After two years of meetings and hearings in which property owners often clashed with environmentalists, the Berkeley City Council approved a revised Creeks Ordinance (6-2-1) late Tuesday night aimed at safeguarding the city’s many open and culverted waterways. 

Councilmembers Betty Olds and Gordon Wozniak voted in opposition, while Councilmember Laurie Capitelli abstained. 

The ordinance, whose second reading will take place at the Nov. 28 council meeting, would severely limit any new construction within 30 feet of the center of an open creek or expansion of a building within 25 feet of the creek. Such construction would require a variance, generally needed when zoning laws prohibit a proposed project and requires a hearing before the zoning board. 

The new ordinance allows: 

• vertical expansion (building up and down) within 30 feet of an open creek and horizontal expansion of an existing structure between 25 and 30 feet of an open creek with an administrative creek permit, based on a report showing the construction would have no adverse impact on the creek; and 

• building within 15 feet of a culverted creek with an administrative culverted creek permit, based on a structural engineer’s report that would demonstrate culvert stability, access and protected water quality. 

Despite promised lawsuits by the City of Berkeley and project neighbors, UC Regents voted Tuesday to approve a massive athletic training center along the western wall of Memorial Stadium. 

Berkeley City Councilmembers voted unanimously in closed session Tuesday night to sue if the project is approved, with only Kriss Worthington absent from the meeting. 

But the regents withheld one key approval needed before the project can move forward—certification of the environmental impact report (EIR) that includes the Student Athlete High Performance Center, major stadium renovations, a nearby 912-car underground parking lot, an even larger new building joining functions of the UCB law and business schools as well as streetscape changes for Piedmont Avenue/Gayley Road. 

Any suit challenging the EIR and the project it covers must be filed within 30 days after regents adopt the document, a move which could happen as early as the first week in December in a telephone conference among the Board of Regents’ Committee on Grounds and Building. 

The committee voted unanimously to approve the project, simultaneously urging UC Berkeley officials are to see if a compromise on EIR issues isn’t possible—though officials said approval of an EIR in time to allow for bidding to begin in January so excavation at the building site could be completed before the start of the fall football season was deemed an essential feature to avoid a year’s delay in construction. 

The other would-be plaintiff is the Panoramic Hill Association (PNA), which is comprised of residents who live on hillside homes to the east of the stadium. 

PNA member Michael Kelly told the Regents Tuesday “the only road left to us is legal action,” and said the association has been advised that “there are elements of the current proposal which have serious flaws” 

But the regents approved the $112 million project budget, all to come from corporations, organizations and individual donors, $12 million in potential standby financing if needed during fund-raising and plans for the 142,000-square-foot training and office facility. 

Four stories tall in places, the building would fit beneath the base level of the landmark stadium building. 

When it came time for a City Council vote Tuesday, Councilmember Betty Old said, “The trees are enough to make me vote for it,” referring to the 40 Oaks that were among the trees slated for destruction if the project goes through.  

The new parking lot added to her determination. “Nine hundred cars to too much to put on Gayley Road,” Olds said. Gayley is the two-lane nationally landmarked roadway that leads to the Stadium. 

The city has hired Harriet Steiner of Sacramento-based McDonough 

Holland & Allen to work on the lawsuit, which will be filed within one 

month, according to Olds. 

Fault issues 

One objection cited by the city and neighbors is contention that the projects embraced by the EIR include structure on or near the Hayward Fault, and thus are susceptible to provisions of the Alquist-Priolo act, a law governing buildings on or adjacent to active earth faults. 

While acknowledging the Hayward Fault runs under Memorial Stadium itself, UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor Ed Denton and Associate Vice Chancellor for Project Manager Rob Gayle insisted the training center is exempt from the law because it is not or sufficiently near the fault. 

UC Berkeley officials who addressed the regents dismissed claims of neighbors and the city that the project would impair emergency response times for the surrounding city neighborhoods. 

Gas masks, air filters and angry posters marked the Pacific Steel Casting protest rally on Saturday, which drew more than 250 protesters. 

Environmental activists, West Berkeley residents, parents and children turned up to send a message to the West Berkeley-based steel foundry protesting its emissions. 

Children carried posters asking Pacific Steel Casting (PSC) to stop polluting their soccer fields while parents donned dust masks to show how harmful the fumes from the foundry could be. 

“The rally was one in a series of protests which will continue to take place until PSC agrees to clean up its act,” said Bradley Angel, director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice. “The turnout exceeded our expectations and the diverse representation symbolized the community’s mounting concern over this problem. This was definitely a family protest.” 

West Berkeley has been fighting PSC’s emissions over the last 30 years. Neighbors have complained about its noxious odors, saying they have resulted in headaches, nausea and chest tightness for many over the years. 

“We are putting PSC on notice,” Angel said. “Now it’s up to them to clean the air and save the neighborhood from environmental degradation.” 

The demonstrators challenged PSC, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), the City of Berkeley and Alameda County to address the problem immediately. Councilmember Linda Maio, in whose district the steel plant is located, attended the rally along with Alameda County supervisor Keith Carson. 

“It was moving to see parents of children suffering from asthma in West Berkeley speak at the rally,” said Steve Ingraham, a member of the PSC protest committee. “There are so many kids who play in the soccer field or attend day care near the steel plant. PSC has to stop this before the problem escalates any further.”  

During the rally, about a dozen workers from the foundry came outside and listened to the speakers at the rally. The organizers called upon them to work with the community to help clean up the air. 

“We will keep rallying until there is complete transparency from PSC about its operations,” said Janet Schroder of the West Berkeley Alliance for Clean Air and Safe Jobs. Schroder moved into West Berkeley in 1979 and started having symptoms of nausea and chest tightness which she associated with a burning odor coming from the steel plant. 

“The odor got less frequent at one point in time, but it became really strong from 2000 onwards,” Schroder said. “We hope to carry out swipe tests in the future that will help pinpoint harmful chemicals emitted from the plant.” 

Anuja Mendiratta, a Berkeley resident who attended the protest on Saturday, said that she notices the noxious odors everytime she runs on the Olhone Trail in West Berkeley. 

“There are so many young moms and children smelling those noxious odors when they are out there everyday,” she said. “It’s just outrageous. Pacific Steel should know that we will not tolerate this any more.” 

UC Regents are scheduled to decide this morning (Tuesday) whether or not to approve the $112 million Student Athlete High Performance Center, a 142,000-square-foot building along the western wall of UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium. 

The controversial structure, which would cost $597 a square foot, would be funded by gifts—though regents are being asked to approve up to $12 million in standby funding. 

Construction would commence in January, with a completion date of September 2009—provided a threatened lawsuit by the city doesn’t toss a wrench into the university’s plans. 

The controversial structure, which would be attached to an antiquated structure directly over the Bay Area’s most earthquake-prone fault, would be used by athletes from across the campus. 

The regents’ Committee on Buildings and Grounds is scheduled to take up the issue during an 11:35 a.m. session at the UCLA campus, along with 15 other building projects at other UC campuses. 

The committee is also being asked to certify an environmental impact report (EIR) that includes not only the training facility but renovations to the stadium itself, construction of an underground parking structure northwest of the stadium, a new building joining offices and programs of the university’s law and business schools and changes to the landmark Piedmont Avenue/Gayley Road streetscape. 

Together, the projects—which add up to more than a quarter-billion dollars—are called the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects (SCIP.) 

The Berkeley City Council sent a letter to the regents asking them to hold off on certifying the SCIP EIR until city officials have had time to review and comment on the massive document. 

“We haven’t had any response,” said City Manager Phil Kamlarz Monday afternoon. “We’re disappointed with the EIR because it didn’t address our issues, which include the high performance center, the parking structure and the stadium renovation. We have an impasse on this project.” 

City Planning Director Dan Marks addressed the concerns with an earlier EIR draft in a 54-page letter in July, and Kamlarz said the university had failed to adequately address the issues raised in that document—at least from what officials have been able to glean from the final draft. 

“They gave us two weeks to review over a thousand pages, and it’s impossible to give the document a rational review in that short amount of time,” Kamlarz said. 

Still, Kamlarz said he wasn’t surprised at the university’s lack of response. 

In a Nov. 2 letter, the city asked the regents to delay certifying the EIR until the regents meet in January at UC San Francisco. The report had been issued too late not only for the city to provide an adequate review, but for the regents as well, declared the letter. 

There had been no response by Monday afternoon. 

Center details 

The document submitted to the regents along with the agenda for this week’s meeting—which runs today through Thursday—gave a first look at some of the specifics of the training center. 

Preliminary plans and drawings cost $5.6 million, and the project is being designed under the executive architect, the Los Angeles office of the Kansas City architectural firm Howard Needles Tammen & Bergendorff (HNTB), which was selected by the office of UC President Robert Dynes in September. 

HNTB’s director of business development is well acquainted with stadiums and training centers. He is former Kansas City Chiefs kicker and Pro Football Hall of Famer Jan Stenerud.  

According to the report to the regents, the proposed center’s first goal is to remove student athletes to enable a seismic retrofit for the stadium, a project which has yet to be approved. 

Other goals include: 

• Rectifying deficiencies in existing training programs and facilities to make UC Berkeley’s program equivalent with other “top tier NCAA Division 1 programs. 

• “Integrate the stadium and its site and the campus in order to improve access to the stadium and enhance game-day experience for visitors.” 

• “Improve the stadium environs, which is currently characterized by high cyclone fencing and surface parking lots. 

• “Provide spaces for daily public use, while preserving some of the wooded landscape west of the stadium.” 

The largest tenant of the new facility will be ºthe Cal Bears football team, occupying 50,850 square feet, with all other sports relegated to a total of 25,800 square feet. Combined training and sports medicine facilities will add another 32,300 square feet. 

The first stage of construction will involve shoring up the stadium’s west wall with new underpinnings and soil cement walls. 

The report states that the facility “will be designed to resist near-fault ground motion forces and displacement.” 

The city and project critics charge that the project violates the Alquist-Priolo Act, which governs buildings constructed on or adjacent to fault zones, a charge the university has dismissed. 

Compliance with the law has been cited by city officials as one possible basis for the suit; another includes failure to mitigate demands on city traffic and other infrastructure. 

Another project 

While the regents are also scheduled to hear a report on safety improvements at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), there’s nothing on the agenda about a new building planned for the site, which is a facility of the federal Department of Energy currently operated by the university system. 

Jeff Philliber, the lab’s environmental planning coordinator, notified the city on Nov. 6 that the lab is preparing an environmental review of a project that calls for demolition of Building 10 at the site and its replacement with a 30,000-square-foot, three-story structure that would house offices, labs, meeting spaces. 

The structure it replaces is a 15,575 sheet-metal and wood structure built in 1944. If the plans are approved, demolition would begin in March 2007 and be completed within four months, followed by construction that would begin in January 2008 and continue for 18 months. 

LBNL has issued an initial study and proposed mitigated negative declaration on the project, which are available online at www.lbl.gov/Community/index.html.

With the lion’s share of votes counted, Kriss Worthington has slightly widened his lead in the squeaker Berkeley City Council District 7 race, according to the Alameda County registrar of voters. In fact, all the winners increased their winning margins. 

Damaged absentee votes and provisional ballots (those, generally, cast by voters at polling places other than where they are registered or by voters whose names do not appear on the polling place list), which have yet to be counted, make up a much smaller number than those counted over the weekend, according to Guy Ashley, spokesperson for the Alameda County Registrar of Voters. 

The votes counted over the weekend were absentee ballots people hand-delivered to the polls on election day or that were received in the registrar’s office on election day. The number of uncounted Berkeley ballots is still unknown, Ashley said.  

In District 7, at about 1 p.m. on Monday, Worthington had picked up 429 additional votes for a total of 1,893 votes, or 52.73 percent, and Beier had picked up 346 votes for a total of 1,679, or 47.42 percent. 

With the additional 775 votes counted, Worthington increased his lead from 131 to 214 votes. 

On Monday afternoon, the councilmember, while optimistic, said he wouldn’t declare victory until the last provisional ballot was counted. 

“It’s nice to be ahead by 6 percent,” he said.  

But the nasty race was still on his mind.  

“I’m still upset by the lies. I feel, personally, so offended,” Worthington said, referring especially to the distortions of his record by the Beier campaign and the Chamber of Commerce PAC, particularly regarding Worthington’s support for adding police on Telegraph Avenue.  

“I’m happy that voters here were able to see through the lies,” he said. 

Beier was out of town and unavailable for comment. 

In the mayor’s race, incumbent Mayor Tom Bates slightly increased his lead from 62.65 percent of the votes to 62.72 percent. Zelda Bronstein also increased her percentage from 30.94 percent to 31.09 percent, with Zachary Running Wolf and Christian Pecaut losing percentage points.  

Bates’ total vote was 23,093 and Bronstein’s was 11,447. Running Wolf had 1,665, or 4.52 percent, of the vote and Pecaut had 457, or 1.24 percent. 

In Berkeley’s District 1 Linda Maio picked up 750 votes, bringing her total to 3,386, or 76.33 percent. Challenger Merrilie Mitchell picked up 258 votes, leaving her with 23.46 percent of the total. 

In District 4, Councilmember Dona Spring also kept her strong lead, picking up 634 votes, slightly increasing her lead from 70.76 percent to 70.85 percent. Challenger Raudel Wilson received an additional 137 votes, leaving him with 28.43 percent of the vote. 

In District 8 Councilmember Gordon Wozniak also increased his lead, picking up 557 votes for a total of 2,492 votes, or 64.01 percent. Challenger Jason Overman’s share of the vote fell, even with an increase of 289 votes to a total of 1,387, or 35.63 percent.

The question for Alameda County election officials in the next few months is like a paraphrase of the old O’Jays song: “Now that we’ve got IRV, what are we gonna’ do with it?” 

The IRV, in this instance, is instant runoff voting, or ranked-choice voting. A voting system that eliminates runoff elections by allowing voters to rank candidates on the ballot in order of preference, IRV has been approved for use in municipal elections in San Leandro, Berkeley, and, most recently, in Oakland, where voters passed the IRV-implementing Measure O in last Tuesday’s election. 

The Sequoia voting machines currently used in Alameda County elections do not have IRV capability. But a clause in the county’s contract with Sequoia requires that the company put in place the hardware and software capable of handling ranked-choice voting by November of next year. 

But just what form, or forms, that system will take has not yet been determined. 

IRV operates in races of three or more candidates by having voters cast only one ballot, but having “rounds” of vote counting to choose the eventual winner. During each round of counting, the candidates with the lowest “first choice” vote totals are eliminated. 

The second choice on the ballots of those voters who voted for the eliminated candidates will then be added to the totals of the remaining candidates, eventually ending up in a final round of vote-counting in which there are only two candidates remaining, one of whom will be ensured a majority of the final vote tally. 

But different forms of IRV have different methods of elimination that can have widely varying effects on the eventual winner. Oakland’s recently passed Measure O, for example, allows for the elimination of more than one candidate in each round, under certain circumstances. That is different from other systems, which only allow for the elimination of one candidate in each round. It is possible for a different candidate to win an election under the use of these two different elimination methods, even if voters rank their choices in the identical way. 

There are also differences in how ballots should be handled when a voter fails to make the proper number of ranked choices. 

Neither ballot measure authorizing IRV, in San Leandro in 2000 or Berkeley in 2004, specified the exact type of form the IRV election system would take in those cities. 

Officials from the Alameda County registrar’s office, Sequoia Voting Systems, the League of Women Voters, the three cities with IRV authorization in place, and the county’s remaining cities are expected to meet throughout the year before the November 2007 implementation deadline to work out the differences. 

A sales representative for Sequoia Voting Systems said during an interview on election night last week that “Sequoia would prefer having one method of IRV implemented throughout the county.” 

But the representative said that the Oakland-based company had the capability of writing software to support more than one system, “and we will work to accommodate what the county and the cities eventually authorize.” 

Berkeley City Councilmember Kriss Worthington said he had not yet had the chance to look at Oakland’s IRV ballot authorization—noting that “I’ve been busy this fall with some other activities”—and said that he did not know if Oakland’s measure would be acceptable to Berkeley.  

“It would be nice if we would have a one-size-fits-all system,” Worthington said. “These details are going to have to be hashed out.” 

Worthington said he believed that work to coordinate the IRV implementation is going to go slowly until a permanent county registrar of voters is chosen. Dave Macdonald, who coordinated the November election in the county, currently serves as acting registrar. 

Berkeley City Councilmember Linda Maio said that she would prefer not to have several versions of IRV in the county, noting that “we would like to make it compatible.”  

But Maio said that minor disagreements on the exact form should not be allowed to hold up implementation of the new system.  

“Let’s just say that [the various implementing cities] don’t quite agree, but we come to something that’s close,” she said. “It would be better to put it in place for a couple of cycles to see how it works in practice, and then work out the details.” 

An alternative, Maio said, might be to offer “a couple of ways for cities to implement IRV in their jurisdictions.”  

In either event, Maio said that it’s not possible to anticipate all of the problems that might occur with implementation.  

“It’s a wholly new thing for us,” she said. “We’re not sure of all the implications yet.”  

Supporters and opponents of the proposed 148-unit Trader Joe’s Building on 1885 University Ave. turned out in full force at the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) meeting on Thursday. 

The modified project had been returned to the ZAB after being approved by the Design Review Commission. 

Berkeley-based developers Evan McDonald and Chris Hudson asked the board to give preliminary consideration to a modified design that will allow construction of a mixed-use development with 14,390 square feet of retail, and 157 parking spaces in a two-level parking garage. 

ZAB asked city staff to come back with a detailed report on Nov. 27 outlining density bonus options and a traffic analysis as well as provide conditions for approval of the project.  

Residents opposed to the project asked how the city would apply the state’s affordable housing density bonus statute to the project and address issues related to traffic and building size.  

Neighbors have maintained that the building would stick out like a sore thumb in the neighborhood and create a parking nightmare in an already congested residential block. 

Developer Chris Hudson told the board that the revised project would provide 123,924 square feet of residential floor area and 14,390 square feet of commercial floor area and include 148 residential units and 22 Below Market Rate (BMR) units. 

Hudson added that with 22 affordable housing units the modified project with Trader Joe’s would provide the same proportion of affordable housing as the earlier-proposed 186-unit project. 

“This proportion is the same proportion required of all density bonus projects in the City of Berkeley,” Hudson said. “The staff and city attorney support this level of affordable housing as equitable and lawful and have confirmed that the density bonus required for a project with 22 affordable housing units is appropriate.”  

Steve Wollmer, who spoke on behalf of Neighbors for a Livable Berkeley Way, said that the 148-unit project was 7,000 square feet larger than the 186-unit project for which it was supposed to substitute. 

The principal question, Wollmer said, “is whether a city had the discretion to not only allow a substitute project, but a substitute that is significantly larger.” 

Board member Dave Blake called the staff’s declaration of the number of base units of the new project “fictitious.” Staff said that they’d rather not have the word “fictitious” used in describing the base units. 

Supporters of the project said that the project would result in a handsome building on a highly visible intersection which was blighted and reduce the number of daily car trips by a large margin. 

Tim Southwick, who has owned Toyota of Berkeley for the last 33 years, called the project a great opportunity to turn University Avenue into a street more like Solano Avenue because the development with a Trader Joe’s on the ground floor would help attract pedestrian traffic.  

“Don’t let Trader Joe’s disappear,” he said. 

Hudson also told the board that Peter Hillier, Berkeley’s assistant traffic engineer, had concluded that the traffic analyses on the project had been properly conducted and that the project, because of traffic signal upgrades, would not increase congestion.  

In a letter to ZAB, Regan Richardson, a resident of Berkeley Way, said that the 148-unit apartment building would “tower menacingly” over the other buildings in the neighborhood. 

“Are you all so dazzled by the prospect of food and liquor that you can’t make a rational decision to save Berkeley’s neighborhoods for future generations?” he asked. “This project is an elephant dressed up in a Trader Joe’s T-shirt uniform. And as everyone knows, an elephant sits wherever and destroys whatever it wants.” 

Despite neighbors’ insistence that the proposed entrance to Trader Joe’s be moved to the University Avenue side of the building, Hudson told the board that the driveway could only be located on Berkeley Way. According to Hillier, any other location for the entrance would increase traffic congestion. 

Berkeley resident Tom Hunt urged the board to keep the project within zoning limits and to enforce all the setbacks that were required. 

“We should adjust the projects according to zoning laws and not the zoning laws according to the projects,” he said. 

According to the project proposal, the driveway was on a portion of Berkeley Way zoned for commercial use. 

Hudson told board members that the project would not have any significant environmental impacts.  

“I would like to know whether there are other alternatives, and if it takes another month or two to do so, so be it,” said ZAB member Rick Judd.  

ZAB member Dean Metzger requested fuller details of the project, including areas of commercial space and usable open space. 

Berkeley resident Eric Dynamic said that he was opposed to bringing in a chain into the neighborhood that would further hamper revenue for local grocery stores.  

“Trader Joe’s is not interested in the future of Berkeley,” he said. 

Connie Hicks, CFO of KPFA Radio, located across Martin Luther King Jr. Way from the project, said parking would be a problem for the 60-plus employees and people who visited the radio station. 

“People are going to be irritated and this problem is going to be talked about on air all over the country,” he said. 

Councilmember Dona Spring quotes from an old Joni Mitchell song: 

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.  

They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum.  

And they charged all the people 

A dollar and a half just to see 'em.  

Spring says the UC Berkeley must change its tune. At tonight’s (Tuesday) council meeting, Spring and Councilmember Betty Olds will ask the council to support a resolution calling on UC to protect the Coast Live Oaks near Memorial Stadium slated for destruction. 

In other council business, the council will discuss cultural uses at the Gaia Building, allowing electric-vehicle dealerships to open businesses on South Shattuck Avenue, the status of the Solano Avenue Business Improvement District and more. 

Coast Live Oaks threatened 

As part of its southeast building project the university is planning to cut down 40 Coast Live Oaks between 40 and 300 years old to construct a 912-space parking lot and athletic training facility adjacent to a rebuilt Memorial Stadium. 

These trees are part of the city’s watershed system, Spring said. If they are destroyed, there will be erosion of the hillside and flooding, she said. 

While Coast Live Oaks are protected by the city’s “Coast Live Oak Moratorium,” UC is exempt from local laws. Organizations opposing the tree removal include the California Native Plant Society and the Sierra Club. 

Councilmember Betty Olds said she thinks community outrage will cause the university to re-think its plans. 

“The university doesn’t want to have a black mark against it. They want the citizens of Berkeley to like them,” she said.  

