them to keep trucks from their buildings. “Sometimes you’ll see a child in a stroller parked right next to the exhaust pipe of the truck,” said Lori Bukiewicz.
• As a new mother, she said, people coach you on potty training and what to feed your child. “But the ice cream truck, nobody ever mentions that,” she said.
• Jim Conway, a vice president for Mister Softee, said the company encouraged vendors to be sensitive to customers’ complaints. But parents, he said, are different from when he was young. Those who dislike the ice cream man, he said, tend to be “New Age parents whose kids can’t seem to do anything without them.”
• But the complaints are not just coming from effete organic-food zealots with too much time on their hands. The 18th Ward in Chicago, which banned ice cream vendors, is made up of working-class African-American families. Ms. Reiley is a stay-at-home mother. Ms. Heidel-Habluetzel is a real-estate agent who is an active volunteer at her children’s school. And Ms. Sell owns and runs a restaurant in Brooklyn with her husband, a chef.

That last part is so offensive to me. "It's not just effete organic-food zealots, it's Black people, too!" because of course those two categories do not overlap, ever! And the idea that a real estate agent or a restaurant owner is "working class" is galling. Is it because they're African-American or because they live in the 18th Ward? Does anyone with any sense at the NYT read these things before they are published?

UPDATE: h/t to my old law school classmate who found this article, "Irate" Ice Cream Mom Knows a Few Things About Sugar Pushing Herself. Zing! And the race was on!

Only In the East Bay, Part 2

I don't know how I neglected to post THIS one, too. That's right, Shuuuuuuunnnnn The Nonbeliever!!

Only In the East Bay, Baby

Happy Day, Ladies and the men who love us.

Taking A Bite Out of Crime

For almost as long as I have lived on this street, there has been a wierd phenomenon where cars that were left unlocked were rifled through. Money was taken, and sometimes stuff. I always figured that for a savvy homeless person or something. I figured that if you didn't lock your doors, you expected this to happen, and it did. On other occasions, crap has gone missing from front yards on our street, but the stuff that gets taken strongly suggests art students doing a crap harvest for some final project. 

Lately however, better stuff is getting taken, and its also being taken via smashed car window. Also, a neighbor's car was stolen. This is making a lot of people on my street very angry/annoyed, and has resulted in many email exchanges, although none, as far as I know, with the thieves. What to do about all this? has been answered many times, occasionally, but not often enough, in jest. One guy helpfully installed a video camera focussed on his driveway, and caught footage of a man looking in car windows with a flashlight while a Mercedes slowly traveled along. This was also witnessed by a guy who must be something of a night owl, because both times, it was 3:30 a.m. 

Other folks have expressed interest in a night watch, but not enough people have expressed interest to staff more than one night's shifts. Several people have done extensive research into the costs associated with hiring a private security company to patrol our street. IN ROCKRIDGE. $5000 a month is a number that has been bandied about. I know the value of my neighbor's Honda Civic was less than that. 

My response was classic Dre. I made a flyer, and passed it out to all the neighbors to put inside their car windows. It says:

WE ARE WATCHING. We have video recording you and your car, and have established a neighborhood watch to monitor your actions on this street. The police have been notified, and are working with us to stop further thefts. You are being watched and videotaped, and we will assist in the prosecution of any crimes committed in our neighborhood.

ESTAMOS MIRANDO. Tenemos grabación y video de usted y su coche, y hemos establecido un reloj de vecindad para supervisar sus acciones en esta calle. La policía ha sido notificada, y están trabajando con nosotros para poner fin a más robos. Se le ha visto y grabado en vídeo, y vamos a ayudar en el enjuiciamiento de todos los crímenes cometidos en nuestro vecindario.

I have handed out about 80 flyers and sent it to every neighbor on our listserv. Another 40 drop tomorrow. I will let you know how it goes. And don't worry, old friends, I will continue to remain vigilant against the Alpha Delt fraternity, lest they dare hold a party in this neighborhood. . .

