If you live in South Berkeley, chances are you’ve met Bill Bahou. For 22 years, he’s run Roxie’s Delicatessen on the corner of Shattuck and Ashby, serving quality, affordable sandwiches to one and all and offering a helping hand wherever he can. -more-
For many, the nightmare of trying to survive on low wage jobs just about anywhere in America remains just that, a nightmare. One person who’s lived to tell what it’s really like to try to live on a little over $5 an hour is journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, author of “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.” -more-
West Berkeley neighbors say they hope the recent police raid of a notorious drug den will finally clear the drug dealers and loiterers from a long-blighted intersection. -more-
On a recent afternoon at the Women’s Cancer Resource Center on Telegraph Avenue, Maria gets a tender embrace from Mary Tunison, the center’s executive director. -more-
As a tenant the proposal to increase homeowners taxes by $250 annually will cost me nothing, but I oppose it because it is wrong. It is wrong to scare Berkeley residents with polling questions threatening to cut off emergency services unless we agree to increase taxes. It is wrong because homeowners are not all rich, some struggle to get by or are dependent on fixed incomes. But mostly, it is wrong because it is unnecessary. -more-
In response to vocal concern about a rapidly rising crime rate in North Oakland neighborhoods, the chief of the Oakland Police Department admitted last week that his office “made a mistake” in diverting elite officers from North Oakland and West Oakland last summer. -more-
Let’s give a cheer for good old Arnie— -more-
Volunteer poll workers mistakenly barred a Daily Planet reporter from watching them handle data chips embedded with thousands of electronic votes shortly after the polls closed on election night. -more-
Berkeley librarians insist that embedding their books with a state-of-the-art monitoring device despised by privacy advocates will not grant Big Brother a glimpse at patron’s reading material. -more-
The nationwide Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary—otherwise known as BAMN—returned to UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza Wednesday to celebrate California’s decision to vote down Proposition 54. -more-
When Rush Limbaugh’s drug problem first surfaced in various website chatter, I was intrigued. When it made the evening news, I admit I felt a moment of joy. Limbaugh is the icon of brutish, cheap-shot conservatism and his entertaining style has spawned a vast legion of broadcast talkers even nastier than he. How could one not find some pleasure in his fall from grace? As we learned from the unmasking of other righteously destructive rightwingers, hypocrisy is their middle name. -more-
On Monday night the Oakland A’s played the Boston Red Sox in the final baseball game of their American League Division Series. A win moved them one step closer to a World Series title; a loss ended the season. It was a big game. I wondered if Oakland’s playoff fever stretched north to Berkeley. -more-
On the day after the recall election, a couple of my more politically-involved friends asked—in no small state of befuddlement—how Californians could simultaneously overwhelmingly defeat Proposition 54 and elect Arnold Schwarzenegger governor. -more-
In light of a continuing string of wheelchair pedestrian accidents, including Fred Lupke’s recent death, the Berkeley Commission on Disability’s subcommittee for transportation met Wednesday to draw up requests asking the city to revisit what they say are important safety measures proposed for the city’s general plan. -more-
While some Indian jewelry and saree stores are rumored to have taken off for Los Angeles and more lucrative markets, new Indian stores and restaurants are opening almost monthly on and around University Avenue. Indian Americans travel from San Jose, Fremont, Palo Alto, Yuba City, and even Los Angeles to shop here. -more-
How smoothly last Tuesday’s recall election went in the city of Berkeley depends upon which end of the process you observed. Poll workers reported a nearly flawless experience by voters using the Diebold touch-screen voting machines throughout the city. But there were glitches in the vote compiling process. -more-
Berkeley Police officers escorted Alison Weir, founder of If Americans Knew, into her organization’s South Berkeley office Monday afternoon, three days after a voicemail threat warning her to stay away from her office at 2 p.m. Monday or risk losing her life. -more-
It seems unlikely that UC’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies bribed the Nobel Prize Committee to choose Oct. 3 to announce they had awarded the world’s most high falutin’ literary prize to South African author J.M. Coetzee. But there must have been at least some dancing in the hallowed academic corridors when the word came over the news. It happened last Friday, the same day that Assistant Professor Peter Glazer’s beautifully staged adaptation of Coetzee’s novel “Foe” opened at Zellerbach Playhouse. -more-
Berkeley is one of the older cities in the Bay Area and the majority of Berkeley’s approximately 40,000 buildings are more than 60 years old. The city’s built environment gives it a physical quality not found in the newer California communities where the majority of the state’s population lives. With the exception of areas just south of the University Campus, Berkeley escaped the massive urban clearances that other older cities experienced. -more-
UC Berkeley graduate student instructors Friday staged a walkout to protest university bargaining practices they blame for a contract impasse. -more-
In memory of Fred Lupke -more-
The West Nile Virus is heading for Northern California and will probably reach Alameda and Contra Costa counties within the next two years, according to an infectious disease expert with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). -more-
In 1891, Charles Keeler and Bernard Maybeck met on the 5 p.m. commuter ferry from San Francisco to Berkeley. Keeler was 20 and worked at the California Academy of Sciences. Maybeck was 29 and employed at the architectural firm of A. Page Brown. Four years later Maybeck designed Keeler’s home--the first house on Highland Place, in the Daley’s Scenic Park tract just north of the university campus. -more-
Some nights a blue light shines in South Berkeley. If you’re in the know, when the light is glowing, you’re in for an enchanting evening at one of Berkeley’s newest hot spots for the underground arts scene, the Jazz House. -more-
Having to put Jesse Jackson on hold so I could take a call from Al Gore. -more-
NEW DELHI, India—With Indian tech workers no longer wanted in the United States, the buzz here is all about teachers. -more-
Sometime in the next three weeks, Berkeley renters and landlords will learn how much next year’s rents will increase, after the city’s rent board negotiates its way through a legal and political minefield to pick a number almost certain to make someone unhappy. -more-
After watching the PBS special on Mark Twain, I became obsessed with the idea of moving close to the Mississippi River. Maybe if I could spend time along its muddy waters the muse I had lost would return and I’d be able to churn out one marvelous, witty paragraph after another, just like Samuel L. Clemons. -more-
When the Oakland Tribune and other ANG Newspapers withdrew their endorsement of Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor over the weekend, citing recent sexual harassment allegations against the actor, the news brought cheer to a group of East Bay female politicians who had pressed the paper to make the retraction. -more-
Tom Lehrer, the ideological mentor of my teenage years in the fifties, said that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He himself stopped performing in 1967, a long time ago now, and yet he is still regarded as a fountainhead of political wisdom by young people of a certain type who were raised in homes with old Tom Lehrer songbooks on the piano. The Onion, one of his spiritual descendants, interviewed him in May on the occasion of the release of his boxed CD set, which has been selling well. -more-