When asked for the university’s response, Jennifer Ward, spokesperson for the UC Office of the President, told the Daily Planet: “No comment.” 

Cultural use at Gaia 

When Patrick Kennedy developed the Gaia building at 2116 Allston Way, the city allowed him two additional residential stories in exchange for providing cultural uses on the first two floors. But the definition of “cultural uses” and the extent to which the space must be used for culture remains in dispute. 

The council will be asked tonight to approve the staff’s interpretation of an agreement made between Kennedy and former Planning Director Carol D. Barrett. 

That interpretation says that the Gaia Building should devote 30 percent of the days of the year to performances defined as live theatrical productions, literature readings, non-commercial film showings and educational uses related to culture. (Rehearsal time and set-up are not to be included in the 30 percent.)  

Cultural uses should have priority, the report says, but non-cultural uses are otherwise permitted.  

But Anna de Leon, who owns Anna’s Jazz Island located in the Gaia building, says staff has distorted the meaning of the agreement. The 30 percent use of the first two floors for performances means that live performances must be 30 percent of the cultural uses, but cultural uses must be 100 percent of the total use. 

“The use permit mandates exclusive cultural use,” De Leon said by phone on Monday. 

Solano Avenue Business Improvement District 

The City Council is being asked to approve a business improvement district (BID), which is usually routine, but two businesses are protesting the operation of the Solano Avenue BID. 

Businesses that belong to a BID contribute to it in order to receive benefits, but Susan Powning of By Hand says the BID has not been effective in street cleaning or advertising, and James Slaten of Jim’s Sewing Machine Service writes that the sidewalks are dirty and that the BID has not helped him increase business. 

Zoning for small-scale electric vehicle dealerships 

A resolution by Councilmember Dona Spring calls on the zoning board to change its rules so that small-scale electric vehicle dealerships can operate on south Shattuck Avenue. While there are automobile dealerships there, current zoning prohibits new automobile dealerships in the area. 

Overruns at the Oxford Plaza/Brower Center development are also on the council agenda. 

At 5 p.m. the council will hold a workshop on updating the status of the city budget. 

Housing Authority 

The Housing Authority will meet at 6:20 p.m. to rescind allocation of Section 8 vouchers for Prince Hall Arms at 3132 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Hillegass Apartments at 2500 Hillegass Ave. and Allston House at 2121 Seventh St. HUD disqualified all three projects, which means that these projects will have to find alternative sources of funding, according to a staff report released Monday. 

The Housing Authority will also discuss alternatives to the present structure in which the City Council sits as the authority. 

Community members will have one more chance to weigh in at a public hearing tonight (Tuesday) on a proposed city law some praise for protecting creeks but one that others say would be costly to homeowners and restrict the use of their property.  

At the same public hearing, Berkeley residents will be able to address a zoning law amendment that allows people to rebuild residences of four or fewer units at the original height and bulk with an easily obtained across-the-counter permit if the structure was destroyed by a disaster, such as a fire or earthquake. 

The City Council meeting starts at 7 p.m. at Old City Hall 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way; the public hearing time is not predetermined.  

The proposed amendment to the existing Creeks Ordinance would regulate building or remodeling on or near creeks and culverts. The proposed ordinance differs in how it regulates creeks and culverts—streams that run through pipes. 

In a phone interview Monday, former mayor Shirley Dean, with the Neighbors on Urban Creeks, said the proposed Creeks Ordinance revision, while continuing to lack certain components, goes a long way to satisfying the needs of property owners. Neighbors on Urban Creeks was founded to ensure the rights of property owners. 

The city-appointed Creeks Task Force has been working on a revised Creeks Ordinance for almost two years. 

The most important element of the revised law, according to Dean, is that “daylighting a culverted creek will be voluntary.” Daylighting a creek means opening a creek enclosed in a pipe and restoring it to a more natural state. 

But a problem with the proposed law, according to Dean, is that when an individual wants to build on vacant property or expand an existing residence within 25 feet of a culvert identified by the city, the property owner must pay a professional to establish exactly where the culvert is. Dean says that should be the city’s responsibility. 

“The city doesn’t have a clue where the culverts are,” she said. 

The proposed law would: 

• allow building within 15 feet of a culverted creek with an administrative Culverted Creek Permit issued based on a structural engineer’s report demonstrating culvert stability, access, and protected water quality; and 

• allow both vertical expansion (building up or down) within 30 feet of an open creek, and expansion of an existing structure between 25 and 30 feet of an open creek, with an Administrative Creek Permit based on a report showing the project would not have an adverse impact on the creek. 

A key question the council will have to answer when it considers the ordinance will be the type of city permit a homeowner would have to obtain to build on vacant land within 30 feet of the centerline of an open creek: should the homeowner be required to get a variance—generally needed when a proposed building project does not comply with zoning laws and is issued by vote of the zoning board—or should the homeowner be allowed to build after obtaining a use permit? The zoning board would issue the use permit “with strict criteria and findings that alternatives have been considered and have been determined infeasible and that the creek is protected against adverse environmental effects,” according a Nov. 14 planning staff report. 

The Creeks Task Force supports a variance, while the Planning Commission supports the use permit option.  

Calling the proposed ordinance “a finely crafted compromise that respects the homeowners as well as the environment,” Helen Burke, who chairs the Creeks Task Force, called for requiring the variance option in order to build within a 30-foot setback of an open creek to avoid degradation of the creek environment. 

In her Nov. 14 report to the council, Deputy Planning Director Wendy Cosin said the Planning Commission, on the other hand, “stated that a use permit is more appropriate because it is nearly impossible for a variance to be approved.”  

Dean and others have addressed concerns about the cost to homeowners for repairing culverts on their properties. This is not addressed in the ordinance revisions, because the city is in litigation with property owners over the issue of responsibility for culvert repairs. 

According to Burke, the City Council will address that question only after the lawsuit has been resolved. 

The Peralta Community College District will spend Measure A bond money on any of the broad range of projects that appeared on last June’s ballot, not just on the line item “Measure A Capital Projects” list, which currently appears on the district’s Department of General Services website. 

That is the assessment of Peralta Chief Financial Officer Tom Smith in a telephone interview this week. 

It’s not the specified lin- item list on the district’s website that is “legally binding,” Smith said. Measure A projects must only “relate to projects that were listed on the ballot measure itself.” 

Smith also took issue with the assertions that Peralta does not have a plan for spending the Measure A money. 

“A lot has been going around about we don’t have a plan,” Smith said. “We do have a plan.” 

Aside from the list of Measure A projects appearing on Peralta’s website, Smith said that the district is currently undertaking intensive long-range strategic and facilities planning. 

The issue of two Measure A bond project lists came to light during the recent Peralta Area Seven trustee race when challenger, and now trustee-elect, Abel Guillen raised charges that Peralta “doesn’t have a plan for the spending of [the Measure A] bond money, just a laundry list of projects.” 

That echoed complaints made by Peralta trustee Nicky Gonzalez Yuen both recently and when the bond measure language was first approved by trustees last February.  

A subsequent investigation by the Daily Planet showed that two separate lists of proposed bond projects—one of them a generalized list, the second an itemized, budgeted list—were circulated by the Peralta administration on the night last February that Peralta trustees voted to authorize the bond measure. 

The more generalized list was placed before voters on the June ballot, but at least one trustee, Cy Gulassa, believed that trustees were voting during that February meeting on the itemized, budgeted list. 

California Proposition 39, under which the Peralta bonds were passed in June, requires that a list of bond projects be included or referenced in the ballot measure, but state law does not lay out how specific the bond list must be. 

Peralta CFO Smith said that the line-item list was produced first, coming out of a “detailed needs assessment report from the colleges and the district office. We then put together what we thought our facilities needs were for the next 15 years, at a cost of approximately $400 million to $600 million.”  

The line-item budget document produced, Smith said, “was used as the basis to write the ballot language.” 

Trustee Cy Gulassa’s memory of the genesis of the two lists is different. Gulassa told the Daily Planet last week that the generalized list came first, and that when he and other trustees complained that the list was not specific enough, the itemized line item budgeted list was then produced. 

The difference in the two lists is striking. The itemized project list gives specific project descriptions with estimated costs included, listing, for example, “Complete Modernization and Facility Renovation of Landscape Horticulture. Project will Include: Horticulture Retaining Wall Replacement; Rebuild Horticulture and Access to the Area—$3,094,085.” 

For the same building, the generalized list for Merritt College included with the Measure A ballot says simply “expansion of the horticulture library and additional office space.” 

CFO Smith said this week that when the more generalized list was produced for inclusion on the ballot, “we tried to make it flexible enough so that when our needs expand, we will have the flexibility to do the projects needed with the bond money.” 

Last June, area voters approved the Peralta Measure A ballot measure, approving the issuance of $390 million in bonds to finance facilities projects in the district. The district is currently putting together the legally mandated citizen oversight committee to monitor the spending of the Measure A bonds. 

Loni Hancock came to Richmond Thursday night to visit the citizen panel she helped to create. 

The East Bay Democratic assemblymember addressed the Community Advisory Group (CAG) established to advise the state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) on the cleanup of hazardous waste sites in southern Richmond. 

Listening closely to her words were two CAG members who have played a critical role in bringing the contamination issues into the public eye, Sherry Padgett and Gayle McLaughlin. 

“My office is going to be here, and we want to work in partnership with you and DTSC,” Hancock told CAG members. “If there’s anything I can do to get you additional resources, then let me know.” 

Hancock said the CAG “can be a model for the entire state, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for stepping up to the plate.” 

The CAG was created after intense political pressure first raised by Padgett and members of Bay Area Residents for Responsible Development (BARRD) brought the issue to the attention of another future CAG member, Contra Costa County Public Health Director Dr. Wendel Brunner, who in turn contacted Hancock. 

“Dr. Brunner said he was alarmed about the things he had learned from Sherry about the safety of the cleanup,” said Hancock, referring to work down at the site of the former Stauffer/Zeneca chemical manufacturing complex west of the Bayview Avenue exit off Interstate 580. 

Heavy dust raised during excavation of the site and the subsequent burial of contaminated soil on the property worried Padgett, who worked in an office close to the site. Padgett and other activists formed BARRD, which in turn attracted the support of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, of which McLaughlin was a veteran member. 

McLaughlin joined BAARD members for protests at the Zeneca site, and won for a City Council seat in 2004 as a member of the Green Party. Two years later she challenged incumbent Mayor Irma Anderson for the position of Richmond’s chief executive. 

With an estimated 2,000 absentee ballots yet to be counted, McLaughlin holds a slim 192-vote lead over Anderson, who has yet to concede. Hancock, a Democrat, had endorsed fellow Democrat Anderson. 

CAG members who questioned Hancock included two former residents of Seaport Village, a housing complex that stood immediately east of the chemical complex from 1946 to 1957. 

Ethel Dotson told Hancock she had just learned that she has about a year to live because of cancer she attributes to exposure during childhood, and JoAnne Tilmon said 11 of her family members have died, and another—an aunt—is suffering from cancer. 

Both have said they are less than trusting of regulatory agencies. 

“I’m very skeptical of DTSC,” said Tilmon. “I want to make sure we’re doing the best for the community.”  

“I understand why people are skeptical of government agencies at this point,” said Hancock. “But DTSC has the most expertise and the most commitment to helping people.” 

Dotson and Tilmon are both concerned that while plant employees have been granted an extension on the statutory provisions for filing health claims, no such extension has been granted to Seaport residents. 

Hancock urged them to visit her office to discuss their concerns. 

The chemical plant cleanup—and the remediation of the site immediately to the west that houses the UC Berkeley Richmond Field Station—had originally been under the aegis of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. 

In part because the water boards have no toxicology experts on staff and no provisions for regular public input, Padgett, McLaughlin and Hancock had pushed for the takeover by DTSC. 

The Berkeley lawmaker held a state legislative hearing at the Field Station in November 2004, which led to the decision by state officials to hand over jurisdiction of both sites to DTSC. 

Uranium worries 

While most of the concerns have focused on a witch’s brew of toxic chemicals contaminating the soil, another ongoing concern is the possibility of radioactive contamination. 

A search is still underway for barrels possibly containing radioactive waste that CAG member Rock Alcaraz said he helped dump in the waters off the Field Station decades earlier. The source, he said, was apparently the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). 

A preliminary search at one location came up empty, but Barbara Cook, the DTSC’s chief of Northern California coastal cleanups, said an additional search will be conducted at a site identified by Alcaraz. 

Another former LBNL employee, radiation biologist Dr. Michael Esposito, said he is concerned about anomalous findings of radium at the former Seaport Village site. 

Because a phosphate plant was once located at the Zeneca site, Esposito said increased uranium could be expected in the area because the element is found in phosphate ores. 

While the totals of radioactive elements are small and below federal guidelines, Esposito said that an imbalance between levels of uranium and radium indicate that some uranium contamination had occurred. 

Both elements are typically found at the same levels, because of the age of the earth and the rate at which uranium decays into radium, and, ultimately, into lead. But at the Seaport Village site now occupied by the so-called downwind business, uranium particles outnumber lead by a factor of two to one. 

Findings for nearby Booker T. Anderson Park, selected as a control site, showed the expected nearly one-to-one ratio of the radioactive elements. 

“While the values are small, we have to factor them in with the dangers to exposure to other risk, to all carcinogens found at the site,” he said. 

One of the problems CAG members have discovered is that while statistical risks of cancer and other ailments can be found for individual chemicals found at the sites, no such estimates exist for the chemicals in combination with each other—and state and federal cleanup standards have no way to estimate the combinatorial risks. 

Yet chemicals often produce synergistic effects in combination, results not predictable by simple addition of the risks. Padgett and other CAG members have said they’re especially concerned because of the wide range of deadly compounds found at the sites. 

Esposito also said that the tests were performed “by a quick and dirty method” that doesn’t offer accurate findings. “The levels of inaccuracy are so high that the footnotes in the report have more information than the data,” he said, likening the report to “a dance of the seven veils.” 

Other concerns 

Why isn’t the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) posting warning signs and building fences to keep people—especially children—out of contaminated soils? 

CAG member Eric Blum asked Cook why the BCDC hadn’t responded to repeated requests from the CAG and DTSC to post signs warning of dangers of toxic exposure to mercury, arsenic and PCBs to Bay Trail users and residents of Marina Bay. 

The dangerous substances are found in Meeker Slough, which separates the Marina Bay housing tract from the UCB Field Station. Currently, part of the area lacks a fence and signs warning of the danger. 

Blum said he drafted a letter the CAG sent to BCDC “just asking that we get signs that make it clear there is danger there,” and to “get fencing to keep children from stepping and playing in things that are fairly toxic. It’s right there in the soil.” 

Cook said she had been unable to get a definitive response from the agency, which must approve all such signs and fences along the shore area. 

BCDC’s Executive Director is Will Travis, who is also chair of Berkeley Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee. 

Waskar Ari Chachaki is an ill-fated victim of the War on Terror. Born in the remote Andean highlands of Bolivia, by age 42 he had earned a Ph.D. from prestigious Georgetown University. Ari, the first member of the pre-Incan Aymara tribe with a doctorate in history from the United States, also helped establish eight indigenous organizations in Bolivia and Peru. He’s an expert in indigenous history, culture and political movements.  

But American students may never benefit from his singular perspective.  

“I’m exiled in my own country,” Ari says from La Paz, where he now resides after eight years living in the United States.  

For the past one-and-a-half years, the U.S. government has refused to grant Ari a visa to teach at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.  

Attorney Michael Maggio says the case is another instance of ideological exclusion—a practice that has grown exponentially since 9/11. Before, these cases “weren’t very common” and “usually involved someone of prominent stature, such as [former Chilean president] Salvador Allende’s widow,” says Maggio, who has fought such cases for more than 20 years and is representing Ari for free.  

Ari first moved to the United States in 1996 on a student visa. He studied, taught, and traveled in and out of the country for eight years with no problems, then returned to Bolivia in late May 2005, for what he expected to be a short stay.  

The University of Nebraska petitioned the government for a professional, H1-B visa for Ari on June 13, 2005.  

They’re still waiting.  

In July, the U.S. Embassy in La Paz called Ari. When he turned up for his appointment, a U.S. representative stamped “cancelled” on all the American visas in his passport, apparently at the request of the State Department.  

Since then, “the world has turned upside down,” Ari said.  

Jones says of the university’s decision to hire him, “he’s a top-notch teacher and scholar. But he also brings his experience as an indigenous person, and that’s unique and rare in academia.... We’re continuing to hold his position.”  

The government will neither officially explain why it’s held up his H1-B visa for so long nor when—if ever—it expects to make a decision.  

“We’re in this speculation chamber,” Jones said. “We’re sympathetic to security issues, but we deserve resolution.... The lack of information and the lack of movement [on Ari’s visa] raise bigger questions: Is this a legitimate process, or is it political?”  

Maggio said that “highly reliable sources” in government told him, off the record, that the matter is “in the hands of the FBI.”  

Earlier this year, the State Department told the Chronicle of Higher Education that Ari’s old visa had been cancelled “under a terrorism-related section of U.S. legislation.”  

A spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), the government branch that processes visa applications, said it won’t give out information on specific cases.  

Ari suspects ideological detractors in Bolivia fingered him as a threat. “If someone wants to ruin a person, they just say they have terrorist connections,” he said, adding that “the election of [Evo Morales,] the first indigenous president in five centuries, has provoked racial confrontation in Bolivia. Some say all those who advocate indigenous rights need to be reigned in.”  

Although Ari is a staunch supporter of indigenous rights, he insists he’s not a separatist. He claims that he’s widely perceived as a moderate in Bolivia—a position supported by many prominent individuals and professional associations that have appealed to the Bush administration on his behalf, including the American Historical Association, the American Association of University Professors, and the Georgetown University Faculty Senate.  

Nonetheless, Charles Hale, president of the Latin American Studies Association, isn’t surprised by Ari’s treatment. “There seems to be an ideological litmus test that’s being selectively applied, particularly to Latin American intellectuals from countries with left-leaning governments,” says Hale, an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Ideological exclusion has become such a problem, he says, that LASA is relocating its next international congress from the United States to Canada for the first time in its history.  

Which law the government is relying on to hold up Ari’s visa remains unclear. The Patriot Act includes a clause that allows authorities to deny entry to those who “endorse or espouse terrorist activity” or persuade others to do so. But attorney Maggio says the practice of barring ideological undesireables from entering the United States is nothing new.  

“What’s new since Sept. 11,” he says, “is the number of people caught in the ideological exclusion sweep, which has expanded dramatically.” Definitions of terrorism have been broadened, standards of proof weakened, secrecy increased, and visas are being denied based on preposterous allegations, according to Maggio.  

The ACLU filed a lawsuit in January challenging the Patriot Act’s ideological exclusion provision as unconstitutionally depriving Americans from hearing perspectives protected as free speech under the First Amendment. Swiss citizen Tariq Ramadan, regarded as one of the world’s top scholars on Islam, was among the plaintiffs. The U.S. government temporarily revoked Ramadan’s visa to teach at the University of Notre Dame in 2004. Last June, a federal court agreed that the government cannot exclude someone based purely on the person’s politics, and ordered CIS to make a final decision on Ramadan’s visa within 90 days. Ramadan was formally denied a visa in September under a separate clause. The reason cited was donations he’d made to Swiss and French charities providing humanitarian support to Palestinians.  

If you sue, Maggio said, you might get answers as to why you’re ostensibly being denied entry into the country. But “you don’t get the visa” and “no one gets into trouble for calling someone a terrorist.”  

In the meantime, Professor Jones worries about the effects on Ari. “This has taken a toll on him,” he says. “He’s in limbo. It’s his job, his career.”  

Call her Madam. Madam Speaker, that is. 

Nancy Pelosi was one of the big winners in this week’s dramatic midterm elections, as the five-term San Francisco Congresswoman is set to become the next Speaker of the House come January, the first woman in U.S. history to assume the post. 

That makes her one of the most important politicians in the world. But San Franciscans that know her best still think of her mostly as a dedicated mother, friend and champion of the Jewish community. 

Naomi Lauter is the national community consultant for AIPAC, the Israel lobby based in Washington, D.C., and was the organization’s first regional director here. She’s worked with AIPAC for 25 years, but she’s known Nancy Pelosi even longer. 

“We were neighbors in Presidio Terrace in 1970,” remembers Lauter. “We were moms together. Our kids played together, and we sat and watched them. The Pelosis would come to our house for Passover and we would go to theirs for Christmas.” 

It was clear to Lauter early on that this daughter of Baltimore mayor and congressman Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. was born for the political arena. “You couldn’t be with her and not recognize how intelligent and politically astute she was,” says Lauter, “and how much feeling she had for people. That was obvious.” 

In the early 1980s, when Lauter worked for the Jewish Community Relations Council, she remembers Pelosi serving on the committee to build San Francisco’s Holocaust Memorial. “That old saying, ‘Some of my best friends are Jewish’ — some of Nancy’s best friends are Jewish,” Lauter says. 

Sam Lauter, a pro-Israel activist in San Francisco and Naomi Lauter’s son, has known Pelosi for nearly 40 years. He was 5 years old when the Pelosis moved into his San Francisco neighborhood. 

“She’s one of the classiest,” most “straightforward people you could ever meet,” Lauter says. “As far as the Jewish community is concerned, she feels our issues in her soul.” 

To illustrate his point, Lauter tells a Pelosi story that has become almost legendary in the Jewish community. 

At an AIPAC members’ luncheon in San Francisco right after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Pelosi was speaking when an alarm sounded. 

“Everybody started getting nervous, scrambling toward the door,” Lauter recalls. One person, though, was reading the words of Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, above the din. It was Pelosi. 

“It actually calmed the crowd. You could see people smiling, saying ‘Wow.’ This wasn’t something done purposefully to show everyone that Nancy Pelosi supports the Jewish community. It actually came from inside her.” 

Amy Friedkin, past president of AIPAC and a member of its board of directors, is a longtime friend. “I’ve known Nancy Pelosi for 25 years,” she says. “I’ve heard her say numerous times that the single greatest achievement of the 20th century was the founding of the state of Israel. She has been a great friend of the U.S.-Israel relationship during her time in Congress and is deeply committed to strengthening that relationship.” 

Friedkin also noted that there is even a soccer field in Haifa, Israel, named for Pelosi’s family (the D’Alesandros). 

Philanthropist and Jewish community leader Richard Goldman has worked with Pelosi for decades, and though he is a registered Republican, he has great respect for the incoming speaker. 