Oakland Grody

For some reason, I decided to trek* around Lake Merritt today. Lake Merritt is a natural estuary that works like a bladder for the San Francisco Bay, meaning that its job is to clean the gross stuff out of the bay and send the water back out into the world cleaner than it entered. No matter how hard Oakland boosters try to defend this "lake", the fact remains that it is gross, a little smelly, and the surrounding area is covered in goose poop and meandering homeless/junkie-type people (not inherently the lake's fault). The grodiness of it today was heightened by the guy who was jogging with a quart of Half and Half in one hand. So, not going back to trek around Lake Merritt again any time soon.

* I use "trek" here to mean "try running, but ultimately just walking fast"

Bay Area BS

It's been awhile since I ragged on my region, but the bad weather in the rest of country made me feel like I should remind my friends why they don't live here. People are crazy, is why. The balmy weather makes these people barely tolerable. Four examples:

1. I was at Target today, which has mechanism that runs between the escalators to bring your shopping cart to the second floor. Handy. Two GENIUSES had put their carts on the cart-scalator with their babies still in the child seat. And I mean babies. Like twin eight-month olds. The store staff were yelling at these two women, and another woman and I were so surprised, we were literally standing there with our mouths open. The signage is clear, in English, Spanish and illiterate (a picture of someone doing this with a red circle and bar across it). 

I realize that this is just universal stupid, not Bay Area-special brand of dumb.

2. My next example will be in the form of a short poem:

If its yellow

let it mellow

doesn't apply

at the Y

3. My sister reports seeing, during a recent trip to SF, graffiti from the window of the train that read, "Ira Glass." Now either Ira has a really ill-conceived viral marketing plan or liberals now tag West Oakland. I can't say. Neither is a good idea.

4. People in Berkeley have a tendency to turn everything into a Free Speech zone. Or rather, the whole town is a Free Speech zone and you have no right to be free from other people's speech, even where it might endanger your life. For example, there is a particular overpass on Highway 80 in Berkeley which is particularly attractive to people with "something to say". Here's a picture of it. It's dangerous to protest or whatever up there, because drivers slow or stop and look up to read your dumb-ass sign, rather than minding their business on the road. If you scroll down on that page I linked to, you will see a hideous statue which was recently added at one end of the overpass. It's huge, and, let me say again, hideous. And very distracting even when there aren't people with Free Mumia signs up there. But what's interesting to me is that the figures in the statue are holding empty signs that are not just blank, they're empty. EXACTLY.

So, snowed-in Midwesterners, freezing New Yorkers and DCites-who-are annoyed-to-be-called out-by-Obama-for-a-snow-day-when-he-has-the-Oval-Office-temp-at-like-72, revel in the common sense of your neighbors, and enjoy the seasons while you still have them.

Another Gift, and On the Same Day!

Yesterday, a neighbor brought to my attention this LA Times article. The Berkeley Bowl is imposing lifetime bans on people who "sample" the food without buying it. Good for them. Even the offenders admit its stealing.

Store manager Larry Evans says the policy is a fair response to doctors, lawyers and college professors who help themselves to bags of cookies, nuts and vitamins, stick their fingers in pies and guzzle from bottles of sake, assuming the rules don't apply to them.

"There's a sense of entitlement to this town," Evans said. "People think, 'If I want to do it, I'll do it, just try and stop me.' "

This does not mean that I will go to the Berkeley Bowl again (its been over 5 years since I last shopped there) but I will hate them one iota less for attempting to impose some order on the mayhem of Berkeley.

Some Days, You Get a Little Gift

The Tree Sitters are being fined for the costs associated with their nasty little public disturbance. You remember the Tree Sitters: I blogged about them here and here. You'll need to chuckle for a moment, because my next Berkeley story may make you sick to your stomach.

A woman I work with (who lives in Bkly) has a unit on her property that she rents to another woman. Let's call the first woman "A" and the second woman "B". In preparing to have the unit renovated, A learned that B was a horder, and it took some doing to get the place cleared out enough to have the work done. Fast forward. After completing recent electrical work, the electrician reports to A that she has some water damage below her bathroom. A calls the plumber. The plumber investigates, and notifies A that the toilet has not been used for years. Literally years. The toilet is bone dry, most of the works are missing from the tank, and the rubber pieces have cracked and crumbled from years of aridity.

What's that about? Where's the, you know, everything?