“We’re just very good friends,” he says. “I feel as close to her as anyone in politics. She knows what she’s getting into; she’s a very wise political person.” 

In 2003 Pelosi was a guest at the Goldman Environmental Prize ceremony in San Francisco, delivering the keynote address. The prize is a major project of the Goldman Fund. 

Rabbi Doug Kahn, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council in San Francisco, has known Pelosi since she started representing his district in 1987. Kahn says his group has always had an excellent relationship with her, and he praises her passion for issues that relate to equal opportunity, social justice and peace. 

Kahn says that Pelosi, coming from a city with a liberal political reputation, will face challenges from the liberal segments of the Democratic Party that have criticized Israeli policies. But he is confident that she will be effective in persuading people of the importance of maintaining bipartisan support for Israel. 

Community leader Roselyne Swig counts Pelosi among her closest friends, and believes she’s a natural for her new job. “She’s done a wonderful job of being sensitive to a very diverse population in San Francisco,” she says. “She’s garnered tremendous respect from her peers and built loyalties with people who have worked with her over the years. She’ll bring unity.” 

Tom Dine is another local Jewish leader who knows Pelosi well. The former AIPAC executive director and current CEO of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, Dine has nothing but praise for his friend. 

“When I would see her in D.C. about the pro-Israel agenda,” he recalls, “her first question was, ‘Tell me how I can help you.’ She considers herself kin.” 

Not every San Francisco Jew is so sanguine about Pelosi’s rise. Norman Epstein of the Northern California chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition saw the election as a referendum on Iraq, but he doubts Pelosi will improve the situation. 

“I’m tremendously concerned about her policies,” says Epstein, “given that she and her fellow Democrat leaders have no clue about the nature of the Islamo-fascist enemy. They want to wipe out the free world and Israel. My hope is that as an Israel supporter, she will support John Bolton as U.N. ambassador. He’s been steadfast in supporting the USA and especially Israel. That’s one step we can all agree on.” 

Another thing most observers agree on: Pelosi’s new job will not be a walk in the park. 

“She’s has to lead a party of varied predilections and policies,” says Dine, who understands well the ways of Washington. “She’s going to be the No. 1 Democrat. All eyes will be on her and how she gives direction to the party, and for 2008.” 

Says Lauter: “She’ll be fantastic because she understands where the country is politically. She’s a person who brings people together.” 

Lauter admits that at moments she’s still amazed that her old friend and neighbor is now one of the most powerful women in America. 

“I would look in the window sometimes passing by,” recalls Lauter, “and there she had fed, bathed and put to bed the five kids and then made dinner for her husband. I don’t think people understand what a traditional person she is. Her husband, kids and grandkids are the most important thing to her. She believes in making the world better for her grandchildren.” 

Jennifer Jacobson of JTA contributed to this story.  

Editor’s note: This article was published in the Nov. 10 issue, but did not run in its entirety. This is the complete article with updated vote totals. 

Incumbents Nancy Riddle, Shirley Issel and challenger Karen Hemphill have won the three open seats on the five-member Berkeley Board of Education. 

Leading the pack was school board director Nancy Riddle, who captured 20,798 votes, or 29.77 percent, according to the registrar of voters as of Monday afternoon. 

Karen Hemphill came in second place with 19,778 votes, or 28.31 percent of the total. School board director Shirley Issel finished third with 17,185 votes, or 24.60 percent. 

Riddle, CFO of Monster Cable Products, is currently finishing her first term with the school board. A strong supporter of Measure A—the school parcel tax which won by a landslide in Tuesday’s election—Riddle has been involved in rewriting it since 2003. 

She pledged to work on removing barriers in education and to encourage a transparent and open budget process that reflects the values of the Berkeley community. 

Hemphill’s victory has made her Berkeley’s first African-American school board director in 8 years. An assistant to the city manager in Emeryville, Hemphill has previously been a member of the Berkeley’s Civic Arts Commission and the Commission on the Status of Women. 

Hemphill, who has served on the steering committee for Measure A, thanked Berkeley voters for passing Measure A. 

“We have a lot of work to do,” she said. “With ten years of funding from the school tax measure we can focus on student achievement. We need to get the middle-school kids ready for high school, improve Berkeley High and B-Tech and improve reading comprehension. The board also needs to be a lot more open, and healing needs to take place between the School Board and the Berkeley Federation of Teachers.” 

Barry Fike, president of the teachers’ union, said that teachers were pleased with the election results. 

“The teachers really campaigned hard,” he said. “We endorsed Karen Hemphill and we think she is someone who is going to add a lot to the school board. She is interested in listening to the voice of the teachers as well as the community.” 

Issel, a clinical social worker, has served on the school board for eight years. She said she will continue to use her skills as a professional social worker and educational reformer to improve teaching and learning in the district.  

“It is very important for me to continue in the partnership with the Berkeley Integrated Resource Initiative (BIRI), which is an initiative with the Berkeley Alliance,” Issel said. 

“BIRI is like an umbrella under which BUSD, the city of Berkeley and local community organizations work collectively to identify and weave their relative resources to effectively address barriers to learning and to promote healthy development for all Berkeley children. We are now ready to enter the next phase where we hope to focus on kindergartners, which is a key aspect of the achievement gap,” she said. 

First-time candidates David Baggins and Norma Harrison came in fourth and fifth. Baggins won 7,633, or 10.93 percent, and Harrison received 4,287 votes, or 6.14 percent. 

Baggins, a professor of political science at California State University, East Bay, had made school registration one of the main issues of his campaign. 

“This was an opportunity to demonstrate to the district how to run a valid registration system. They say that they have done that which is great. I am sure all the board members who were elected this year will take their job very seriously,” he said. 

Harrison, 71, a realtor and former public school teacher, had never run for public office before. During her campaign, Harrison had emphasized the need for discussions about helping students in Berkeley enjoy school. 

Victory for Measure A 

Measure A, the school parcel tax which renews two existing school measures—Berkeley School Excellence Project (BSEP) and Measure B—won a decisive victory with 29,868 or 79.48 percent of the total votes, as of Monday. 

Both BSEP and Measure B, which expire in June, provide the Berkeley Unified School District with $19.6 million annually, which primarily pays for 30 percent of Berkeley’s classroom teachers and all elementary and middle school libraries and music programs as well as providing school site funds.  

With Measure A passing, the current budget level will now continue.  

Ninety percent of Measure A will fund class size reduction, the school library, music and art, and site enrichment programs which have been authorized and reaffirmed by Berkeley voters since 1986. 

If Measure A had failed, the schools would have lost 25 percent of their budget, which would have resulted in the elimination of 30 percent of the teachers, libraries, the music program and a lot more. 

BUSD Superintendent Michele Lawrence told the Planet that she was relieved with the results. 

“I am ecstatic that our community once again gives this endorsement for our public schools. I look forward to working with our confident and cohesive board on improving the school district,” she said.  

School Board candidate Harrison said that she was not enthusiastic about Measure A because it did not support the kind of programs her campaign had endorsed. 

“If it goes on funding the same institutions again and again instead of experimenting with new ideas, such as creating forums for discussion and allowing students of all age groups to work together, then it will not help our children to enjoy what they learn,” she said. 

Although Measure A had been supported by every major organization, elected official and candidate for office in Berkeley, with the exception of Harrison, it was opposed by various groups such as the Council of Neighborhood Associations, the Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations, Berkeleyans Against Soaring Taxes and Berkeleyans for School Management Access Accountability Responsiveness and Transparency.

Berkeley School Board president Terry Doran will be retiring at the end of the BUSD meeting on Wednesday evening. 

Doran will be honored by the Berkeley Federation of Teachers and given a proclamation by Mayor Tom Bates at a special gathering in the Council Chambers between 6 to 7 p.m. on Wednesday. 

Doran has been with the school district since 1966. He served as a teacher and department head at Berkeley High School until his retirement from teaching in 1998. He has been department chair for the Art Department, and helped develop it into the Visual and Performing Arts Department.  

He then ran successfully for the Board of Education, where he has sat for the past eight years.  

Doran has also served in the Berkeley Federation of Teachers where he has held every office except president. He has also been advisor to the BHS Yellow Jacket newspaper for five years. 

It’s back to the vision thing Wednesday night for the citizens panel helping formulate a new plan for downtown Berkeley. 

The Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee will meet at 7 p.m. to hear what visions members have formulated to serve as guideposts for planning in the recently expanded downtown area. 

Committee members broke off a discussion of detailed planning concepts two weeks ago because they said they felt they hadn’t given enough attention to formulating an overall vision for the future of the city center.  

Planning staff under Matt Taecker, the consultant hired to formulate the plan, will present a synthesis of the essays that members drafted after the earlier session. 

The plan and the larger guidelines resulted from a city lawsuit challenging university plans that include the addition of a million square feet of UC Berkeley within the downtown area. 

In addition to describing their visions for the downtown, committee members will hear an update on the plans by the university and a Boston hotelier to build a high-rise hotel and conference center at the northeast corner of Shattuck Avenue and Center Street. 

Carpenter & Company is developing plans for a complex at the site that now houses a Bank of America branch. Condominiums will also included in the project, which will become the tallest building constructed in downtown Berkeley in recent decades. 

The meeting begins at 7 p.m. on the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. at Martin Luther King Jr. Way.

The cities of Berkeley and Oakland teamed up Monday to host a one-stop service fair called Project Homeless Connect. 

Targeted at the transient adult homeless population, the event coincided with the opening of the Berkeley-Oakland-Alameda County 100-bed winter shelter at the Oakland Army Base. 

With rain falling, 500 homeless people turned up at the Howie Harp Center in Oakland for hot meals, haircuts, laundry services and other forms of assistance. 

Philip Mangano, executive director of the Federal United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, and Oakland City Councilmember Nancy Nadel praised the Bay Area for taking the lead in collaborating among cities, counties and the federal government on projects. 

Modeled on a similar project in San Francisco, Homeless Connect brought together 42 human service providers who provided medical and dental services, sign-ups for General Assistance, Medi-Cal and food stamps, jobs and job training, referrals to shelters, transitional housing and drug and alcohol programs and informational legal services among others. 

“Since most of the homeless population is transient between Berkeley and Oakland, the City of Berkeley proposed to the City of Oakland that we collaborate on this together,” said Julie Sinai, senior aide to Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, who worked on the project with Jane Metcalfe and Andrew Wicker of Berkeley’s Homeless Commission. 

“We worked closely with Oakland to bring together city and county government, UC Berkeley, social, mental, educational and health services under one roof,” Sinai said. “Service providers and mobile homeless outreach vans helped tremendously to connect the homeless with this program.” 

Dana Perez St. Denis, spokesperson for the Oakland Department of Human Services, said, “Five hundred men and women got access to eye-glasses, foot-care, massages, showers, drug and alcohol counseling and many other services. We signed sixty people up for lifelong medical. We also gave out warm coats, sleeping bags, tents and hygiene kits which will help people to stay warm. The hot items of the day were the meals and the clothes but it was the massages which made them feel really cared for.” 

The Oakland Army base building is being prepared for use and will be opened as a winter shelter for the homeless on Nov. 20. People staying at the winter shelter will be treated to a sit-down Thanksgiving Dinner at the Marriott Convention Center. 

St. Denis added that the project provided opportunities for the homeless to get into transitional housing which laid the foundation for either returning home or finding permanent placements.  

Oakland conducted two similar projects in the past which helped more than 500 homeless people. 

Berkeley held its first Youth Connect program in April which attracted over 50 of the city’s transient homeless youth. The city will be hosting its second Youth Connect program on Dec. 4 in collaboration with the Youth Emergency Assistance Hostel (YEAH!) situated in the premises of the Lutheran Church on 1744 University Ave. 

YEAH!’s doors will be opening to the homeless youth for winter shelter on Nov. 20.  

Metcalfe told the Planet that young people often avoided adult shelters. 

Started by four Berkeley women in the fall of 2002, YEAH! provides seasonal shelter to Berkeley’s homeless youth, along with hot showers, peanut butter sandwiches, and cough syrups.  

SAN ELIZARIO, Texas—Residents of this hardscrabble town on the Mexican border are feeling jumpy and under siege. Since 9/11, border immigration enforcement and drug interdiction have been swept into the war on terror, with chilling effects. 

One recent night an armed skybox with a night-vision camera loomed over backyards, manned by a soldier returned from Iraq near the Kuwait border. His partner packed a Beretta, with a couple of ropes of extra ammunition around his neck. They are among 6,000 National Guard soldiers sent to the border in President Bush’s Operation Jump Start. 

At Ray Carrillo’s welding yard, neighbors talk about the Guard. They also talk about citizen militias like the Minutemen—a local one is called the Border Regulators—which have appeared. And they talk about the sheriff, who detained more than 800 undocumented persons at roadblocks earlier this year, and turned them over to the Border Patrol. Deputies even asked U.S. citizens who looked Mexican to present papers, according to residents who say they were asked. 

Border resident 

One day during the sheriff’s roadblocks, Carrillo, a U.S. Navy veteran, stood amid machinery and tankers under repair and barking dogs. He pulled out his cell phone and called the Spanish-language TV station in El Paso as neighbors and workmen were being picked off. It was a cry for help or at least for some attention from the wider world. 

“I’ve lived here 24 years, and there’s been nothing like this before,” says Carrillo, a 36-year-old father of two. 

This part of San Elizario began as a rough colonia, unimproved lots where families have seen water come to houses only in the last few years. Progress in making colonias a decent place to live has come hard, but now people are scared. Households have always been a mix of citizens, legal residents and undocumented relatives. In other colonias east of El Paso—with names like Agua Dulce, Sparks, Horizon, Montana Vista—residents say during the months of the sheriff’s traffic stops they brought food and diapers to houses where fathers had been taken by authorities and mothers didn’t dare go into the streets. Priests reported churches vacant. A clinic usually bursting with the uninsured stood empty of families, the sick unattended. 

Today those who are undocumented, and relatives, remain uneasy. Around San Elizario the occasional La-Z-Boy or old sofa in a yard sits empty. “People used to walk around more, used to walk down along the edge of the cotton field over there along the river for exercise, late in the day,” says mechanic Jessie Rubio, 46, a friend of Carrillo’s. Rubio’s 11-year-old son, Jose Luis, tinkered with a car engine, and a lone, white egret was the only other creature visible in the expanse to the line that marks the border. 

“What if a Minuteman mistakes me and shoots me?” Rubio asked. Then there’s the Guard. “They can make a mistake with somebody taking a stroll, because now there’s too many guns and too many people. Somebody will say, ‘I’m an American, you can’t tell me what to do,’ and there’ll be trouble. Sometimes you get mad when you get asked so much for papers. You feel racism starting to climb. You can feel the tension.” 

National Guard and Border Patrol spokesmen reiterate that soldiers have authority only to call in the Border Patrol, not to arrest suspicious persons. Yet on the ground, fear of running into a soldier and being challenged is greater than running into a Border Patrol agent. Partly this is because agents are familiar, but the soldiers are not. Partly it’s because residents see soldiers at war on TV every day, pictured amid explosions and in combat, then, disconcertingly, see them behind their back yards. 

Residents say they are concerned that soldiers who are trained for war, or recently returned from war, may have a mind-set that doesn’t belong in the neighborhood. Veterans Affairs Secretary R. James Nicholson told The Washington Post in October 2005 that 12 percent of returning troops from Iraq and Afghanistan seen at Veterans Administration facilities suffered from some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder. 

Suzanne Dennis, who served in Baghdad as a public affairs specialist with the Texas National Guard, dismisses anxiety about stressed-out soldiers on the line. “They just switch gears. If you can’t switch, you don’t belong there.” 

Nevertheless, for those in houses near the line, living in the zone now brings a sensation of the ground shifting under their feet. “It just clicked,” says Carrillo about the moment when the roadblocks were in full swing and the Guard was beginning to arrive. “It’s illegal to ask somebody for papers without suspicion of a crime. It’s not right for people to be afraid to come out of their houses.” His wife wants to move, but Carrillo is deciding to stick around, staying in touch with rights groups, monitoring, listening, “protecting my rights, my kids, my neighbors.” 

Neighbor Jessie Rubio votes, and says he is pleased when the Border Patrol busts drug runners, who, he says, “could hurt my son.” But Rubio feels less ownership of his neighborhood now, questions why it’s feeling like a front line and senses danger. “In a war situation you’re looking at people and asking, ‘Friend or foe?’” 

Locals sometimes speak of an incident that happened almost a decade ago, but whose memory remains fresh. 

In 1997 Marines in an anti-drug joint task force supporting the Border Patrol shot and killed an 18-year-old American named Esequiel Hernandez as he tended family goats in rural Redford, Texas. The Marines were never charged. 

“You’re getting people coming in from different parts, the Guard and Minutemen, and here we all look the same,” worried Rubio. “In a war zone they don’t know who is who.” 

New American Media Contributing Editor Mary Jo McConahay reports on the border for The Texas Observer. This is part two of two; the Planet published part one on Oct. 13.

More than half a million dollars and piles of glossy mailers later, campaign weary incumbent mayoral and council candidates—Mayor Tom Bates and Council-members Gordon Wozniak, Kriss Worthington, Dona Spring and Linda Maio—will retake their old seats on the familiar council dais. 

With the exception of a tight District 7 race where the business community’s candidate George Beier outspent Worthington by more than three-to-one—closer to four-to-one if you add the Chamber of Commerce Political Action Committee’s contributions to the effort—the incumbents cruised to landslide victories.  

Mayor’s Race 

Mayor Tom Bates outdid former Planning Commission Chair Zelda Bronstein with 17,960-to-8,869 votes, or 63-to-31 percent. Zachary Running Wolf picked up 1,341 votes, or about 5 percent, and Christian Pecaut got 368 votes, slightly more than 1 percent.  

Absentee ballots the county received by mail Tuesday and those hand-delivered to polling places remain outstanding. Regi-strar of voter spokesperson Guy Ashley said he didn’t know how many of these there are. 

Mayoral challenger and former Planning Commission Chair Zelda Bronstein’s vigorous but underfunded campaign focused much attention on a closed-door lawsuit settlement agreement between UC Berkeley and the city. 

At the mayor’s victory party, Bates’ aide Julie Sinai criticized the Bronstein campaign, accusing the candidate of pursuing a narrow agenda. 

“The opposition forgot that land use and UC are not the only two things vital to Berkeley,” Sinai told the Daily Planet. “People move to Berkeley from all over because it’s a compassionate place. That’s more important than what gets and what doesn’t get landmarked. They move here for its vitality and its recreational, healthcare and educational facilities. It’s important to have a broad vision.” 

Also at his Tuesday night victory party, Bates talked about “healing” on the council. In a phone interview Thursday, he elaborated: “I believe we’ve turned a page,” he said. “We’ll pull people together on new challenges.” 

That includes passing the second reading of the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance (the ordinance approved by the council on its first reading was pulled from further council consideration when Measure J qualified for the ballot), the Creeks Ordinance, funding the Gilman Street ball fields and more, Bates said. 

Differences, however, won’t disappear, he said, “Some people will fight to the death for their point of view.” 

District 1 

Councilmember Linda Maio, who won her race against Merrilie Mitchell with 2,636 votes to Mitchell’s 817 (76-to-23 percent), said in a phone interview Thursday that she wasn’t so sure that congeniality could return to the council. 

“I’m hoping we can make repairs,” she said, noting, however, there is another race for mayor in just two years and the enmity could smolder. “The atmosphere is still charged,” she said. 

District 7 and 8 

At the joint after-election party for Worthington, District 8 challenger student Jason Overman and the No on I campaign, volunteers, many returning from last-minute get-out-the-vote efforts, munched campaign cuisine—chips, pretzels, somebody brought in a pie—and gazed at a giant TV screen linked to a laptop computer.  

The final tallies that night showed a close race with Worthington winning 1,464 votes, or 52 percent, and Beier pulling in 1,333 votes, or 47 percent.  

While waiting for results, the group of several dozen people—some of them also stopping in at either Bronstein’s or Bates’ parties—had plenty of time to rehash the campaign, especially condemning negative mailers from the Chamber of Commerce PAC and District 7 challenger Willard Neighborhood Association President Beier. 

“It’s very disheartening to see how money has precedent over values,” said Worthington’s student coordinator, Candace Nisby, UC Berkeley political science major. 

Nisby said in the end it was Worthington’s track record, especially his drive to get students involved in city government and his work for affordable housing, that brought many of the more-than-100 volunteers into the campaign office. 

Worthington’s support for the strikers was the impetus for Honda strike organizer Harry Brill to volunteer for the campaign. While campaigning, Brill said people told him: “If they had a problem, they’d just call Kriss and he’d be over on his bike.” 

Brill said he understood that while Worthington got backing for his voting record, support went well beyond that. “He’s a different kind of politician, an advocate, an activist,” Brill said. 

Worthington said he thought the negative campaigning depressed voter turnout. Pointing especially to the student precinct located in the UC Berkeley Unit 3 dormitory where 70 people voted, Worthington said that only 30 among them voted in the City Council race—20 votes went to Worthington and 10 to Beier. 

“There is some significant impact of the massive amounts of money; and also the massive amounts of misinformation confuse people,” Worthington said, contending that he had to spend much of his time correcting the record Beier and the Chamber PAC attempted, in a barrage of mailers, to distort.  

“Most of us know what the solution is: public financing of elections so that we don’t have to raise such massive amounts of money,” Worthington said. 

Reached while packing up his campaign headquarters, Beier said he won’t concede the race until the votes are all in (nor has Worthington declared victory), but he said he has little hope that the votes will turn in his favor.  

He interpreted the low vote count as a large number of votes still uncounted at the county.  

Asked if he would do anything differently in a future race, Beier said he didn’t think so. “I almost won,” he said. “The hardest part was the Daily Planet coming out against me early, without even an editorial interview.”  

He said he had tried as hard as he possibly could, knocking on 2,200 doors in the district. “I raised as much money as I possible could,” said Beieir who contributed a $45,000 personal loan to the effort. “You go big or stay home,” he said, quoting a friend. 

“I still do admire Kriss Worthington,” he added. “He ran a good race. We just have different visions.” 

While Overman had the endorsements of a number of local Democratic Clubs, the Alameda County Democratic Central Committee, the Alameda County AFL-CIO and many more, his campaign offered little competition to the well-known moderate incumbent Wozniak, to whom he lost with Wozniak picking up 1,935 votes to his 1,098. Wozniak won 64-to-36 percent.  

“I couldn’t let the prospect of failure stare me down,” said Overman, speaking at the election night party. 

Overman, who continues to retain his seat on the Rent Stabilization Board, was outspent three-to-one by Wozniak. “Any time you run against wealth, the cards are stacked against you,” he said. 