As for my annual Burning Man screed: I am worried about my blood pressure, and if I write about such infuriating topics I might burst a blood vessel. But you can find earlier posts here. I will tell you this: I was talking to a woman who works for a high profile, well-regarded non-profit which works to safeguard the Constitution (hint: it rhymes with A-C-L-goo) and she told me that they went to Burning Man to protect free speech. That galls me more than their defense of Nazis and guns. Of course, no one there wanted to trample free speech because people who hate free speech don't want to poop in the desert with idiots all week, so they were sort of bored. She did feel that they did protect the 4th Amendment, since drug busts are the primary occupation of law enforcement at the Festival. Which makes sense, since drugs, and not "free speech", are the point of that stupid affair.

Sometimes I Love the Bay Area

My glee at this takes me surprise. A San Francisco firefighter was snapped riding topless with Dykes on Bikes during Pride and it seems she might have been wearing her badge (a no-no) on her corset. This is the sort of thing that I would assume my reaction would be to be very annoyed, and scoff at the silliness of SF. Instead, I think its sort of awesome. I particularly love that the firefighter union president took it all in stride.

We were able to contact fire union boss John Hanley - up on the fire line in Butte County - who told us that while he hadn't seen the photos, "I'm sure it wasn't a Fire Department badge."

Just roll with it, baby. Since this is ostensibly a family blog (ha!), you can click here for a photo.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Venture Near

Sometimes B will call on his way home from work and say, "How are the kids?" and I will say either, "They are great," or "The monkeys are flinging their poo." That makes the kids laugh hysterically and Q will say "poo" over and over again.

But I'm kidding when I say that. My children know better than to use their feces as a projectile. And - we've worked on this - biting isn't allowed either. But its uh-mazing the number of Trustafarian parents who don't teach their children these lessons. So then you have these problems:

BERKELEY — After tree sitters hurled buckets of human excrement at arborists who cut traverse lines and removed wooden platforms Tuesday, the raucous day came to a head when a tree sitter bit an arborist so hard he was sent to the hospital with an arm wound.

The biter goes by the name Millipede. This is unusual. According to experts at Texas A&M:

Millipedes do not bite; but when disturbed they can produce an irritating fluid (using repugnatorial glands opening at the base of the legs). This fluid can irritate eyes, blister the skin, produce an unpleasant odor and cause allergic reactions in venom sensitive people. Some species can squirt their fluids several inches.

That sounds about right. Enjoy lock-up, Millipede.

The Self-Righteous Shall Inherit California

I heard a piece on NPR about this fool and his solar panels. I thought you'd like it.

Even More Irritating!

As I mentioned a few days ago, I don't keep up much on the BPN Newsletters these days. But today, something caught my eye. A poster complained that her local precious market uses a marker to mark their organic produce. She is outraged by the ignorance and toxicity of this method of identifying produce. My first thought was, get over it. But of the seven responders, only one said, "Frankly, I think you're going way out on a limb on this one."

The other six people chimed in with various suggestions for community action, "vote with your dollar" nonsense. Seriously, has anyone in the entire world traced an illness, or even a bad taste in their mouth, to a dot of marker on the outside of their melon?

This one's even better:

The other thing is that at Monterey Fish market they use a very strong smelling, seemingly toxic magic marker to mark the outside of the fish package. I'd like to just pop the wrapped package into the freezer but always feel compelled to ditch the paper as soon as possible. I don't even like it being there during the trip home. This has always bugged me. I would be all for instigating a change if there was a community friendly way to do it.

Ya Got No Creep To Ya

- Kima Greggs, episode 2, season 1.

Yeah, that's right. The Wire is back, On Demand. It does not matter that we have it on DVD. I watched two episodes tonight making Liam's Halloween costume. Which costume does NOT include the following:

Heh heh.

And then finally, have you wondered what you might hate more than Blackwater USA, the mercenary contractor responsible for untold numbers of Iraqi civilians deaths and Godknowshowmany propped-up dictatorships? And how about those irritating sound effects in NPR stories? You know, the laughing children on the playground, the birds chirping, and then you have to change the station before you lose your mind? Do you hate that more, or less, than military contractors in Iraq? Well, I briefly got an answer to that question the other day when I heard a story about protests at Blackwater's training center outside of San Diego. The owner of Blackwater came out to address the protesters, but was quickly shouted down. He got back into his vehicle, and the tape catches a protester angrily yelling, "Oh, you drive a HUMMER?? What about the environment? You gas guzzler!!"