Wozniak shared his victory party with District 7 challenger Beier, who had spent more that $100,000 on his campaign and who had been additionally supported in his efforts by the Chamber of Commerce attack ads on Worthington. On Thursday, while celebrating his victory, Wozniak pointed out that Beier could still win the District 7 seat, as all the votes were yet to be counted. 

(Because in early returns, Beier won only two out of 13 precincts—the one in which his house is located and the precinct next to that—Worthington supporters said on election night that they felt certain of victory.) 

District 4 

Popular District 4 Councilmember Dona Spring won her district with 2,185 votes or 70 percent, knocking bank manager Raudel Wilson out of the race. Wilson got 878 votes or 28.43 percent. 

“I am overjoyed,” Spring said, underscoring that her landslide win was despite the Chamber of Commerce PAC-funded hit pieces that attempted to tie her to the closing of downtown businesses.  

“It demonstrates the intelligence of the voters in District 4,” she said. “The fliers with all the lies didn’t impact them. They saw through the lies.” 

Looking to the future, Spring, who endorsed neither Bates nor one of the challengers, told the Planet, “I am hoping Tom and I can get off on a better footing.” 

While Spring and Worthington pointed to excessive Chamber PAC expenditures that funded hit pieces against them (about $100,000 that included expenditures for the defeat of Measure J), others faulted the Daily Planet for its one-time home-delivery of newspapers throughout the city, recommending Spring, Worthington, Overman and Bronstein. 

“There were endorsements on the front page and it was filled with political rantings on the inside,” said Jill Martinucci, aide to Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, but speaking for herself. 

“I felt like it was advocacy, not journalism,” she said, underscoring that she was not claiming the home delivery of the paper was illegal, but as a political contribution that is not reported “it crossed the line,” she said. 

Daily Planet Executive Editor Becky O’Malley, however, called the home delivery “an advertising stunt.” The decision was made by publisher Michael O’Malley and Deputy Publisher Richard Hylton, she said.  

“It was for advertising purposes,” O’Malley said, noting it was the largest paper the Daily Planet has produced. “It was a good paper. We wanted to show it off,” she said. 

Reporter Riya Bhattacharjee contributed to this story.

Though Berkeley voters rejected Measure J Tuesday, backers say they’ll go back to the electorate if city councilmembers adopt the new landmarks ordinance they passed on first reading in July. 

“We already have the forms for a referendum,” said Roger Marquis, one of the two principal sponsors of the failed ballot measure. 

Measure J, which would have preserved the city’s existing Landmarks Preservation Ordi-nance (LPO), was defeated in an election that pitted big money from developer pockets and the backing of Mayor Tom Bates and a City Council majority against local preservationists, neighborhood activists and Green Party members. 

When the dust settled, the initiative had managed to garner 11,588 votes—or 42.8 percent of the total—to the 15,470 votes—or 57.2 percent for the opposition. 

An update of the LPO designed to resolve legal conflicts, Measure J was proposed by Marquis and Laurie Bright, who began gathering signatures after the council passed an alternative ordinance prepared by the city attorney’s office at the direction of Mayor Bates and Councilmember Laurie Capitelli. 

Darrel de Tienne, who represents several major developers who gave to the anti-J campaign, said the biggest reason they opposed the initiative was that they wanted to support the Request for Determination (RFD) provision of the Bates/Capitelli ordinance. 

In that new process, a property owner would hire a historical consultant from a list vetted by the LPC. The consultant would then review the property’s architecture and history and prepare a report. Once the document is filed, the LPC has two meetings, or 60 days, to move to landmark the structure. If the LPC fails to act, the public has an additional 21 days to file a landmarking petition. 

If no action is taken by the commission or the public, all further landmarking efforts are banned during a two-year “safe harbor” during which the developer would be free to proceed with a project. 

“That’s the important thing for the developer,” said de Tienne. “It means the process moves faster, which is a reasonable thing.” 

But preservationists charged that RFDs could swamp the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the council-appointed body that administers the ordinance, while blind-siding neighborhoods in a process that would deny the chance to act to save endangered landmarks.  

BBG money 

The anti-J campaign was run by Business for Better Government (BBG), the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce Political Action Committee, which also bankrolled mailers supporting two losing City Council candidates, George Beier and Raudel Wilson. 

De Tienne’s BBG-donor clients included: 

• Wareham Development—the major office and industrial builder in West Berkeley—which gave $10,000; 

• Seagate Properties, co-developer of a nine-story condo project on Center Street, with $5,250; 

• Douglas Herst, who is planning a major development at his Peerless Lighting factory in West Berkeley, with $5,000, and 

• Aquatic Park Science Center, LLC, a Corte Madera corporation formed to develop the office/industrial complex of the same name in West Berkeley, which gave $500. 

All of the funds were earmarked to oppose Measure J, and none was to be spent on the Beier and Wilson campaigns, de Tienne said. 

Anti-J donors resembled a Who’s Who of the Berkeley development community, with a concentration in firms and individuals with projects in West Berkeley, enabling the chamber PAC to spend at least $60,534 as of Nov. 3 on a barrage of opposition mailers, flyers and signs. 

Just who received their funds remains a mystery, because unlike the Measure J proponents, BBG listed only the amounts spent—sometimes even offering estimates instead of actual expeditures—without saying which firms or individuals conducted the campaign. 

Unanswered question 

There’s also a second, unresolved issue, and that involves the source of funds that bankrolled a massive telephone polling operation earlier in the year that was targeted at developing arguments identical to those later used by the chamber PAC in its campaign. 

One estimate placed the cost of that poll at more than $50,000, but no individual or PAC has claimed the expense for the operation. 

One question targeted the structure of merit bestowed on a “West Berkeley restaurant” that pollsters said had stalled a profitable development—an apparent reference to the designation of the Celia’s Mexican Restaurant building at 2040 Fourth St., the site of a proposed five-story mixed-use and condo project. 

The Celia’s designation was the subject of the first of the BBG mailers. 

The city Fair Campaign Practices Committee has opened an investigation into the poll, which was conducted by employees of Communications Center Incorporated, a 19-year-old polling firm with calling centers in Washington, D.C., Spokane, Wash., and Lakeland, Fl. 

Failure to report spending on polls conducted for political campaigns is a violation of state and city election laws. 

Measure J support 

The Landmarks Preservation Ordinance 2006 Update PAC, by contrast, took in about $18,000, with its largest contributions coming from the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA) with $2,500 and BAHA consultant and LPC member Lesley Emmington, who donated $1,356 and loaned an additional $4,100 to the campaign.  

Bright said a core group of about two dozen volunteers worked regularly on the campaign committee, “and members of (Berkeley’s) Green Party did a lot of work independently, raising some money and doing some of the literature. But the BBG had the bigger bucks and was able to conduct a mass mailing campaign that far surpassed the effort of Measure J. supporters,” he said. 

“I wasn’t entirely surprised by the outcome,” Bright said. “I’m a realist. I know negative campaigning works—that’s why they do it. But I’m proud we ran an open and honest campaign. I can’t say the same for them.” 

One surprise, he said, came in the absentee ballots, which reflected an even stronger negative vote than did ballots cast on election day. “I’m not sure why that was,” Bright said. 

The future 

The city councilmembers passed the first reading of the Bates/Capitelli ordinance in July, and only a second reading and vote remain. 

The real question for Laurie Bright is whether the council will simply pass the measure on second reading on Nov. 28, “or whether the chamber and the developers will pressure them to give up even more.” 

Marquis said Measure J supporters are weighing options, including a possible referendum challenge that would take the Bates/Capitelli ordinance to the public for a vote. 

Another challenge could be waged in court, in the form of a challenge to the RFD process, which Marquis said violates several provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act.

With Alameda County operating its new Sequoia voting system for the first time in last Tuesday’s general election, the county experienced its share of opening  

day glitches in the midst of  

what appeared to be a generally smooth operation. 

Close to 177,000 voters cast their ballots at Alameda County polls on election day. Another 129,000 chose to vote by absentee ballot. 

Earlier this fall, during a media tour of the county’s election headquarters, Acting Alameda County Registrar of Voters Dave Mac-donald told reporters that the Sequoia optical scanning system would be operated under the conditions of a secret ballot, with poll workers having no opportunity to view how a voter’s individual ballot had been cast. 

Beginning at Tuesday’s election, Alameda County purchased optical scanners for each of the county’s 1,219 precincts. 

According to Macdonald, voters were supposed to be given their ballots inside a manila folder and that the voters themselves would be given the opportunity to feed the ballots into the scanners once the ballots had been marked. If assistance was needed from the poll workers to put the ballot into the scanner, Macdon-ald said, the ballot itself would be hidden from the poll worker’s view within the manila folder, making it impossible for the poll worker to see how the ballot had been marked. 

A survey of voting by Daily Planet workers at Berkeley precincts during Tuesday’s election, however, showed that procedure was not universally followed. 

At the Frances Albrier Com-munity Center in San Pablo Park, reporter Judith Scherr reported that after she had voted, the poll worker requested the voter’s two ballots (one for candidates, one for ballot measures). 

The poll worker tore off the receipts from the two ballots, gave them to Scherr, and then the poll worker fed the ballots into the scanner. Scherr said that she was not told that she had the right to feed the ballots into the scanner herself. Scherr said she was not provided with a folder to hide her ballot. 

That was the same case as reported by managing editor Michael Howerton at Berkeley Fire Station No. 3 on Russell Street, with the poll worker taking the unhidden ballot from the voter and feeding it into the scanner. 

But Planet executive editor Becky O’Malley said that at the same precinct, the worker took her ballot and tore off the receipts “while making a big show of not looking at the ballot itself” and then gave the ballot back to O’Malley to feed into the scanner. 

And at the Prudential California Realty on Tunnel Road, arts and calendar editor Anne Wagley said that the voting procedure worked as Macdonald had described it, with Wagley tearing off the receipts and feeding the ballots into the scanner herself “while the poll worker stood away.” 

None of the Planet staff reported that the poll workers involved appeared to be attempting to read their ballots. 

Spot checks of Berkeley precincts during Tuesday’s elections showed similar discrepancies in how secret the voters ballots were maintained. 

At the Black Repertory Theater on Adeline Street, which housed ballots for two precincts, voters at one polling place were allowed to drop in their ballots without assistance, while workers at the second polling place were taking the ballots from the voters and doing the depositing themselves. 

At the Veterans Building on Center Street, which also housed two precincts, voters were allowed to cast their own ballots in both precincts, but at one ballot box, the worker stood and watched the voter put the ballot in, the ballot and its markings easily visible. 

At Washington School and both of Longfellow School’s precincts, voters cast their own ballots without observation by poll workers. At the Berkeley Unified School District administrative headquarters in the old City Hall, the poll worker did the scanning for the voter, but did it from a ballot kept inside the folder, so that the votes were not visible. 

During the tallying of the ballots themselves at Alameda County election headquarters at the Registrar of Voters office in the basement of the county courthouse Tuesday night, however, the operation was managed with military precision and attention to detail. 

At the end of the day’s voting, poll workers placed into red canvas bags all counted ballots cast at their polls, the electronic tally voting cards from the scanners and electronic touchscreen machines, the uncounted absentee ballots dropped off at the polling place that day, and the precinct roster sheets showing which voters had signed in and voted. 

The precinct bags were then driven to 27 relay stations set up around the county where workers checked to see if all of the necessary information was present. From there, the collected precinct bags were driven to the courthouse in Oakland. To keep track of what had come in, workers scanned in the barcodes on the roster sheets before they were deposited in plastic bins. The electronic tally cards were scanned twice—once when they first came out of the red bags, and then again after the vote tallies had been downloaded into the registrar’s main computer. 

At the height of the counting near midnight some 35 workers were busy at various vote counting tasks in the courthouse basement, not enough to keep the red canvas bags from backing up in double lines on a table while cars continued to roll in with more bags. 

Even with the checking at the relay stations that was supposed to ensure that all of the items were in the bags, the checkoff system at the courthouse identified several precincts where either electronic tally cards or roster sheets had not been included with the ballots, and during the night’s tally, phone calls went out from the courthouse to several county locations to retrieve them. 

Acting Registrar MacDonald said that all of the electronic tally cards, physical ballots, and roster sheets would be kept in the county’s secured warehouse for 22 months following Tuesday’s election. 

Everybody was not satisfied with the conduct of the courthouse basement counting. 

Two computer experts appointed by the Democratic Central Committee of Alameda County to monitor the voting process—Jerry Berkman and Jim Soper—as well as a representative of the Wellstone Democratic Club Voting Rights Task Force—Donald Goldmacher, Wellstone—complained that they were not allowed to enter the room where county employees were actually downloading the vote tallies from the electronic cards into the county’s main computer. While the computer tally room was visible through a wall of windows, the computers themselves were turned away from the windows, so that the computer screens were not visible to outside observers. 

Soper said that California law mandated that all aspects of the counting process be visible to observers, and that the registrar’s decision to bar observers from the counting room was a violation of the law. “We want full transparency in the vote-counting process,” Soper said. “That’s the cornerstone of democracy.” 

Soper, Goldmacher, and Berkman had a lively discussion at some length with ROV spokesperson Guy Ashley, asking for the right to enter the counting room. Ashley at one point said that the issue had been discussed by telephone with Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, noting that McPherson had said that the setup of the counting room was at the discretion of local officials. The Secretary of State “didn’t say he had a problem with keeping observers out the counting room,” Ashley said. “Don’t you think he would have said something if he thought this was a violation of the law?” 

Soper said that voting activists are considering filing legal action against the county to attempt to open up all aspects of the counting process in future Alameda County elections. 

Incumbents Nancy Riddle, Shirley Issel and challenger Karen Hemphill have won the three open seats on the five-member Berkeley Board of Education. 

Leading the pack was school board director Nancy Riddle, who captured 15,900 votes, or 29.56 percent, as of Thursday afternoon, according to the registrar of voters, with last minute absentee and provisional ballots still to be counted. 

Karen Hemphill came in second place with 15,113 votes, or 28.10 percent of the total. School board director Shirley Issel finished third with 13.212 votes, or 24.56 percent. 

Riddle, CFO of Monster Cable Products, is currently finishing her first term with the school board. A strong supporter of Measure A—the school parcel tax which won by a landslide in Tuesday’s election—Riddle has been involved in rewriting it since 2003. 

She pledged to work on removing barriers in education and to encourage a transparent and open budget process that reflects the values of the Berkeley community. 

Hemphill’s victory has made her Berkeley’s first African-American school board director in 8 years. An assistant to the city manager in Emeryville, Hemphill has previously held posts in the Berkeley’s Civic Arts Commis-sion and the Commission on the Status of Women. 

Hemphill, who has served on the steering committee for Measure A, thanked Berkeley voters for passing Measure A. 

“We have a lot of work to do,” she said. “With ten years of funding from the school tax measure we can focus on student achievement. We need to get the middle-school kids ready for high school, improve Berkeley High and B-Tech and improve reading comprehension. The board also needs to be a lot more open and healing needs to take place between the School Board and the Berkeley Federation of Teachers.” 

Barry Fike, president of the teachers’ union, said that teachers were pleased with the election results. 

“The teachers really campaigned hard,” he said. “We endorsed Karen Hemphill and we think she is someone who is going to add a lot to the school board. She is interested in listening to the voice of the teachers as well as the community.” 

Issel, a clinical social worker, has served on the school board for eight years. She said she will continue to use her skills as a professional social worker and educational reformer to improve teaching and learning in the district.  

“It is very important for me to continue in the partnership with the Berkeley Integrated Resource Initiative (BIRI), which is an initiative with the Berkeley Alliance,” Issel said. 

“BIRI is like an umbrella under which BUSD, the city of Berkeley and local community organizations work collectively to identify and weave their relative resources to effectively address barriers to learning and to promote healthy development for all Berkeley children. We are now ready to enter the next phase where we hope to focus on kindergartners, which is a key aspect of the achievement gap,” she said. 

First-time candidates David Baggins and Norma Harrison came in fourth and fifth. Baggins won 6,047, or 11.24 percent, and Harrison received 3,366 votes, or 6.26 percent. 

Baggins, a professor of political science at California State University, East Bay, had made school registration one of the main issues of his campaign. 

“This was an opportunity to demonstrate to the district how to run a valid registration system. They say that they have done that which is great. I am sure all the board members who were elected this year will take their job very seriously,” he said. 

Harrison, 71, a realtor and former public school teacher, had never run for public office before. During her campaign, Harrison had emphasized the need for discussions about helping students in Berkeley enjoy school. 

Victory for Measure A 

Measure A, the school parcel tax which renews two existing school measures—Berkeley School Excellence Project (BSEP) and Measure B—won a decisive victory with 79.05 percent of the total vote, as of Thursday. 

Both BSEP and Measure B, which expire in June, provide the Berkeley Unified School District with $19.6 million annually, which primarily pays for 30 percent of Berkeley’s classroom teachers and all elementary and middle school libraries and music programs as well as providing school site funds.  

With Measure A passing, the current budget level will now continue.  

Ninety percent of Measure A will fund class size reduction, the school library, music and art, and site enrichment programs which have been authorized and reaffirmed by Berkeley voters since 1986. 

If Measure A had failed, the schools would have lost 25 percent of their budget, which would have resulted in the elimination of 30 percent of the teachers, libraries, the music program and a lot more. 

BUSD Superintendent Michele Lawrence told the Planet that she was relieved with the results. 

“I am ecstatic that our community once again gives this endorsement for our public schools. I look forward to working with our confident and cohesive board on improving the school district,” she said.  

School Board candidate Harrison said that she was not enthusiastic about Measure A because it did not support the kind of programs her campaign had endorsed. 

“If it goes on funding the same institutions again and again instead of experimenting with new ideas, such as creating forums for discussion and allowing students of all age groups to work together, then it will not help our children to enjoy what they learn,” she said. 

Although Measure A had been supported by every major organization, elected official and candidate for office in Berkeley, with the exception of Harrison, it was opposed by various groups such as the Council of Neighborhood Associations, the Berkeley Alliance of Neighborhood Associations, Berkeleyans Against Soaring Taxes and Berkeleyans for School Management Access Accountability Responsiveness and Transparency.

While Albany’s going to pot, Richmond may be getting a new mayor and El Cerrito is in for the same old, same old. 

By a 245-vote margin, voters in Albany decided to add a marijuana dispensary to the city’s list of business. 

Measure D, which won 52.7 percent of the votes (2,356 yes to 2,111 no), allows for the operation of one dispensary under rules to be codified by the city council. 

Voters were more enthusiastic about Measure C, a $5 million bond issue to build a new Emergency Operations Center and add sustainable features to the civic center complex. Yes votes of 3,369 accounting for 75.7 percent of the total, contrasted with the 1,081 voters turning thumbs down. 

The Albany City Council race pitted two opponents of a proposed upscale mall at Golden Gate Fields against two candidates who said they were more open to waterfront development. 

At least one of the anti-mall candidates has emerged a clear winner, with Marge Atkinson the top vote-getter with 2,601—32.5 percent of the total. She ran on a slate with Joanne Wile, who currently holds second place with 2,078 votes. Trailing close behind is Caryl O’Keefe, who garnered 1,969 votes—a 109-vote margin that could change as remaining ballots are counted. 

The clear loser was Francesco Papalia, with 1,569 votes. 

City Attorney Robert Zweben was reelected in an uncontested race. 

Richmond 

Though severely outspent by incumbent Mayor Irma Anderson, City Councilmember and Green Party member Gayle McLaughlin is claiming victory in the fight to become Richmond’s chief executive. 

Anderson, who spent over $100,000 and had the backing of RichPAC (the Richmond Chamber of Commerce Political Action Committee), the Council of Industries and ChevronTexaco, the city’s biggest employer, was trailing McLaughlin by less than 200 votes Thursday afternoon—with the challenger ahead 6,243 to 6,051. Gary Bell, in third place, had 4,382 votes. 

While McLaughlin emailed supporters to claim victory Wednesday night, Anderson wasn’t conceding until all the votes were counted, which should occur today, Friday. 

Two incumbents won reelection to city council seats, with Jim Rogers in the lead with 8,023 votes, followed by Maria Viramontes with 7,730. The race was tighter for the third and last opening, with Ludmyrna Lopez at 6,576 votes just ahead of Courtland “Corky” Booze with 6,416. James Jenkins, the fifth place finisher in the field of six, trailed by 2,254 votes. 

The clear loser was incumbent councilmember Richard Griffin, who came in last, trailing Jenkins by 23 votes. 

Incumbent Miriam Walden was the front-runner in a four-way race for three seats on the Albany Board of Education. She ran on a slate with second-place finisher Jamie Calloway. The third winner was David Glasser, who held an unbeatable lead over fourth-place finisher John Kindle. Their respective vote totals were 2,753, 1,985, 1,866 and 11,288. 

El Cerrito 

Both incumbents running for reelection to the El Cerrito City Council won handily in the races for reelection. 

Mayor Sandi Potter came in first in the field of four candidates for the two seats, winning 4,016 votes, or 32.2 percent of the total. Following close behind was Janet Abelson, with 3,075 votes—1,230 votes ahead of third-place candidate David Boisvert. Andrew W. Ting came in last with 2,242.

The defeat of Measure I, a property-owner-backed measure that would have eased conversion of rental units to condominiums, was much easier than No on I coordinator Jesse Arreguin had anticipated. 

“I thought they’d come out with a last-minute stealth campaign for it,” Arreguin said. 

In fact, there was no visible campaign in support of the ballot measure that would have gutted tenant protections when a rental unit was converted into a condominium; it would have also permitted conversion of up to 500 rentals each year. 

Rent board candidates, who ran unopposed, worked with the No on I campaign to defeat the measure 19,758-to-7,136 votes or 73-to-27 percent. 

Notable, however, was that many people skipped the rent board vote —five seats were up for grabs with a slate of five candidates: Howard Chung got 12,475 votes, Chris Kavanagh got 12,320, Dave Blake got 11,746, Lisa Stephens got 10,994 and Pam Webster got 10,438. 

Voters supported Measure H, the advisory measure to impeach the president and vice president, at just slightly lower numbers than they had voted against Measure I—19,513 favored Measure H, while 8,804 opposed it. That’s a 69-to-31 percent victory.  

In San Francisco, the measure to impeach passed at only 59 percent. 

“Some people supported it, but thought it was frivolous to put it on the ballot,” said Geoffrey King, of Constitutional Summer, the student group that organized the push for the local ballot measure. 

King said the most important win was the attention the measure attracted to the crimes the President and Vice-President have allegedly committed.  

Measure G, aimed at reducing Berkeley’s greenhouse gas emissions, got the greatest support of any of the measures or candidates, winning 23,083 votes or 81 percent; 5,259 voters or 19 percent opposed the measure. 

Mayor Tom Bates included support for the measure on his campaign literature and often spoke in favor of it as he stumped for reelection.

In the three major contests in this week’s election for positions in Oakland-area government, voters split the difference, with two incumbents turned out and one incumbent re-elected. 

In City Council District Two, incumbent Pat Kernighan beat challenger Aimee Allison for the third time in a little over a year, winning a full four-year term on the council. 

With last-minute absentee ballots still to be counted, unofficial results had Kernighan with 54.5 percent of the vote to Allison’s 45 percent, an 800 vote margin out of nearly 9,000 votes cast. 

In May of 2005, Kernighan won 28.8 percent of the vote over eight opponents in a special election to succeed Danny Wan, who retired in the middle of his term. Allison came in fourth in that 2005 special election with 14.2 percent of the vote. 

Last June, Kernighan beat Allison again in a three-person race, 46.1 percent to 39.3 percent. Because Kernighan did not get a majority of the vote, the November runoff between the two women was necessary. 

Some observers saw the race as a contest over who would control Oakland City Council: Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, or incoming Mayor Ron Dellums. Some thought that with Allison elected, De La Fuente might be ousted from the powerful position of the council presidency, with a councilmember more favorable to Dellums taking his place. 

However, the question of who Kernighan might support for council president when the council reorganizes next year did not become a major issue in the campaign, and the Oakland Tribune reported this week that she had not decided if she would support De La Fuente for that post. Dellums did not endorse either of the candidates in the District Two election. 

Peralta board, city auditor 

With two Peralta Community College District trustees (Linda Handy and William Riley) winning re-election without opposition, challenger Abel Guillen easily beat incumbent Alona Clifton for the Area 7 trustee seat, 54.6 percent to 44.5 percent. 

With trustee board vice president Bill Withrow of Alameda expected to succeed Handy in the board presidency, Guillen’s election will not provide any shakeup in the Peralta trustee board’s leadership (unlike the Oakland City Council, Peralta trustee officers generally rotate from year to year). However, Guillen has promised to take a more active role than Handy did in the board’s fiscal oversight of the district. 

And as expected, Roland Smith was ousted from the Oakland Auditor’s position, 64 percent to 35 percent, by challenger Courtney Ruby. 

Smith had feuded with outgoing Mayor Jerry Brown and several Councilmembers over critical audits Smith’s office made of city government activities, as well as countercharges that the auditor had mistreated several workers on his staff.

A search for a new Berkeley Library director has begun. 

The search follows a years-long war in which members of the public and the library staff called for the resignation of the former library director Jackie Griffin, and she in response threatened to sue the city if fired before she resigned her post in June 

Thirteen candidates applied for the post, of whom four will go through an elaborate three-day public selection process next week, according to Susan Kupfer, chair of the library Board of Trustees, an appointed body which governs the library. 

On Thursday, after a tour of the main library and one branch, library staff that will include both management and line-staff will interview the candidates individually, Kupfer said. 

On Friday candidates will be interviewed by a panel of librarians from communities surrounding Berkeley and in the afternoon, they will speak to community representatives that will include two councilmembers—Linda Maio and Betty Olds—representatives from the Friends of the Library and the library foundation, School Board member John Selawsky, and Jan Garrett from the Center for Independent Living. 

The library advocacy group SuperBOLD (Berkeleyans Organizing for Library Defense) was invited to send a representative, but has declined to do so, arguing that the public was left out of the original search process. “The whole (search) procedure is outrageous,” said Jane Welford of SuperBOLD. Selection of the “head-hunter,” Dubberly Garcia Associates, was done without public input, she said.  

On Saturday, the general public will be able to question the candidates in a session that is scheduled to run approximately from about 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the library. The exact time is yet to be determined, Kupfer said. Saturday afternoon, the trustees will interview candidates. 

Each of the panels will submit evaluation forms to the board. 

“The board makes the final decision,” Kupfer said, underscoring the trustees’ attempt to make the process as inclusive as possible.

City Manager Phil Kamlarz will be asking the Berkeley City Council in closed session on Monday to approve the appointment of Pamyla C. Means as City Clerk. 

Retired former City Clerk Sherry Kelly has assisted in managing the City Clerk Department since Sara Cox resigned from the position of City Clerk on July 14. 

If approved, Means will be appointed with an annual salary of $162,000 starting Dec. 4 and will be responsible for overall policy development, program planning, fiscal management, administration and operations of the City Clerk’s department. 

Means received her municipal clerk certification in 1985, and her master municipal clerk certification in 2000. She has served as the city clerk for Irvine since January. Prior to this, she served as city clerk for Napa from 1983 to January 2006, and as deputy city clerk for Napa from 1975 to 1977. 

Former City Clerk Sara Cox is now the Napa city clerk. 

The City Clerks Association of America awarded Means the City Clerk of the Year award in 1996 and the President’s Award of distinction in 2001 and 2003.

One of Berkeley’s neighborhood services liaisons, Michael Caplan, got a new job Thursday when he was named acting manager of the city’s Office of Economic Development. 

The announcement came in the form of a press release from Assistant City Manager Arietta Chakos. 

Caplan replaces Tom Myers, who held the post for the last four years. Myers had announced his planned resignation in August, ending a 13-year career with the city.  

Saturday, 88 years after the guns went silent in Europe at the end of World War I, Berkeley will celebrate Veterans Day with a flag ceremony at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park. 

Boy Scout Troops 19 and 24 will perform a flag ceremony at 11 a.m., the same hour to the minute that the last artillery barrage was fired across No Man’s Land. 

Originally celebrated as Armistice Day, the holiday became Veteran’s Day in 1954, to include recognition of soldiers who had fought in the conflicts that followed “the War to End All Wars.” 

There was at least one post-election celebration in Berkeley that brought together Bates and Bronstein backers and Measure J fans and foes in a common spirit of  

festivity. 

It happened at the end of Wednesday night’s meeting of the Planning Commission, when Chair Helen Burke brought out the bubbly—non-alcoholic Martinelli’s sparking cider—and the munchies—a box of Pepperidge Farm cookies. 

The cause celebre was the defeat of Proposition 90, which was greeted with uniform approval by commissioners and staff alike. 

“We all have something we can celebrate,” said Burke. 

The controversial ballot measure, which its principal backer said was designed to cripple regulation of land use through costly litigation, was defeated on a close vote Tuesday, with 52.5 percent of California voters saying no. 

Wednesday’s meeting was given over to scheduling and staff reports, with no formal actions beyond scheduling upcoming hearings on zoning ordinance amendments to change the procedures and makeup of the Design Review Committee and setting a date for another hearing on proposed changes to ordinances governing nuisance abatement and permit violations.  

Deputy City Attorney Zach Cowan said the nuisance and permit code sections need revising because as currently written, the procedures make it impossible for some of the eight city attorneys to speak to each other. 

As now written, one attorney must advise the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) and another has to deal with city staff—with the two barred from talking to each other because of potential legal conflicts. 

The revision would enable one attorney to advise both groups. 

Other revisions change the handling of nuisances and permit violations, changing the actions of ZAB to recommendations, while vesting the decision with the City Council. 

Currently ZAB makes the decisions, which may then be appealed to the council. The revisions would eliminate the appeal process, further freeing up staff time. 

The Design Review Committee changes would eliminate the requirement for the ZAB chair to serve on the committee and reduce the number of lay members. 

Commissioner Gene Poschman said he didn’t have problems with the first change, but said lay members often made the only sensible comments at the DRC, while the architect members sometimes spent a lot of time congratulating each other. 

Milo delayed 

The fur didn’t fly over the Milo Foundation Wednesday night, though a growl or two was heard from neighbors. 

The pet adoption facility on Solano Avenue and a companion site on Capistrano Avenue have drawn the ire of neighbors, who pointed out that the facility violates city zoning ordinances which don’t allow for kennels in the area. 

Principal Planner Allen Gatzke said the planned hearing was being delayed while City Councilmember Laurie Capitelli tries to come up with a solution through negotiations with the non-profit animal adoption service and its neighbors. 

If and when a compromise is reached, the commission will be asked to draft zoning ordinance amendments that would spell out a new use that would be restricted to a specific location and with a limited range of permitted activities, Gatzke said. 

UC plans 

Commissioners were also asked to provide comments on the final environmental impact report prepared by UC Berkeley for the quarter-billion-dollar complex planned at and around Memorial Stadium. 

City Manager Phil Kamlarz has asked UC Regents not to adopt the document when they meet at UCLA Wednesday and Thursday. 

Kamlarz said city officials hadn’t had time to read the more than 1,000 pages of changes and comments submitted by the university on a project that has potentially massive impacts for the surrounding city.

Third- and fourth-graders at LeConte Elementary School skipped their science, math and writing classes on Tuesday for a hands-on lesson in civic participation.  

Starting at 8 a.m., the eight- and nine-year-olds were stationed outside the school’s election booths to conduct exit polls. Around 84 voters from the area were quizzed on whom they had chosen for California governor and Berkeley mayor and their stance on Measure A. 

When the exit polls at LeConte closed after 1 p.m., the students were able to predict—albeit unscientifically—that Measure A would win by a large margin, which it did. 

The exit polls also showed that Phil Angelides was ahead in the governor’s race with 69 percent of the total votes, and Peter Camejo was coming in second at 30 percent. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger did not receive a single vote, according to the exit poll. 

The poll also revealed that Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates was winning 70 percent of the votes for mayor, with opponents Zelda Bronstein and Zachary Runningwolf getting 18 and 12 percent respectively. Mayoral candidate Christian Pecaut did not receive any votes in the poll.  

Measure A received 97 percent of the total votes in the poll. 

“This was the perfect opportunity to teach the kids about the structure of the American government and elections,” said Jen Corn, the third- and fourth-grade teacher who organized the activity. “We have been studying both these things for quite sometime in class now. This exercise will help the kids to receive first-hand citizenship education and prepare them to become future voters.” 

Third-grader Elias Keen told the Planet that he couldn’t wait until he was old enough to vote. 

“I have been learning a lot about Proposition 87, 86 and Measure J from all the signs and the ads,” he said. “I learned quite a bit about voting through the exit polls today.” 

LeConte’s cooking teacher Brenna Turman said that the kids had acted very mature while asking questions. 

“They did not get angry or excited when some of the voters told them that they had voted against Measure A,” she said. “Since they had been taught in class how important it was for Measure A to pass, I was afraid that they would get upset by the negative responses, but they behaved beautifully.” 

Corn said that she had been planning and practicing with the classes about what to say for a long time. 

“They had a lot of opinions and I had to really train them not to react. I told them that it was important to remain impartial observers only,” she said. “It was interesting to see how much information they had about the different election issues such as Prop. J or 87. I could clearly see that they were talking to their parents about them at home.” 

Lila Bensky, a fourth-grade student, said that she was hoping that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger lost. 

“He always goes along with whatever President Bush does and President Bush is the one who arranged the war,” she said. 

Susie Bluestone, Lila’s mother, said that the exit poll provided a great opportunity for the students to interact with community members. 

“Measure A affects the children in a huge way. The neighbors were happy to see that the kids were so concerned about it,” she said. 

The importance of Measure A was not lost on Lila either. “If Measure A does not pass, gardening, P.E. and music will all go bye-bye,” she said. 

Corn told the Planet that she hopes to conduct a similar exit poll during the 2008 presidential elections.  

“This is a small step in learning about democracy and how to become responsible voters,” she said. “I am hoping that in two years the kids will jump at the chance of doing something bigger.”

West Berkeley residents will join environmental justice groups and community members on Saturday in a rally against the toxic pollution and noxious odors emanating from Pacific Steel Casting. 

The protest will begin at 11 a.m. in front of Gilman and 9th streets in Berkeley and then move on to Pacific Steel Casting at 1333 2nd St. 

The event is being sponsored by GreenAction for Health and Environmental Justice, the Ecology Center, West Berkeley Alliance for Clean Air and Safe Jobs, PSC Protest Committee and Global Community Monitor.  

The West Berkeley steel foundry has been the source of complaints by neighbors, who claim the company has been polluting the environment with toxins and nauseating odors for years. Residents say that health risks from the emissions include headaches, nausea and chest tightness.  

The foundry is located in an area with a high concentration of low-income residents, several daycare centers, a retirement home and schools. 

PSC was sued by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District in August for failure to meet statutory deadlines for reporting air emissions, and for violating the schedule to resolve ongoing air quality complaints. 

According to Bradley Angel of GreenAction, the protest seeks to send a clear message to PSC. 

“We want PSC to be a good neighbor and to clean up its act,” he said. “We want it to protect the environment, children, pregnant women, elders, workers and all the residents and businesses in the area. We also want to call on BAAQMD to do what is necessary to achieve this goal. The lawsuit was a positive step but it should be more aggressive. The City of Berkeley should also do what it can to put pressure on PSC. It is important to remember that the pollution problem is not going to go away anytime soon. It is only going to escalate.” 

Elizabeth Jewel of Aroner, Jewel & Ellis Partners—PSC’s public relations consultants—said she was aware of the protest but had no comment to make at the moment. 

Steve Ingraham, a Bay Area environmental activist and member of the PSC Protest Committee, said that the pollutants emitted by PSC could contribute to cancer, neurological harm, birth defects, respiratory problems (like asthma) and reproductive disorders.  

“Some of the specific pollutants emitted in large quantities include particulates, benzenes, formaldehyde, phenols, manganese, nickel, lead, zinc and chromium. Children are especially at risk from carcinogens as well as from PM 2.5 (small particulates),” Ingraham said. 

“Due to the failure of Pacific Steel to implement appropriate technology to reduce emissions from being released into the community, countless residents have fallen sick. The community has faced countless hurdles from the city and the Air District while trying to stop PSC from polluting the environment even further. This protest is a statement to show that we will not tolerate further delay in the health risk assessment test,” he said. 

The West Berkeley Alliance for Clean Air and Safe Jobs carried out independent swipe tests in the West Berkeley neighborhood surrounding PSC in October, which pointed to the presence of already known toxins in the facility. 

Denny Larson of Global Community Monitor—the non-profit that helped residents carry out the swipe tests—said in a statement that the evidence pointed toward the harmful nature of the emissions. 

“We tested for 11 metals known to come from PSC at six residential locations,” he said. “In five samples, the tests found three or more target metals. In four samples the tests found four or more metals. In two samples, the tests found seven and eight metals that comprise PSC’s emission fingerprint. This is credible evidence of toxic fallout of a serious nature.” 

Martin Bourque, director of the Ecology Center, said that the protest would give citizens a chance to voice their protest against PSC and the air district.  

“PSC continues to ignore regulations and lawsuits,” he said. “They still haven’t provided the community with information on the health risk assessment tests. It is important that they hear from the people directly.” 

Willi Paul of Cleanaircoalition.net said that asking PSC to clean up its act was not enough.  

“We need to shut it down,” he said. “If they can clean it up then they can come back. PSC has been killing us for so long. It’s time for them to know that we can’t take this anymore.” 

In the months leading up to Tuesday’s election, the conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C., was that immigration would be a powerful wedge issue that would help the Republicans either limit their losses or even retain control of the House of Representatives. 

The argument went something like this: “Immigration will prove to be the gay marriage issue of 2006. Blocking comprehensive immigration reform and approving a 700-mile fence will bring out the GOP base, draw support from conservative Democratic voters, and give Republican candidates some distance from an unpopular president on a controversial issue.” 

Congressman Brian Bilbray of California made just such a claim when he came to Washington, D.C., after winning a special election earlier this year to replace the disgraced and jailed Randy Cunningham. The mainstream press and the me-too political class bought it hook, line and sinker. 

Not surprisingly, many candidates followed this logic, either out of opportunism or conviction. And how exactly did these candidates fare? Judge for yourself. 

The Senate 

Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) hit opponent Bob Casey for Casey’s support for the Senate comprehensive bill that passed on a bipartisan basis last May. Santorum suffered the biggest defeat of any Senate incumbent in this election cycle, losing by 18 percent. 

Katherine Harris repeatedly invoked Senator Bill Nelson’s (D-Fla.) support for the Senate bill in her comeback attempt. She lost 60 percent to 38 percent. 

Republican Tom Keane Jr. attacked Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) for his support of comprehensive reform. Menendez beat Keane 53 percent to 47 percent. 

Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) were attacked for their votes in support of allowing legalized immigrant workers to claim credit for social security taxes they paid when they had been undocumented. Both won easily. 

Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.) was opposed by a one-issue candidate, former INS official and noted immigration restrictionist Jan Ting. Accused of supporting “amnesty,” Carper won 70 percent to 29 percent. 

The House 

In Arizona-8, Republican Randy Graf lost to Democrat Gabrielle Giffords 54 percent To 42 percent. This was a closely watched race for a toss-up district along the U.S.-Mexico border in a state in which immigration is the No. 1 issue. Graf made the prophetic statement, “If this issue can’t be won in this district [by hard-liners], the argument can be made that it can’t be won anywhere in the country.” 

In Indiana-8, House Immigration Subcommittee Chair John Hostettler was one of the featured Republicans in the summer “field hearings” held by the House GOP to stir up voters on the immigration issue. He lost by a wide margin. 

In Arizona-5 hardliner J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.) is the author of the book “Whatever It Takes” about illegal immigration, who refused to vote for the controversial Sensenbrenner bill HR 4437 because he thought it didn’t go far enough. Hayworth was upset by comprehensive reform advocate Harry Mitchell 51 percent to 46 percent. Two years earlier Hayworth won re-election by 21 points. 

In Colorado-7, Republican hardliner Rick O’Donnell was trying to replace another Republican, Bob Beauprez, who vacated the seat to run for governor. In a front-page New York Times article during the campaign O’Donnell argued that immigration was the biggest issue in his district and that his views were much more popular than those of his opponent, comprehensive reform advocate Democrat Ed Perlmutter. Perlmutter won 54 percent to 42 percent. 

Governors 

In Arizona Len Munsil repeatedly attacked Democratic incumbent Janet Napolitano, an early proponent of comprehensive reform, for being soft on illegal immigration. Munsil proposed a half-a-billion-dollar border security initiative as his signature issue. Napolitano won 63 percent to 35 percent. 

In Colorado Republican Bob Beauprez staked his campaign on attacking his Democratic opponent Bill Ritter for being soft on illegal immigration. He lost 56 percent to 41 percent. 

In numerous states, Democratic incumbents and candidates came under fire from their opponents for being soft on illegal immigration and for supporting in-state tuition for undocumented students. In every case—Kansas, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Oregon, Iowa and Maryland—the pro-immigrant candidate won and the hard-liner lost. 

In California, Arnold Schwarzenegger took a different tack from many in his party. He moved to the center on immigration—he stopped applauding the Minutemen, stated his regret for his support of Proposition 187 in the past, dragged his feet on approving the deployment of his state’s National Guard for border duty and loudly criticized the Republican Congress for not moving on comprehensive immigration reform. He was rewarded with a huge victory that included 39 percent of the state’s large group of Latino voters. 

So much for the conventional wisdom that supporting comprehensive reform would turn out to be a loser and that being a hard-line hawk would be a winner. 

Meanwhile, polls released before and after the election found the following: 

• among all voters, a strong majority soundly reject a hard-line, enforcement-only approach in favor of a pragmatic, comprehensive approach to immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for those working and living in the U.S. illegally; 

• Latino voters see immigration as a defining issue of extreme importance; comprehensive reform with a path to citizenship has broad and intense support; and they punished the political party currently associated with a harsh tone and a hard line. 

What does this mean for immigration reform in the next Congress? It means we may well have an opportunity to move beyond the stalemate in the current Congress on broad reform and towards a workable solution. But enacting a major reform on such a controversial subject is easier to thwart than to win and thus calls for a new approach to governing. 

First, it will require our nation’s leaders to follow through on their stated commitment to bipartisan problem-solving. Simply put, when it comes to immigration, without bipartisanship, there will be no solution. 

Second, it will require a commitment to not only getting a bill enacted, but to enacting a bill that will actually work once implemented. Simply put, if it won’t work, don’t pass it. 

If our leaders incorporate these lessons, we have a chance to make history. If our leaders revert to partisan bickering and finger- pointing, then those responsible for inaction may well face a frustrated electorate once again in 2008.

Two polls, one on the eve of the election, the other through the media’s exit polling, confirmed earlier independent polls that the public wants a solution and wants that solution to be comprehensive. 

In a Tarrance Group poll commissioned by the National Immigration Forum and the Manhattan Institute and released on Election Day, likely voters across the nation and in key districts and states were surveyed on immigration. Here are the key findings: 

• Immigration is an important public policy issue to voters, but not a key issue driving voting in the mid-terms for the majority of voters. 

• Voters support a comprehensive approach to immigration reform. More see what happened in 2006 (fence and enforcement resources) as a first step rather than as a solution (48 percent-28 percent); want comprehensive reform next year rather than waiting to see how the fence and enforcement increase works out (50 percent-37 percent); reject the idea that enforcement will drive immigrants out of the country (65 percent-32 percent); and agree that Congress should enact comprehensive reform next year (75 percent-20 percent). 

• Voters prefer a candidate who supports comprehensive reform over a candidate that supports enforcement-only (57 percent-37 percent). Perhaps even more importantly, comprehensive reform supporters have more intensity than the enforcement-only supporters (40 percent-27 percent). 

• Voters are still ambivalent about a vaguely defined path to citizenship for those in the country illegally—with half viewing it as “amnesty” (48 percent-46 percent)—but do not believe that a path to citizenship that involves paying a fine, working, paying taxes, living crime free and learning English constitutes amnesty (68 percent-27 percent). 

In exit polls conducted on behalf of the media on Nov. 7, researchers came up with similar findings. According to press reports on the exit polls: 

• Fewer than one in three cited immigration as extremely important in influencing their vote decision. 

• Republicans had only a narrow lead with voters who said immigration was extremely important. 

• Roughly 6 of 10 voters said they believe that undocumented immigrants living and working in the U.S. should be offered a chance to apply for legal status. 

• Democrats won support from 61 percent of those who support such a path to citizenship. 

The Dog that Did Hunt 

Latino voters were not supposed to be much of a factor in this election. But look again. In an election eve poll commissioned by NCLR and conducted by the Lake Group, here is what they found: 

• Latinos are energized about voting in this election. 