Like the owner of Blackwater gives a shit. Like he should be driving a Prius.

And for a brief moment, I felt . . . I don't know what. Sorry for how lame the protesters are. Sorry that I have to listen to NPR's pitiful filler-in-lieu-of-news every day. Sorry that the best argument that can be summoned to yell at the owner of Blackwater, just hours after 17 Iraqi citizens were killed, is that he's a gas guzzler.

I am suspending my normal "meh" attitude towards Dave Matthews because this is a pretty good song, but more importantly because Zoe choreographed the video and dances in it.

Cool!

And lest you think my sister and I are the dullards of the family, think again. Lorin is the project manager on the retro-fit and re-design of Casa Zimbabwe, a housing collective at Berkeley. Thus her irritation at not being permitted to install nuclear exit signs. I can't find any pictures of the C.Z. architectural changes, but you can see from the outside that they are probably very dramatic, since this is what they are working from.

Perhaps Lorin will share some photos with us so I can sing her praises as well.

What Else Can You Do?

I cannot imagine the frustration of being a bureaucrat in Berkeley. It is a town where protests are their own form of bureaucracy, something to be endured to obtain the public benefit of "enjoying" (if you can call it that) Berkeley.

Because of Berkeley protesters, I find myself hating causes with which I am otherwise sympathetic. For example, oak groves. I love them. They are great. Good for the environment, good for the children. Only jerks would want to raze them (grrrr) to build a sports stadium. Sports: BOOOOOOO!!!

But then a bunch of people decide to live in them, and enlist droves of other idiots to bring them food and water and High Times magazine, in order to stop the inevitable construction of said sports complex (the old one being probably seismically a fucking mess - which is another thing I hate: earthquakes).

In preparation for The Big Cal Game this weekend, university officials erected a fence around the tree sitters and are prohibiting access by the water-bearing minions. That's an 8-foot chain link fence. You might think that's overkill, but here's what the university is dealing with:

Ground crews supporting the tree sitters alternatively yelled at workers and peacefully strummed guitars as the crew worked.

Asked if the university's action amounts to a move to starve out the tree sitters, Assistant Chief Mitch Celaya — who was spray painted on his neck in the fray — said people can draw their own conclusions.

If I got spray-painted on the neck by a hippie harassing the hardhats and strumming a guitar, I would do more than erect a fence. But of course, Berkeley tried that 30 years ago and all it bought them was more of the same.

Anyway, if you are irate because I have sold out or something, consider this:

"We believe the protesters in the trees are sincere, but misguided," university spokesman Dan Mogulof said. "This is not an ancient grove. All but three of these trees are here because of a 1923 university landscaping project."

Supercrack

This is brilliant. The Red Cross has a new ad campaign to raise awareness about earthquake preparedness, because 83% of Bay Area residents have no plan and no supplies in case of The Big One.

Earthquake preparedness nags at me. Its the thing I worry about after I have exhausted the following topics: L's obsession with dinosaurs, the amount of sleep/fresh fruit that Mr. Scobie doesn't get/eat, my work, my grandmother, my student loans (not necessarily in that order).

Anyway, the other day I was going to order some extra food and water because I was having the groceries delivered, and I figured it would save me a lot of hassle. And then I just forgot to do it. But I also thought: well, we have some cans of soup, I don't really need to get food. How dumb is that? We have possibly two cans of soup. We have lots of breakfast bars too. That's basically it. Neither flashlight has good batteries, and the embarrassment of batteries in the fridge aren't the right size for the flashlights. Meeting plan? Not there yet.

So I will move earthquake worrying to higher on the list. What meager supplies have you laid in, or what other self-justification have you indulged in?

UPDATE: In an attempt to make some use of my utter procrastination, I did a bit of on-line shopping for our earthquake preparedness kit. Ten gallons of water, cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli, Ramen, peanut butter, canned fruit cocktail, Jolly Ranchers. If it weren't for the canned peas and condensed milk, I would be psyched for the earthquake, just so I could eat all that gross stuff.

Dumb-ass bumper stickers

If the people lead, the people will eventually become leaders too.

- on a car in Berkeley.

You are shocked, I'm sure.