• The issues on the top of the Latino agenda continue to be education and jobs/the economy, with the war in Iraq coming in third and immigration fourth. 

• However, immigration was a great motivator in this election. The poll found the issue would have a profound influence on how this electorate votes. 

• The treatment of the immigration issue and developments over the last year, is driving Latinos away from the Republican Party. 

According to 2004 exit polls, President Bush won 44 percent of the Latino vote. Based on exit polls yesterday, House Republicans won only 27 percent of the Latino vote. 

In addition, exit polls showed that 37 percent of Latino voters ranked illegal immigration as an extremely important issue, far more than was the case for all voters. Also, 78 percent of Latino voters said that those here illegally should be given a chance to apply for legal status, some 20 point higher than other voters. 

What Now? 

The public has spoken. The results are in. The demand is clear. Fix our broken immigration system with a tough, fair and practical solution.  

Frank Sharry is the executive director of the Washington-based National Immigration Forum. Immigration Matters regularly features the views of the nation’s leading immigrant rights advocates.

Asian American voters in eight states continued a decade-long shift towards Democratic candidates, with 79 percent of those polled favoring Democrats in Tuesday’s congressional and state elections. They also rejected an affirmative action ban that won in Michigan. 

Preliminary results of a nonpartisan, multilingual exit poll of over 4,600 Asian American voters, released by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, showed Asian American voter turnout helping Democratic candidates in closely watched races in Virginia , New Jersey and other states. 

Most exit poll respondents (87 percent) said that they had voted in a previous election, while 13 percent said they were first-time voters. Over 625 pro bono attorneys, law students and community activists monitored polling places and surveyed Asian American voters in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. 

Margaret Fung, AALDEF executive director said, “Asian American voters reacted to sharp ideological differences among the candidates and displayed their awareness of party labels.” 

Fung added that the decade-long trend of Asian American voters favoring Democrats contributed to “the dramatic shifts in political power that took place in Tuesday’s midterm elections." 

Exit Poll Survey Highlights 

Virginia: The exit poll of more than 250 Asian American voters showed 76 percent voted for Democratic senatorial bet Jim Webb, 21 percent voted for incumbent Republican Sen. George Allen, and 3 percent voted for Glenda Parker. After maintaining a slim lead, Webb was declared the winner by 0.3 percent of the total vote (49.6 percent) beating Allen (49.3 percent). Allen is best known among Asian Americans for his derogatory “macaca” remark to a South Asian campaign worker. 

New Jersey: this heated Senate race, among more than 370 Asian Americans polled, 77 percent voted for incumbent Sen. Robert Menendez, while 20 percent voted for Republican challenger Thomas Kean Jr.—a 57-point margin. Among all New Jersey voters, Menendez held his seat by an 8-point margin (53 percent to 45 percent). 

Maryland: In Maryland ‘s open Senate seat, among over 200 Asian American voters polled, 73 percent chose Democrat Ben Cardin, with 24 percent for Republican Michael Steele, and 3 percent for Green Party candidate Kevin Zeese. Among the general electorate, 55 percent voted for Cardin, 44 percent for Steele, and 2 percent for Zeese. 

Pennsylvania: Among more than 200 Asian American voters polled in Philadelphia , 71 percent voted for Democratic candidate Bob Casey, while 29 percent voted for Republican incumbent Sen. Rick Santorum. Among all voters, 59 percent voted for Casey and 41 percent voted for Santorum. 

Massachusetts: Democratic gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick, who became the nation’s second African American elected governor, received support from 75 percent of more than 350 Asian American voters polled in Boston, Dorchester, Lowell and Quincy, with Kerry Healey receiving 21 percent. Statewide, 56 percent voted for Patrick, and 35 percent voted for Healey. 

Michigan Proposal 2: Rejecting claims that Asian Americans are hurt by affirmative action programs, three in four Asian American voters voted No to Proposal 2, which seeks to end race- and gender-based affirmative action programs in education, hiring, contracting and health initiatives. More than 300 Asian American voters—including Arab Americans—participated in AALDEF’s exit poll survey in Michigan . Proposal 2 passed by a wide margin, 58 percent to 42 percent. 

Illinois: Democratic incumbent Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich defeated his Republican opponent Judy Baar Topinka with a 10-point lead, 50 percent to 40 percent. In contrast, 99 percent of the 170 Asian Americans polled in Chicago voted for Blagojevich, with 1 percent for Topinka. 

New York: Of over 2,300 Asian American voters polled in New York City , 82 percent voted for Democratic candidate for attorney general Andrew Cuomo. Republican contender Jeanine Pirro received 14 percent of the Asian American vote, with 4 percent voting for other candidates. Cuomo led Pirro 58 percent to 40 percent among all voters statewide. 

AALDEF has been conducting a nonpartisan exit poll of Asian American voters for 19 years. Volunteers—the majority of whom spoke one of 15 Asian languages or dialects—conducted the multilingual survey, which was translated into nine languages: Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Khmer, Bengali, Arabic, Punjabi, Urdu, and Gujarati.

The Arnold Effect was on awesome display Tuesday. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger trounced his hapless and ineffectual Democratic opponent and nearly pulled a few Republicans along with him into other state offices. 

That’s quite a feat for a politician who seemed dead in the political water with voters and even deader with black voters after the initiatives he backed in last year’s ill-fated and ill-timed special election went down to a crushing defeat. Schwarzenegger, however, read the political tea leaves, scrambled fast and re-burnished his image as a moderate, centrist Republican who could reach across the political aisles and do business with Democrats. 

He didn’t stop there. Suddenly there was a Schwarzenegger sighting in places he had rarely been spotted before, and that was at black events. He swayed to the gospel beat at black churches, posed with black cowboys at a popular black rodeo, made a well-timed and well-publicized slew of black appointments and went to bat for the embattled King-Drew public hospital in South Los Angeles. 

He even corralled a group of high-profile black ministers to tout his re-election campaign. It worked. The kinder, gentler, retooled minority-friendly Arnold did what no Republican in living memory had managed to do. He got the raves of many blacks, and even more of their votes. On election eve, nearly 30 percent of blacks gave the governor a favorable rating. 

The Arnold Effect did two things for the GOP. It sent the message that a Republican governor could actually do more than pay lip service to the GOP’s pledge to make itself a party of diversity. It provides the party a potential model it desperately needs in order to rebound from the shellacking it took nationally. 

It won’t be easy. GOP strategists are walking a thin political tightrope. Republican presidents from Nixon to Bush Jr. have bagged the White House, and in the past decade Congress too, by courting and revving up evangelicals, hardcore conservatives and Southern and rural white voters. They’ve fired up passions on welfare and big government, abortion and gay rights. But that one-dimensional approach to winning past elections won’t be enough to win future ones. 

The ranks of the independent voters have swelled in recent years and many of them aren’t tightly corralled in any ideological camp. Their votes can spell victory or defeat in the key battleground states. Schwarzenegger could mobilize many of these voters for the GOP, and many of them are black. 

In 2000 nearly three-fourths of African Americans identified themselves as Democrats. By 2002 that number had dropped to slightly more than 60 percent, according to a recent survey by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research group devoted to African American issues. But an increasing number, especially those 18 to 35, identify themselves as independents. One-fourth of black adults now characterize themselves that way. 

In 2004 Bush slightly punctured the myth that blacks in California won’t vote Republican. Bush got more than ten percent of their vote. This was the fourth highest of any state. Schwarzenegger can tap into the anger and discontent that many blacks have with the Democrats. That could also be a plus for the GOP. When Republicans have actively courted blacks they’ve had phenomenal success. 

The governor’s race in Maryland in 2002 is a case in point. The Democrats had a huge voter majority over the Republicans in the state, and for nearly four decades had held a tight grip on the statehouse. But Republican governor candidate Robert L. Erich, Jr. and lieutenant governor candidate Michael L. Steele, a black Republican, openly appealed to black and younger voters. Erich and Steele got nearly 15 percent of the black vote. That was the biggest percentage of black votes ever for a Republican ticket in Maryland. In Baltimore, they got 30 percent of the black vote. Their success was no aberration. 

That success encouraged Steele to make a bid for the Senate, and he did it by transforming himself, as Schwarzenegger did, into a centrist Republican that would work with Democrats and court black voters. He lost, but Steele’s political pirouette kept him close, and the GOP should take note of that too. 

The Democrats will do everything they can to dampen the Arnold Effect. They will remind voters that he goes against the political and philosophical grain of what the GOP stands for. But the Democrats’ attacks won’t matter much in 2008. Bush is out, and the GOP field is so wide open that a centrist GOP candidate, such as former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney or former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, could emerge from the pack as the GOP standard bearer in 2008. That would further enhance Schwarzenegger’s vote-pulling power. GOP leaders will do everything they can to put him on the national campaign trail to woo and court independents and black voters. 

The modest breakthrough Schwar-zenegger made with black voters gives the GOP a faint glimmer of hope for 2008. 

Media Associate Editor Earl Ofari Hutchinson, author of The Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September 2006). 

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy vs. Ferguson that Jim Crow laws mandating various forms of segregation were OK and that if Blacks had a problem with that “badge of inferiority” it was “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” 

We’ve come a long way since then—often on faith. But as Tuesday’s election results showed, we’re moving on up through doors never opened before and with skills never seen before in such concentration and with a fire in the belly matched with the resources to do something with that passion. That’s the “construction” we’ve put on 21st-century politics. 

Lynn Swann, Republican and former football player, did not become governor of Pennsylvania. Ken Blackwell, Republican, did not become governor of Ohio. But that they ran credible races cannot be denied. 

The big winner of this year’s class of candidates at the state level was Duval Patrick, a Black man, a lawyer, a former leader of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. He is now governor-elect of Massachusetts. The first blood officially shed in the Revolutionary War was that of a Black man, Crispus Attucks in 1770, but an image I can never shed is of Massachusetts racists, using the U. S. flag, attacking Blacks trying to enforce court-ordered integration of Boston public schools two centuries later. 

The big winner at the federal level was Charles Rangel, the longtime congressman in Harlem, who for years had sold himself as a potential chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. 

Many people—including me—during the Republican hegemony thought this was a narcissistic pipe dream and that we would be better served if he stepped aside to permit new blood to make its course. But he is now chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee! Think tax legislation, Social Security’s future, Medicare and trade. Think $$$$$$. 

“Mr. Chairman!” former New York mayor David Dinkins greeted Rangel at Pier 2110, a restaurant that itself is a symbol of Harlem resurgent – across the street from a building and plaza dedicated to the memory of the last Black titan on Capital Hill – Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Rangel entered just before 10 p.m. Of course, the applause was thunderous among those who took time from the free food and booze to pay attention. 

As returns came in from around the country, I asked him: “How are y’all doing? “ He flashed that confident and triumphant grin and said, “All right!” To those gathered he said, “I’m hearing from all over the country that the people have spoken that it’s time for a change.” 

In California, Nancy Pelosi, now poised to be the first woman Speaker of the House, shared that spirit: “Today we have made history,” she said. “Now let us make progress.” 

What does that mean exactly—from Rangel and from Pelosi? Rangel, sporting an anti-Bush campaign button, assured me that “as chairman of this august committee,” he will amplify the attention he has given during his tenure to issues ranging from taxes to the war in Iraq to the quality of public schools. 

The Democrats now dominate the House—and many state governorships—but they still must deal with a reality that includes powerful Republicans. Rangel, typical of the Democrats who triumphed Tuesday, held out an olive branch while stinging like a Muhammad Ali bee. 

“The President could be in serious jeopardy if he merely stays the course,” he said, referring not just to strategy in Iraq but also to domestic policy. “This is a victory for Americans and for the Constitution.” 

He promised not vengeance on the part of Democrats who have been shut out of real power in the House for so many years, but “fairness.” 

“Fairness would be a novelty after the last dozen years,” he told me. 

What does it all mean? As the Rev. Jacques DeGraff said, “The baton has been passed.” 

May it not be dropped in the exuberance of the moment.

After their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court failed, several Berkeley Sea Scouts (BSS) have tried to make the public understand the service they offer. The BSS have been under pressure because the City of Berkeley has accused them of operating under the discriminatory policy against gays and atheists of the Boy Scouts of America. For this reason the city took away their previously free use of the dock at the Berkeley Marina, sparking the court case. 

“It’s unfair, because I don’t think we’re doing anything wrong,” said 16-year old Boatswains’ Mate Keenan Nelson-Barer. “We are part of the Sea Scouts organization, but we are different from them.” 

Eugene Evans, BSS Skipper, explained that Sea Scouts of America has different umbrellas for the various scouts, such as Police Scouts, Sea Scouts, Boy Scouts, and that the BSS has attempted to change umbrellas. 

“A committee of adults asked the Scout executive at the Pleasant Hill office if we could move from the Venturing Structure to the Scouting for Life Structure, which doesn’t include the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Policy’,” said Evans. 

“The Police Scouts, which the city supports, are under the Scouting for Life structure.” 

For many, Sea Scouts represents a place to make new friends, relax, and learn new skills. 

“I’ve been going down to the boat, since my freshman year,” said Boatswain James Nolting, a Berkeley High School senior. “My friends were going and I figured I would try it. I’ll admit that at first I didn’t like it, but once I got to know people, it was really fun. You get a community away from everything else.” 

Nelson-Barer recounts, “The reason why I started to go to Sea Scouts was because I wanted to meet new people. After I went, I met older kids my age and it became really fun. I’ve also learned how to operate the boat, build things, and use many types of machinery. Most importantly, I learned a lot of things from my peers.” 

Berkeley Sea Scouts has been providing activities for youth in Berkeley since the 1930s. Kids go down to the boat, Farallon 44, at the Berkeley marina on weekends and work on it. Additionally, every Monday, there is an opportunity to go rowing in Alameda, accompanied by pizza and drinks. 

“The membership is at around forty kids,” said Evans. “The way we do our membership is a ‘bring-a-buddy’ system. One of the issues we try to deal with is being good citizens.” 

Nolting explains that Sea Scouts is not only a place for kids to learn essential skills, but also a place to have fun. 

“On the boat, we teach carpentry and plumbing,” said Nolting. 

“We teach people how to row. We do a lot of water-skiing activities and surfing activities. We do service projects at Angel Island. We go on overnighters to Jack London Square and see movies. We go on surf trips down to Santa Barbara. One of the best things is the big 10-day summer cruise to Sacramento, where we go water-skiing. We go anywhere that kids want to go. You stay in Sea Scouts because of people you meet 

down there.” 

Lucas Buckman, former Sea Scout, says that his time at Sea Scouts was life-changing. 

“I learned skills,” said Buckman, a BHS junior,” which I can channel into my everyday life. Sea Scouts helped me become more responsible. It’s like a brotherhood that I will never forget.” 

Evans explains that the Berkeley Sea Scouts are not attempting to advance a political agenda, but rather they are just trying to survive. 

“In August 1932, there were eight or nine Sea Scout boats at the marina,” said Evans. “We were the first boat, and we are the last. None of us are really political savvy to deal with these problems ... we really don’t have control over the policy [of the Boy Scouts]. 

“We are serving two masters: the city government and the management structure of the Boy Scouts. Serving two masters is an impossible situation. Our interest in this issue has been simply to stay alive. We just want to stay alive to be a Sea Scout unit to serve boys. There’s no political agenda on the Sea Scout boat.” 

Evans credits young people in Berkeley with the survival of Farallon 44. 

“The only way this organization survives is that we provide what the boys in Berkeley want,” remarked Evans. “We can’t do anything that it out-of-step with the young men of Berkeley who participate. Otherwise, we wouldn’t exist anymore.” 

People who are interested in helping the Berkeley Sea Scouts continue to serve the youth of Berkeley may send donations or queries to: Sea Scouts Ship Farallon Inc., PO Box 184, El Cerrito, CA 94530. 

Rio Bauce is a member of the Berkeley Sea Scouts.

The Zoning Adjustments Board denied the expansion of the South Berkeley Police Substation for employee lockers and vehicle storage on Thursday. 

The proposed expansion on 3192 Adeline St.—which had first been heard by ZAB on August 10, 2006—had been the subject of a long battle between the neighbors and the Berkeley Police Department. 

Some residents on the Adeline Corridor protested the project and wanted the property to be put to commercial use. 

Police Chief Doug Hambleton told the board that the BPD had met with neighbors on several occasions and had been able to come to an agreement on the facade design. 

“Although we met with opposition from certain neighbors, we need to have an increased space for the betterment of the city,” he said. “Our long-term goal is to stay in the neighborhood. If we don’t get the space, we will be required to look for another place.” 

Property owner Huck Rorick told the board that it was not feasible to put the space to commercial use at the moment. 

“If the police department is not able to extend into the space, then we are looking at an extended vacancy,” he said.  

ZAB member Bob Allen said that neighbors had expressed a lack of faith in the Police Department and had complained about the absence of police presence in the area despite the substation. 

“This use has not been a good neighbor,” he said. 

“We don’t have an officer in the building for the purpose of serving someone who walks into the front door,” Humbleton said. “That would be good but not cost-effective.” 

Board member Dean Metzger said that if the substation could not make police presence visible in the area, then it would not be of any help to neighbors.  

Sam Dyke, owner of People’s Bazaar on Adeline Street, said that the project would not add economic viability to the area. 

“Granted we need the BPD, but not in that location,” he said. “This is the main corridor, the gateway to South Berkeley. We need businesses there that will attract foot traffic.” 

Board member Jesse Anthony commented that the substation did not contribute in any way to the community and was instead a place to store junk. 

Board member Jesse Arreguin said that he would have been more compelled to support the project if there had been beat officers stationed there.  

“From what I hear, it doesn’t really address the safety issues,” he said. “The Adeline Corridor needs help. Economic development is what we need to focus on.” 

Board member Allen made the motion to deny the use permit, which was seconded by board member Anthony. The denial could be appealed to the City Council. 

Hummingbird Cafe 

ZAB continued the hearing for a carry-out food service store (no seating) in an existing commercial space at 1842 Euclid Ave. with no off-street parking to Nov. 27. 

The board asked staff to come back with more information to consider the use permit for the Hummingbird Cafe. 

Opponents of the cafe asked the board to deny the permit citing oversaturation of restaurants on Euclid Avenue. Jamal Fares, the applicant and owner of Hummingbird Cafe, said that competition was healthy and that his business was in demand. 

Rena Rickles, attorney for Fares, told the board that the cafe would not take customer orders and it would be limited to carry-out only. 

“All the food served there would be cold,” she said. “Some of it may be prepared in the backroom. Customers will be able to make their own smoothies, but the main purpose is to make it a quick-service store.” 

Let’s hear it for Grandma! Grandmothers all over the country, including this one, are delighted that one of their own has taken on the job of cleaning up the House—the House of Representatives, that is. Losing no time, Berkeley’s Grandmothers for Peace planned to rally Thursday at Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco office to let her know that they would support her in an effort to extricate the country from the mess in Iraq left behind by her Republican predecessors (with more than a little help from some misbehaving Democrats).  

Pelosi has certainly had the right kind of training for this dirty job. Terry Gross interviewed Marc Sandalow, the San Francisco daily’s Washington correspondent, about the new speaker on NPR on Wednesday, and he spoke with awe about her “mother-of-five voice,” which she uses to bring errant congresspersons in line. (I haven’t seen Marc since he was in kindergarten with my daughter, but he was a normally frisky little boy then, so he probably knows whereof he speaks.) If that doesn’t work, I’m sure she could try a “Mother Superior” voice for even more authority—Nancy, like me, was educated by nuns in a girls’ school, an environment which left us with no doubt that women were more than capable of taking charge in any situation. She even went to the same women’s college, Trinity, as my cousin Elsa, who was always held up to my kids as a role model because she marched at Selma. The good sisters specialized in building women with backbone, and Pelosi certainly has one. 

She’ll need it, along with her “San Francisco values”. That’s one slur which seems to have backfired. I suspect that the Republican commercials which were intended to knock Nancy might have backfired particularly with women, many of whom probably saw those attacks as being rooted in sexism. 

And speaking of nasty attacks, let’s hear it at home for Berkeley Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who survived having a mountain of money and a pack of lies dropped on his campaign for re-election. His opponent, George Beier, who tried on the roles of Mr. Clean and Superman in a couple of his many campaign mailers, ended up being stuck with the Daddy Warbucks image. The bagmen and bagladies at the Chamber of Commerce PAC put expenditures on his behalf over the $100,000 mark, an obscene amount in a council election, particularly when a lot of it was spent with the Chamber’s non-union Carlsbad mailing house instead of with local Berkeley printers.  

An election night visit to the Worthington “victory party” was not a pretty sight—all of those sincere folks biting their nails as it came down to the wire. But it did show why Kriss ultimately won—that good old left slogan, “people power.” There were lots of appealing and energetic young people there, as well as grizzled veterans of past encounters.  

Jason Overman, one of the young folks present, made a very respectable showing against entrenched Claremont councilmember Wozniak, given the engineered demographics of District 8, intended to prevent students from being elected. Not, for that matter, that the mass of students voted. The student turnout was pathetic, particularly among residence hall dwellers, so Jason must have gotten quite a few of his votes from disaffected long-term residents. His proud parents were there, looking just like Berkeley people—Dad in a Wellstone t-shirt—which is probably why Jason knew how to appeal to the locals.  

Loni Hancock, Tom Bates and Linda Maio, all of whom had always had Worthington’s loyal support in their own campaigns, should be deeply, deeply ashamed of their cowardly refusal to endorse his re-election, probably because they’re beholden to the same out-of-town developers who funded the C. of C. PAC. Dona Spring didn’t get the endorsement of the Hancock-Bates-Maio apparatus either, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. Her constituents really love her, to the tune of a 70-plus percent vote. They’re more likely to be long-term residents, and therefore harder to fool, than residents of District 7.  

Her opponent, Raudel Wilson, unlike George Beier, is new in town and not personally wealthy in any way, simply a bank employee and a renter, so Spring didn’t have to face big money. Wilson is a nice enough guy, though he’ll soon be forgotten, and he didn’t mount the kind of dishonest attacks against Dona’s record that Worthington experienced. She didn’t get a barrage of nasty Chamber hit pieces either. 

A knowledgeable election-watcher looking at the results observed that the conventional wisdom says that negative campaigning doesn’t change votes, it just causes some people not to vote at all because they’re worried. That seemed to be true in District 7, where Beier got about the same number of votes as Worthington’s previous opponent, but Kriss’s own votes dropped off significantly.  

This phenomenon would also explain the vote on Measure J, which captured a very respectable 43 percent, though not enough to put it over the top. The Chamber’s succession of lying postcard potshots at Berkeley’s old and respected ordinance scared off enough voters to make the difference. And the fact that the postcards bore the endorsement of the same prominent politicians who ditched Worthington and Spring didn’t help. 

That’s why some seasoned preservationists at the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association were distressed when a small group of individuals, none of them BAHA board members or LPC commissioners, acted on their own to rush Measure J to a vote in this election. Once J was on the ballot, the troops had no choice but to rally round, but there really wasn’t time to do a good job, particularly when (as should have been expected) the development industry funded the opposition with big bucks. 

A much better strategy, many felt, would have been to wait for the Bates/Capitelli ordinance to be passed, and then to mount a referendum if it turned out to be as bad as it looked when it passed on first reading. Until the mayor’s creation becomes reality, it can be marketed as being all things to all people.  

The referendum strategy is still available to overturn a bad ordinance, of course, and with Measure J as a dry run it might even work better. It’s a lot easier to run a campaign against a lemon on the table than one against pie in the sky.  

APOLOGY OWED 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Now that the election is over perhaps you will reflect on your role in the campaign. Story after story, allegedly news, was laden with digs and attacks on Mayor Bates, usually quite gratuitous. It was all capped off by your (in my opinion) illegal in kind-contributions to those candidates you endorsed by your (to put it mildly) unusual home delivery on Nov. 4. in an excess of partisanship I think you violated your trust as a newspaper and I believe you owe Berkeley an apology.  

Mal Burnstein 

• 

“REVITALIZATION” 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Revitalize Telegraph” it said on the marquee. “Vote George Beier.” That would be the marquee of the Fine Arts Cinema. The name plastered on the hideous building constructed on the ruins of Berkeley’s best local independent arts cinema. The cinema that was promised to have their theater rebuilt in the huge development. The cinema that instead became a casualty of this development. If that is what George Beier and his developer buddies think revitalization is, Berkeley was just spared.  

Jon Jackson 

• 

PROPAGANDA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Recently you wondered whether Planet readers might be willing to pay for a subscription to your paper. My response is: “no,” for quite a few reasons: 

• Paying for the Planet would be like making a political contribution with none of the rules and regulations that govern money in politics. There would be no public accounting and no accountability. 

• It would mean giving free rein for the use of my subscription dollars to an editorial staff that evidently regards slanted, incomplete, and misleading articles to be OK in the service of their causes. 

• And it would mean that funds from subscriptions could be used for tactics such as the recent free door-to-door deliveries of the paper in neighborhoods that were evidently judged to be receptive to the unabashed adulation of the Planet’s favored candidates and its unrestrained attacks on their rivals.  

The election results show that the paper’s tactics were not successful. The candidates and causes most heavily touted by the Planet lost, and an incumbent who received hearts-and-flowers treatment in articles and editorials for months before the election came perilously close to losing. Now we hear whining from the Planet that the results are all due to the inability of their favored campaigns to raise funds in the amounts spent by their opponents. But think about it: the value of twice-weekly political promotions by the Planet must have been worth tens of thousands of dollars. No political campaign could possibly raise enough money to counter the free advocacy provided by the Planet.  

Without question, the Planet has only been exercising its free speech right to political advocacy. But its editorial and reporting judgment would be more widely respected, and readers might even consider a subscription, if the editors demonstrated responsibility and even, at times, restraint. Winning the hearts and minds of smart Berkeley voters requires more than propaganda. 

Mim Hawley 

• 

UC STADIUM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Fear the stadium attacking our neighborhood. This should have been the main issue in the City Council race! If you are concerned about noise, trees, traffic, health or safety in our neighborhood you’d better speak out now! Contact Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau at 642-7464 or chancellor@berkeley.edu. 

Check out www.saveoaks.com to contact neighbors and students organizing against the destruction of the grove of hundreds of years old oaks. 

Cyndi Johnson 

• 

CHAMBER OF  

COMMERCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Although the Chamber of Commerce and the Chamber of Commerce PAC may be different entities, they seem to share the same office. Filings of campaign expenses show no record that the Chamber of Commerce PAC paid any rent to the Chamber of Commerce for that space. So, the Chamber of Commerce may have given more than its good name to the Chamber of Commerce PAC; it may also have contributed the use of expensive commercial office space with all of its amenities. 

Because of this, the unethical behavior of the PAC reflects on the entire membership of the Chamber of Commerce. If Chamber of Commerce members really want their good names back, they should do more than try to distance themselves from the PAC; they should denounce the PAC for lying to further its own agenda. Anything short of that suggests approval, not to mention complicity. 

Gus Lee 

• 

JUVENILE POLITICAL 

PLAYBOOK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

You might be interested to know that I voted against Measure J and for George Beier even though I didn’t read one single piece of campaign literature and wasn’t swayed one way or another by the amount of money spent on the recent election. I find it extremely insulting that you would discount my vote and that of the majority of voters (in the case of Measure J) because these campaigns apparently raised and spent more money than their opponents. The article by Richard Brenneman, “Meaure J Defeated, Supporters Vow Fight,” is nothing but a compilation of sour grapes from a pathetic gang of anti-democratic leftover hippy leftists whose self-righteous totalitarian attitudes have led to making Berkeley one of the most anti-business, anti-property owner communities in the entire world. Mao Zedong smiles down upon you! But even more ridiculous was Becky O’Malley’s trashing of George Beier along with the complaint about the Chamber of Commerce using a “non-union Carlsbad mailing house” to print some of their brochures which no one reads anyway. The Planet’s juvenile political playbook seems to say “cry foul” when you lose and “kick your opponent in the groin” when you win.  

David Bunnell 

• 

KPFA ELECTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Berkeley Daily Planet article essentially offered a fair, if pedestrian, assessment of the terrain in the current KPFA board elections (“KPFA Listeners Race for Station Board Spots,” Nov. 3). While controversy in governance is fairly common in both corporate and non-profit organizations, there is a tendency to act as though KPFA’s travails are anomalous or peculiar. What is of paramount importance in my view is to not allow the acrimony to be used as an excuse to justify any reversal or co-option of the democratic structures currently in place. KQED listeners recently relinquished their right to participate in that station’s governance. Apparently there is a school of thought that radio listeners should be passive supplicants and not have role in framing the discourse that informs them. Hopefully, this will not also prove to be the case at KPFA. As it happens, among the many excellent candidates running for the KPFA board is Sasha Futran, a veteran of the long struggle by many progressives, including Michael Parenti, Maria Gilardin and Norman Solomon to gain a foothold on the KQED board. I hope that at the very least this election serves as an affirmation of KPFA listeners’ belief in the idea of participatory governance, and I ask KPFA listeners to please vote and stay involved. Many readers are doubtless aware of Henry Kissinger’s statement (“the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves”) about the right of the Chilean people to elect a government of their choosing, With respect to KPFA, and democratic participation in general, the issues are clearly too important to be left to the few to decide. 

Joe Wanzala 

Listener Representative 

KPFA Local Station Board 

• 

CREEKS ORDINANCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On Nov. 14, I urge the mayor and City Council to vote to adopt the Berkeley Creeks Ordinance as it is currently drafted. Our city does not need more crumbling homes and concrete-lined creeks—it needs forward-thinking legislation that inspires residents to think about their natural areas as more than space to be paved over or built on. Berkeley needs to retain the little green space it has—and its laws should reflect the views and desires of its overwhelmingly progressive and environmentally conscious populace.  

Those who attack the Creeks Ordinance for being “anti-homeowner” do not understand the purpose of the ordinance, and do not have the best interest of their neighbors and Berkeley’s natural areas at heart. The current stipulations for rebuilding and for expanding or remodeling existing homes are perfectly adequate for a city so short on space as Berkeley.  

Our waterways have had enough of concrete, riprap and other forms of mistreatment; creekside homes are already crumbling because there were not adequate creek setbacks when they were built. We do not need to put current and future property owners at risk of flooding, erosion and their associated repair costs by enabling uninhibited expansion into our riparian corridors. I urge the council to adopt the Creeks Ordinance in full and protect homes by requiring a variance for development within 25 feet of the creek centerline.  

I thank the mayor and council for protecting our riparian areas and the people of Berkeley. 

Kristen Quay 

• 

PROBLEMS AT THE POLLS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’ve worked the half a dozen elections since 2002 as a poll worker, most of them in my home precinct in North Berkeley (I’ve only missed the November 2004 election since I was a candidate in that election). I haven’t moved, re-registered, gotten a replacement drivers license, or taken any other action which would affect my voter registration information. Yet when I took time out of my lunch break Tuesday to vote at my polling place, I found that I had disappeared from the voter rolls. My wife appeared, as did my neighbors. I had just voted in June’s primary with no problem. We searched the absentee list, the “late registration” list, the “infrequent voter” list, but no dice. I was not registered to vote in my precinct.  

What did I do? I followed the proper procedure and cast a provisional ballot. As part of the provisional ballot process, I am automatically re-registered to vote—I hope. I don’t know if my vote will count, which is extremely disturbing. Since I didn’t take any action to remove myself from the list, how did this happen? 

I was not the only one who had screwy experiences with the voter rolls this election. My experience in this precinct over the past regular and primary elections (thanks to the recall election and last year’s special election, we’ve had at least 1 general election every year since 2002) showed that there’s always a number of provisional ballots cast. Usually they’re cast by an absentee voter who didn’t turn in their absentee ballot when they came to the polls or by a voter who doesn’t trust whichever electronic voting machine is being used in that election. This time, about half of the 28 provisional ballots in our precinct were caused by voter roll irregularities. Multiple people were registered as absentee voters even though they claimed to never have requested to switch to absentee status. Others had been switched from the regular list to the ‘infrequent voter’ list, even though they, like me, hadn’t missed a primary or general election in years. While I understand that a lot of times new registrations take a couple of applications to show up, these problems affected voters who did not take any action to change their voting status or their address.  

What’s going on? Is this merely an Alameda County problem or does this reach up to the Republican secretary of state in charge of our elections? Was there a half-assed purge of voters? A computer glitch? As a poll worker, I’m really sympathetic to the incredibly complex work that the Registrar’s Office does, but these questions need to be answered and this problem needs to be resolved quickly before we become the Florida or Ohio of the 2008 presidential election. 

Jesse Townley 

• 

DISTRICT 7 COUNCIL RACE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thankfully District 7 will continue to be honestly represented by our hard working Kriss Worthington. I was upset by not only the huge amount of money George Beier poured into his city council bid, but by the absurd issue of Weapons of Mass Needles that he campaigned on. People’s Park has been steadily improving since Kriss took office. The riots have ended, the dirt has been transformed into grass and plants, picnic tables and murals have been installed by volunteers. It’s actually a very nice place.  

Except for its reputation.  

George Beier added gas to that fire with the absurd claim that 1,000 needles were found there. This negative propaganda scares away students, families and neighbors who would otherwise enjoy the park and add to its safety. False and exaggerated charges are counter productive to the hard work of volunteers who improve the park and encourage its use. Claims are made, often by people who don’t in fact go to the park themselves, that there is massive crime, or drug dealing, or “its just gross” or best yet has been the 1,000 Points of Needles of Mass Destruction. Please, don’t believe the hype. 

Go to the park, bring friends, enjoy the facilities, participate, make the park what you want. Its true that one may encounter all kinds of people there, including some less fortunate or socially groomed. But you may be able to help or learn something from these real members of our community who will still exist even if some just see them as problems rather than neighbors with problems. People’s Park has an amazing history and is a special opportunity for community creation. Whining to authorities or asking the University to redesign the park are the completely wrong approach. It will only create conflict in our neighborhood. George should know better than to spread false negative propaganda and propose putting buildings on the park. 

Doug Fost 

• 

BERKELEY POLITICS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

“Berkeley was one of the few cities of any size in the state to remain solidly in the Republican ranks in yesterday’s election” ran the lead in the Nov. 9, 1932 “Berkeley Gazette” report on the Franklin D. Roosevelt defeat of Herbert Hoover.  

Had our alleged Athens of the West thrown enlightenment aside to vote for retrenched reaction? Actually, the city voted for Hoover in 1928, too. While we had a socialist mayor back around World War I, there have been periods, such as the Hoover years, when it could be said that the town was run by stuffy alumni, aloof professors, and the social crowd that the doorman allowed into the Berkeley Women’s City Club—i.e., holier than thou snobs. To a degree, it can be conjectured that a nose in the air posture is a persistent Berkeley trait. It is expressed in our superiority complex vis a vis Oakland. A united shout of joy fills the city over the thumping Bush took in our recent election, yet at the same time factions who believe they have all the answers push their elitist policies. 

These days, we have nature-radicals who demand a park out by the Marina that is so very very natural that humans aren’t allowed in. Our warriors against traffic congestion forego comprehensive plans and throw up barricades called traffic islands. Rather than join the cities across the nation that are installing public wi-fi to democratize Internet access, our militants declare wi-fi towers radiation hazards. 

While we may not be Republicans (capital R), we are not always democratic (small d). 

Ted Vincent 

• 

SCHOOL ISSUES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Considering the content of my campaign, it seems there’s strong interest among a few people in the issues it raised. I’d like to facilitate further investigation of those with some thought as to how we can develop them to serve our local community—and then, beyond. 

School obviously is no way ours, good—on the overall, able to do what it says it would do—for most of the community it commands; nor do we want it to do what it does do—maintain the status quo, serve capitalism, serve competition and the universal brutality of millennia-old imperia. 

I hope people contact me www.normaharrisonforschoolboard.com, normaha@pacbell.net to see about carrying the campaign forward. 

Norma J F Harrison 

• 

SEA SCOUTS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding Rio Bauce’s complaint in the Planet about the Sea Scouts being denied free access to free berthing at the Marina because of discrimination against atheist and gay kids, there are solutions. He admits the Sea Scouts “are serving two masters: the city government and the management structure of the Boy Scouts---an impossible situation.” So why not disaffiliate from the bureaucratic bigots of the BSA top hierarchy and operate independently or under a more fair-minded organizational umbrella? Then Berkeley Sea Scouts could also freely bring along their atheist and gay buddies to enjoy the benefits of their boating interests, and in keeping with our Berkeley values. 

Harry Siitonen 

• 

MAYOR’S VISION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thankfully, San Francisco is not New York City, and Berkeley is not the Jersey Shore. Not yet, at least. 

I have read Mayor Tom Bates’ Nov. 3 commentary in the Daily Planet carefully and respectfully. 

I agree with some of his points and certainly acknowledge the benefits of affordable housing, but the combination of a university with an insatiable desire for more land to build upon, a mayor generally enthusiastic about development, and persons in city governance with a financial stake in development is a troika pulling us toward a tipping point regarding density that we should be apprehensive about.  

Does anyone notice how many residential non-arterial streets in Berkeley are jam-packed with parked cars 24/7? 

Phyllis Henry-Jordan 

• 

BHS LANDMARKING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The landmarking of Berkeley High School’s gymnasium was a page-one story in your Tuesday paper. The expert (structural) analysis I trust the most seems to say that the two big pool rooms easily could be saved, but that the rest of the complex could not be saved except at extravagant expense (maybe the facade of the gym facing Milvia could be incorporated into the design of new classroom building or other useful function at its prominent current location). 

The two pool rooms are worth millions; this must be taken into consideration by the school district before any decision is made regarding their future, including function and remodeling. Just look at the current estimates to replace the warm pool: $7-9 million. Demolition would be an act of criminal negligence. 

The district has been misguided in the past by so-called experts (outsiders and insiders) and must avoid making decisions that hurt the city or itself. Time must be given to listen to users of the warm pool. The district is at risk of acting in a panic, desperate about budgetary matters, and forgetful about the community in which it lives, if it destroys the old pools. 

Terry Cochrell 

• 

GOP 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Was it the war in Iraq that caused voters to turn against the GOP; was it the lies, scandals and corruption that Republicans subjected Americans to for six years or was it that the GOP had become the party of religion in the political arena? 

Could it be that voters rejected Republicans because they are no longer Republicans? The GOP has been taken over by religionists and evangelical activists. The White House, Congress and U.S. government had become a vehicle for the fundamentalist right, and anti-abortionists. No problem now! 

Don’t think for a second we have seen the last of these religious zealots and their stealthy infiltration into all facets of society. They would rather die in their self-induced Armageddon than give up their ingrained hypocritical and intolerant views. 

Ron Lowe 

Grass Valley 

• 

THANKSGIVING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Nov. 23 is the day when many people will be celebrating Thanksgiving Day with families and friends. They feel that it is a holiday where people can be thankful. However, many people still don’t know about the first Thanksgiving in which it wasn’t pleasant. Many people feel that the first Thanksgiving was about harmony between American Indians and white settlers who landed in this country several centuries ago. 

The truth was when the settlers arrived, they were hungry and suffering from illnesses from which many of them had died. American Indians such as the Tisquantums and Samosets taught them how to survive. The Massasoits also taught the settlers how to plant corn in the fields. 

What reward did the white settlers offer to these American Indians who were generous toward them? The settlers colonized and massacred them and took their land, and it has been going on for centuries, including now. So when people think about Thanksgiving, they should think about the first Thanksgiving in which it wasn’t pleasant. 

Billy Trice, Jr. 

Oakland 

On Sept. 6 I boarded the No. 51 AC Transit bus in Alameda and, after putting in money, was told that the transfer machine was not working. The driver subsequently gave me an expired transfer card on which he’d written that the transfer machine was broken and signed his employee number. He instructed me to give this to the next driver.  

When I boarded the No. 43 bus (bus 1071) heading towards Telegraph at 9:55 a.m., I silently held out the transfer slip to the driver, as instructed. The driver indicated with a gesture for me to put it in the transfer machine. I told her that it was expired and that my previous driver—here she cut me off by snapping “Then throw it away.” I was taken aback by her tone and I thought she might have meant to throw away the expired transfer slip and pay the fare of $1.75, so I tried again to say that the other machine was broken and the driver told me to give this to—I was interrupted by her barking at me, in a carrying, rude voice to “Put it in the trash! Put it in the trash!” I still had no idea what her intention was and I was very shaken by her manner of speaking to me. I dropped the slip in the trash and headed to the back of the bus. (I muttered “Good morning to you, too”) half expecting her to call me back and force me to pay. She didn’t. 

I was just a woman on my way to work. I ride AC Transit every day, and always get on the bus with a “good morning” or “good evening” to the drivers, about half of whom respond. This woman spoke to me as though I were some sort of delinquent inciting trouble, rather than a regular paying customer. I was embarrassed and shaken and I determined at that time to call AC Transit’s Customer Relations line—I later realized that the title, customer “relations” as opposed to customer “service,” was significant. 

The woman who answered the customer relations line listened while I told her what bus I was then on and what had happened. She didn’t see the problem—the driver had let me on, hadn’t she? I inquired whether it was their policy that, so long as they allowed you to ride, AC Transit drivers could speak to riders however they liked. She said no, she was willing to take down the complaint, but that the drivers were on a deadline that I was taking up time (words to this effect) and I explained, again, that I did as my first driver told me to do. I reiterated that I did not understand what she meant by yelling at me to throw away the ticket—that it wasn’t as though the driver had responded like a rational person and said “Okay, just throw it away and take a seat.” That would have saved time and confusion. The customer relations rep said that she didn’t mean to stick up for the driver but they didn’t have time for me to stand there and ... it became clear that she saw nothing wrong with the incident, and that if she did, I was the one in fault. Beyond frustrated by this time, I told her I would find someone else at AC Transit to speak to, that I would just go over her head, and hung up. That’s when it hit me: there was no one at AC Transit that I could contact who would give a damn.  

Consider just two examples of this I have from past experience: 

1. A few years ago while on Bay Farm Island (Alameda) waiting for my regular bus home I saw the bus approaching on McCartney. While I waved at the driver in disbelief he turned onto Island and drove off towards “main” Alameda, instead of crossing Island to pick me up. It was the last bus heading my way; I was stranded. Eventually another bus (not the same number as the one I took) came along and the driver took me as far as Broadway, where I walked a quarter of a mile in the dark to get to another bus stop. When I called AC Transit’s Customer Relations line the next day I was told that the route had changed. But when I took the bus to work it was the same—had the route changed during the day? No, but it is a different route now in the evening. But the sign is still there, I pointed out—were they going to remove the sign, or post an explanation on it? The rep did not know, nor did they seem to care. For weeks that sign stayed there, same as it always did. Every so often in the evening, on my way home, I would see another AC Transit rider frantically waving their arms at the bus I was on went by. 

2. A couple of years ago when I arrived at the 40/43 bus stop across from Oakland City Center there was a large amount of human feces next to the bench. Sickened, I called the Transit hotline to report it. “Oh, that has nothing to do with us. You need to call Public Safety,” I was told. I explained that I was on my cell phone on my way to work and did not have the Public Safety number, that I was calling because it was their bus stop, with their phone number posted next to it, and maybe they could call Public Safety. No, I was told. It had nothing to do with them. Perhaps I could call Public Safety after I got to work. Uh-huh. Customer Relations. 

So yesterday, after I had been yelled at by a Transit driver who hadn’t learned how to “use her words” (my 3-year-old granddaughter could give her lessons) and dismissed by another AC Transit employee whose job it was to take my complaint, I had no real hope of having this issue addressed. They have figured out that most people take the bus out of necessity, not convenience, and they don’t really have to work for our business. It is like they are the last store on Earth. 

And the sad thing is, most of the drivers that I encounter are courteous, if not friendly, and take pride in their jobs. Having employees like this one, and others like her, reflects badly on the majority. 

So maybe this letter to the editor, which I have also sent to the Board of Directors from the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District, will result in my being contacted by AC Transit and assured that they do care about customers, and that verbally attacking AC Transit customers will not be tolerated. 

But I doubt it. 

Earlita Chenault is an Alameda resident. 

I am a student of violence. There is, to consider, the actual explosion of rage, when flesh collides with flesh. I have been at the wrong end of two encounters, I have seen it happen to another, and have heard, sometimes within minutes, of many others. But I am even more interested in the moments before the eruption—the thickening of the voice, the ape-like bulking of the shoulders, the trembling of the cheekbones, the reek of flammable testosterone. I’m crackingly alert to the warning signs that scream: MOVE! What is my line of work? Parking enforcement for the City of Berkeley. 

Some years ago, I read an account of domestic abuse, of a woman married to a usually benign but unpredictably, randomly abusive husband. There would be long stretches of normalcy inevitably interrupted by a constant fear of what inflection of voice, what choice of subject, what facial expression would trigger her spouse’s wrath and the sudden laying of the hand. I feel, especially whenever there is a recurrence of violence in our work, that parking officers are in a situation somewhat similar to that of the woman in an abusive relationship. On the one hand, we are, as it were bound, not only by the routine regulations of employment but also by the particular requirements of law enforcement work. On the other, we are, like unarmed London bobbies, in a position of weakness. Considering the public we come in contact with as a whole, I regard it as mostly amiable and mostly reasonable, but capable of lightning-fast changes in mood, not entirely trustworthy, and sometimes dangerous. Knowing people, and knowing, among other things, when people turn violent, is in the interest of self-preservation. 

Recently, one of my colleagues had an experience that, if nothing else, proves that despite my many years in the job I haven’t seen everything yet. Put as plainly as possible, what happened is this: The vehicle of a male Berkeley citizen was cited for a parking violation. The citizen approached the female parking enforcement officer who had issued the citation and demanded that she take back the ticket. The officer declined. The citizen reached for her, grabbed her jacket, and pulled the officer toward him. He then brushed her shoulder-length hair aside, and pushing her shoulder in the same motion, inserted the citation inside a jacket loop above her shoulder. Finally, he slammed his hand down on the shoulder, the loop, and the crumpled citation, and walked away. In the next half-hour, the citizen would be apprehended and arrested for battery by Berkeley police officers. The citizen’s behavior was brutish, yes, but not that uncommon. What sets this incident beyond the pale is that he, self-identified as Rob Browning, wrote a letter about the incident to a local publication, that this letter was defiant rather than contrite, that this letter was in fact published as a “commentary” by the Berkeley Daily Planet (in the Nov. 7 edition), and that he is the husband of Berkeley City Councilmember Linda Maio. 

The commentary, headlined “My Jail Term,” in which he refers to Thoreau and Gandhi and intimates an acquaintance with the noblest principles, puts the strutting rooster back into cockiness. At best a simulacrum of apology, in which he calls the officer stupid and unfair, the letter is at worse something much more worrisome: a provocation to further violence. Mr. Browning describes, with palpable glee, a cellmate who upon hearing of the incident approved of “my achievement.” While in the letter he downplays the details of the incident—the whole of it: “I stuck the crumpled citation under the epaulet of her jacket”—I wonder how honest he was with the cellmate. Did he even, for macho effect, exaggerate? Perhaps, since the incident, he has had or will have conversations, barren of any mention of art museums, writers, or acquaintance with the noblest principles, in which he will snicker and say, “I gave her what she deserved.” 

By necessity, I am a student of violence. And in my estimation, Rob Browning has made my situation and that of my colleagues more precarious. 

Kirk Rivera is a Berkeley resident.

I can’t say I was surprised when I awoke early on Nov. 8 to find Pat Kernighan the declared winner of Oakland’s competitive District 2 City Council race.  

Sitting with Allison supporters at Maxwell’s restaurant at 13th and Webster streets last night, one devoted volunteer, Vanessa J. Moses, age 29, looked at the numbers she’d written in blue ink on her palm. Allison had defeated Kernighan by only 30 votes in the San Antonio precinct that Moses had manned on Election Day. In a neighborhood east of Lake Merritt populated by some of the city’s poorest families, Moses said Allison should have won by a much higher margin because this is where she focused the bulk of her campaign: hitting the pavement to engage voters who have often felt estranged from the political process.  

But on election night Kernighan’s 55 percent edged out Allison’s 45 percent, with just 800 votes separating the candidates.  

Earlier that evening at the Communication Workers building on Park Boulevard and E. 18th Street—get-out-the-vote headquarters for the Allison camp—Yvonne A. Smith was still keeping the faith. She told me a story about a 22-year-old Laney College student named Tony who needed a ride to and from the polls in order to vote for the first time in his life. With Tony translating for his Cantonese-speaking mother, Smith and her fellow volunteers assured her they would bring him back safely, which they did.  

Sixty-eight-year-old Smith, who has lived in Oakland for 50 years, said she’s never seen so many Oaklanders energized about a City Council race. Indeed, over one-third of volunteers for Allison’s campaign came from voters outside of District 2, according to Naina Khanna, age 29, who was field director of the Allison campaign.  

Smith, a longtime West Oakland resident, and Moses, a Temescal resident, exemplify this telling trend in the campaign. Indeed, if these and the many other non-district 2 Allison supporters could have voted, the 36-year old candidate would have easily won. But this factor set aside, the reality is that more of Kernighan’s supporters voted and not enough of Allison’s supporters did. 

Ultimately, the Allison campaign was less about Allison the candidate as it was about what Allison represents: a progressive who, on the heels of a Dellums mayoral victory, had the potential to swing City Council towards more progressive political action.  

Beyondchon.org columnist Ben Wyskida said it well in an Oct. 24 editorial: 

“There are eight seats on the Oakland City Council, and as it stands today, three votes are reliably progressive and the other five are reliably pro-developer. To win, you need four plus the mayor. Five votes = real progressive power.” 

Many progressive activists like Wyskida say this “five votes” factor is especially important because Dellums will move to implement plans for a “model city” in the new year, including critical decisions about housing and development projects.  

But the significance of this factor didn’t replace one key fact: Allison put forth more political rhetoric, albeit progressive political rhetoric, than she did concrete, clear ideas about how to implement the progressive changes her supporters around the city were so excited about.  

Pat Kernighan too failed to express concrete answers to the city’s problems, but unlike Allison, she could point to her record in city council and her relationships in various neighborhoods like Chinatown and her own hood Trestle Glen as proof to undecided voters that she was the safe bet candidate.  

In addition, Allison did well to bring attention to the fact that she did not take political contributions from developers or corporations, forcing Kernighan to try distancing herself from big business and developers. Public campaign finance records show Kernighan accepted individual political contributions from developers like Phil Tagami, and James Falachi, and also from officials at the Port of Oakland, the independent city agency that plays a key role in the huge Oak to Ninth downtown development project.  

But let’s be clear. The energy and momentum generated by the Allison campaign still matters. New voters have participated in the electoral process, and a very diverse group of supporters have come together across neighborhood, racial, ethnic, class, and age boundaries, building a network that Allison and other progressive candidates can draw upon in future elections.  

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that we witnessed a real grassroots, clean-money campaign where a progressive candidate new to electoral politics actually had a real shot at taking the post from a well-funded incumbent. Allison actually believed she could win, and this says a lot in a political climate where young progressives are often ridiculed for being naïve and out of touch with the majority populace.  

Maybe to longtime residents of the Bay Area’s political twilight zone this doesn’t seem extraordinary, but in August I moved to the East Bay from Philadelphia where a green party candidate as liberal as Allison would be hard pressed to garner almost half of the vote in a district.  

As a registered Berkeley voter, I could not vote for Allison in yesterday’s election. But if I could have, I would have. In an interview with the East Bay blog NovoMetro.com Allison said: “Democracy, at its healthiest, encourages people from all kinds of backgrounds…It will never be our turn until we assert ourselves.” 

In political campaigns and in life, Allison’s words ring true. It will never be our turn until we assert ourselves. Sometimes you have to do what you feel called to do, even if it’s not certain things will turn out the way you expect. And even if the result is not what you wanted, you’ve lost nothing. You have only gained the experience of the growth born from taking risks.  

I look forward to the Allison campaign for 2011. 

Beandrea Davis is a resident of Oakland and student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.  

It’s convenient, of course—and not entirely wrong—to blame the 57-43 defeat of Measure J on greedy developers, conservative businesspeople and negative campaign mailers. But Measure J proponents also need to look in the mirror. Not only were they weakened by others, they contributed to losing the race all on their own. 

As an active centrist opponent of Measure J—one whose name was appropriated for the PAC mailers without permission—I can’t claim to be entirely objective, or to be happy with either extreme camp. But I can analyze the campaign in traditional political terms.  

Judging by endorsements, Measure J simply failed to move beyond its natural preservationist base among neighborhood associations. With the arguable exception of the local Green Party, no major mainstream civic or political group endorsed Measure J. Those groups, who reached their decisions well before the negative mailers dropped, simply were not convinced by the proponents’ argument that Measure J was a better alternative than the City Council’s community-compromise version. To accept the Measure J conspiracy theories, we’d have to believe that the entire Democratic Party establishment—including the moderate Berkeley Democratic Club, the Alameda County Central Committee and our ultraleft Rep. Barbara Lee—are all under the control of a few Berkeley developers and businesspeople.  

As a speaker against J at some of the endorsement meetings, I learned that even citizens in favor of J could see some procedural and structural flaws. Procedurally, a very visible problem was that the proponents wrote the measure entirely within their hyper-preservationist orbit, and never held a single public meeting to receive feedback or suggestions for improvements. This left them looking like a narrow special-interest group uninterested in Berkeley-style participatory democracy—rather like those behind unpopular Measure I.  

Structurally, the proponents had faced an unfortunate calendar. They had to circulate and submit their petition before the LPC and City Council finalized their markup ordinance. However, some of the worst preservationist fears in May and June—such as the potential weakening of structure of merit, or a developer-friendly loophole in the Request for Determination (RFD) procedure—were eliminated by the council before approving a compromise ordinance in July. Final City Council action meant that the original Measure J campaign slogan, “save structure of merit,” simply died on its feet. By late July there was much less left in the bill to fear, making motivating pro-J voters even more difficult. 

To its credit, the Measure J campaign moved from mostly-negative to mostly-positive as the election approached. The final mailer—an upbeat piece on the virtues of preservation—told the truth about why we have a strong LPO today. But it failed to tell the whole truth. It never mentioned that the City Council version of the ordinance was waiting to be enacted, and it did not specifically list the improvements Measure J would bring (by design, those improvements were unremarkable). To voters who had learned there was an alternative, the mailer seemed oddly disconnected from reality. It read as if the election were a referendum on preservation, not a choice between alternative revisions. And that diminished the credibility of the campaign. 

The negative PAC mailers were certainly unfortunate, and definitely misguided. Written by outside hired guns, they were just as disconnected from the actual choice on the ballot as the last pro-J mailer was. Perhaps reflecting the prejudices of their backers, the PAC mailers tried to discredit the entire LPO and its landmarking process—even though none of the possible outcomes would change the standards by which historic resources are designated. Many Berkeley voters knew better than that. 

So we experienced a campaign that, in its final days, had both extremes arguing about issues Measure J would not affect at all, win or lose. Neither side should be proud of that, because what we lost was a reasonable discussion of actual preservation alternatives and possibilities. 

The group of passionate preservationists behind Measure J now faces two alternatives—one anti-democratic and one pro-democratic. 

The first alternative is to file a referendum to overturn the new law the council will enact later this month. This divisive tactic would suspend the law for another two years, until in 2008 Berkeley voters no doubt repudiate their views once again. Doing this would poison their own political agenda for at least that long: nothing they favor will get any attention from an LPC and council they just insulted, more designations might fail on appeal for political reasons, and public sympathy would further dwindle. Taking this obstructionist path would be a shame—new ideas for improving our preservation process, such as neighborhood conservation districts, are ready for public discussion. 

The second and more democratic alternative is “wait and see”—give the new LPO a chance to run and document any problems or negative outcomes. If the council fails to remedy those, then another initiative campaign in 2008 could propose to do so with a better chance to win majority support (it could focus on real problems instead of on imagined enemies).  

In stark terms, here is the Measure J proponents’ choice: Do they really believe in cooperatively advancing preservation efforts in Berkeley, or would they rather be treated for the next two years like North Korea—left to live with their paranoid delusions in total political isolation until their referendum is voted down? I hope can they finally show some willingness to work with the rest of us in carrying forward a sensible preservationist agenda the whole city can support. 

Alan Tobey worked for the passage of the original LPO in 1974 and has supported it ever since.

A CLARIFICATION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On election night I attended Tom Bates’ victory party at Cafe de la Paz. It was not my victory party. It was Tom’s. And, it turns out, it was Raudel Wilson’s. I like Raudel, but I didn’t endorse him for City Council. Because I attended that party, that fact seems to be unclear.  

On another note, it was a pleasure to be with so many friends as the returns came in, gratifying as they were. 

Linda Maio 

• 

CHAMBER OF  

COMMERCE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Perhaps the majority of your readers do not know that the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce and the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce Political Action Committee are two separate entities. The PAC is an affiliate of the Berkeley Chamber but have their own governing body, budget, and set of rules separate from the Berkeley Chamber. 

The majority of the members of the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce are the people that serve you coffee in the morning or repairs your car or fixes your computer. There are even members who can give you a massage to relax you from the stresses of the day. Most of these members are just trying to make a living in a town they love. 

For over 100 years the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce has been helping small to midsize companies reach for the American dream of owning a business. There are plenty of networking opportunities and business tools that members can avail to help their business. It hasn’t always been easy with the business climate in Berkeley, but the Chamber is always willing to listen, learn, and assist its members.  

The PAC has no direct relationship with the everyday operations of the Berkeley Chamber. Businesses and individuals that join the Berkeley Chamber do so because the chamber is more about business in Berkeley and not about politics in Berkeley. For the 35 or so people that gathered in front of the Chamber offices last Wednesday (much less than the 125 intimated in the article by Judith Scherr) to protest actions of the PAC, it would have probably been more productive to meet with the chairperson and/or board of the PAC not the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce.  

It’s great that we can live in a country where we can protest whom we want and discuss issues in a constructive and non-violent manner. Let’s just make sure we are talking about the right issues and identifying the right groups. 

Richard Hom 

Chamber Member 

• 

DRAWING PARALLELS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The elections of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Tom Bates in Berkeley share a common thread. These two victors with long left-wing credentials teamed with their traditional opponents to win votes. 

Ortega’s running mate was the former Contra Jaime Morales. During Ortega’s first stint as president his government confiscate Morales’s sprawling estate. After the Nov. 5 vote Vice-President Elect Morales was asked in a Univision Interview how he could run with the man who took his house. Morales answered, “That happened in revolution. I was caught in a huge wave of change.” Morales went on to say, “Ortega is no longer a Marxist he is a pragmatist.” Allegedly, Ortega’s favorite song is Frank Sinatra"s “My Way.” 

Bates obtained the endorsement of the Berkeley Democratic Club that has long opposed most all of what Bates has traditionally stood for. But then these seem to be times for “pragmatism.”  

Ted Vincent 

• 

FALSE DESCRIPTONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I just read P.M. Price’s column (“Confronting the Role Models of Halloween Gangsters”), and I must say I share your feeling of being disturbed. And, unfortunately, it’s worse than you might think. What we are seeing is the manifestation of the “divide” part of “divide and conquer” being played out by our children. The power of “discourse” that surrounds us and informs the “norms” we live by is manufactured to separate us (the workers of the world) from each other so that we will be easier to control. From the immigrant debate that propagates nationalism (and normalizes racial tension), to the depiction of endless violence in the permanent “underclass” that is created by neo-liberal capitalism, we are being fed a world-view that pits us against each other and not against the ones who perpetuate this insanity, the ones with the real influence to do something about it, the ones who would make war a perpetual necessity. Yet, as Michel Foucault would say, the power is everywhere, and we are participating in the empowering of these false descriptions of ourselves by acting them out. Take the power back, be the change you seek in the world.  

Amor Vincit Omnia 

• 

USING MELEIA’S NAME 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It is very odd that the opponents of Proposition H in the Nov. 7 election chose to identify themselves as they did in the ballot arguments. It does seem to indicate they were looking for “pizazz” to bring attention to themselves. But I would also say it was downright rude, and unseemly, to use Meleia Willis-Starbuck’s name in this way. I would recommend that people try to consider common decency in identifying themselves in a public document. I would further recommend that the City Clerk be more cognizant of these issues, and not allow people to personally identify themselves this way. To discuss the concerns about local crime in an argument is one thing, but to personally adopt someone else’s tragedy as a personal identifier, that goes beyond what is decent. 

The twist here is that Mr. Tilleman is using (and I mean using) Meleia’s name to oppose a proposition that she would have undoubtedly endorsed. How insensitive and cruel is that, to her name and memory, and to those who love her. The further irony is that the argument that global issues should not be linked to local politics is made absurd by the fact that it is the culture of punitive aggression that lies at the heart of the violence we experience in our lives locally, here and now. It is all connected. 

On behalf of the Willis-Starbuck family, I would suggest that the City of Berkeley, the media, and other public entities not allow such a mis-usage of personal identification to be used in the future. 

Meg Starbuck 

• 

NOT FOR SALE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

George Beier thought he could buy the election. Then he learned the hard way that it was never for sale. 

Anthony Sanchez 

• 

MUDDLED PICTURE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Your Nov. 3 article on the KPFA board elections muddies the reality of an already complex situation. First, the Alliance for a democratic KPFA slate, of which I am part, is a group of individuals who joined together because there was an existing slate, Concerned Listeners. The Alliance is not the product of any other group, much to one such group’s dismay, People’s Radio. The Alliance has had its own set of problems in this election as a result of PR’s meddling, which has caused a great deal of confusion for both voters, and apparently, your reporter. 

Concerned Listeners, on the other hand, was formed by members of KPFA’s staff going to the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club. Although quoted, the reporter excluded what I stated was most important: It is completely improper for staff, which have their own designated seats on the board, to be involved in the formation of a slate of listener candidates. To turn to any political party to form a such a slate is beyond the pale as no political party should be involved in the governance and setting of policies of any media outlet. 

Your overall portrayal of the Alliance as a group which wants to micromanage and determine programming is an inaccurate characterization. As a former radio programmer and program director, I have been outspoken in the dangers inherent in such detailed involvement, as have others on the Alliance slate. I do, however, firmly believe that the board has a role in asking for a timely review of the programming grid, funding surveys of what Bay Area radio listeners would like to hear, directing the station manager to implement changes reflective of such a survey, and provide funding, through the budget process, for adequate training for volunteer programmers to produce listenable radio programming. We live in a progressive area and a station providing programming outside what is heard on mainstream media should be thriving. This is not the case with KPFA and listener numbers are actually dropping. 

KPFA and Pacifica have been struggling internally and with listeners for many years. There has been a revolving door of short-term and interim station managers. There are factions, feuds and outright fights that include throwing chairs at station meetings. Innuendo, rumors and more divisiveness is not the solution.  

Sasha Futran 

KPFA Local Station Board Candidate 

• 

KPFA ELECTION PROCESS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Judith Scherr’s Nov. 3 article on the 2006 election unfortunately left out some key elements of this year’s election process. Ballots went out the membership before listeners had the chance to listen to the candidates. As someone who was involved in the KQED election with Sasha Futran when she was a member of the KQED board, I would have to say that the KPFA election process was much less democratic than at KQED. The rules were the same for all candidates at KQED and the voices of all the candidates were on KQED FM in a unbiased manner. This again was not the case in the KPFA election. The election officers also prevented me from running as a listener candidate although I have not produced any programming since last October. This follows up on the undemocratic banning of the KPFA Labor Collective from even submitting proposals for labor programming. The same person Tracy Rosenberg, who supported the banning of the Labor Collective proposals being accepted in the KPFA program council was then appointed by Les Radke to conduct a democratic election. This appointment of a biased election officer to run the election at KPFA has only added to the twisting of the democratic process at KPFA. 

Confidential files from Pacifica were released by someone with access to these documents from the staff to taint the election. KPFA Election officer Tracy Rosenberg and Pacifica Election officer Les Radke both have ignored these flagrant election violations which were aimed at harming Sasha Futran and the Alliance For A democratic KPFA slate www.allianceforademocratickpfa.org and putting the integrity of the election in jeopardy. 

One reason that some of the long time staff at KPFA are concerned about the election of Futran is that she is very knowledgeable about radio having been a radio host and manager at other stations around the country.  

Lastly is a serious financial crisis brewing at KPFA and Pacifica and the declining level of listeners combined with increased donations from those contributing $500 or more while $25 donations are decreasing bodes great danger for KPFA. The recent fund driver was more than $100,000 below the goal and this is again a sign of increasing unhappiness with programming that is not relevant to more and more people.  

KPFA needs to be revitalized so it becomes a beacon for change and a voice for people struggling in Northern California for justice, human rights and equality. A vibrant and exciting KPFA is within our reach and we hope to make these changes to make full use of this invaluable cultural and news resource. 

Steve Zeltzer 

San Francisco 

• 

TOBACCO CESSATION  

STILL A PRIORITY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Despite the defeat of Proposition 86 (the tobacco tax), the American Cancer Society remains committed to preventing lung cancer and disease, discouraging the next generation from smoking and reducing tobacco use across the nation. 

I’d like to remind your readers that Thursday, Nov. 16 is the 30th anniversary of the Great American Smokeout. Tobacco is still the leading cause of death in our nation, accounting for one out of every three cancer deaths in California every year. Today, an estimated 45 million U.S. adults smoke despite the known associated health risks. 

And to all the ex-smokers in our community: Congratulations on your success in living a tobacco-free life! You have greatly reduced your risk of diseases such as cancer, heart disease and lung disease—not to mention reducing your community’s exposure to the hazards of second hand smoke. I commend your achievements and hope you will join us in celebrating 30 years of the Great American Smokeout! 

To assist people who still smoke and double their chances of quitting for good, the American Cancer Society has developed resources such as www.cancer.org/smokeout and the toll-free number 1-800-ACS-2345. Both are accessible 24/7 to help smokers manage a plan to quit. 

Janice Woodward 

Director of Community Services 

American Cancer Society,  

East Bay Metro Unit 

Oakland 

• 

THANKS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Many thanks to U.S. Storage at the southwest corner of Shattuck and Ward, for brightening my walk home. These good folks transformed a four-story box warehouse into a whimsical deep sea aquarium, with metallic fish and sea horses swimming among the reeds (watch out for that shark rounding the corner from Ward!). Above them, half-way up, the surface of the sea laps gentle waves, and above the waves, seagulls fly. At the very top is a strip of blue sky, with more seagulls magically perched at rest. 

I smile every time I pass by, and these days that’s something to be grateful for. 

Dorothy Bryant 

• 

BATES ONE MORE TIME 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Well, well...after the election it appears we’re all still riding on the Bates Express. But the good news is that a heck of a lot more people have realized that the train doesn’t stop at their station anymore—it just speeds right by. We all need to work together to make sure we aren’t shut out of our local government anymore. Keep in touch with people across the city and in other districts than yours; share your experiences and learn about their issues. That is how we will win the next election two years from now. 

Doug Buckwald 

• 

MRS. DALLOWAY’S 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I believe I can state, without fear of contradiction, that Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary and Garden Arts Store on College Avenue is one of Elmwood’s greatest treasures. This unique, utterly charming book store, now celebrating its second birthday, was the brain child of its owners, Marian Abbot Bundy and Ann Leyhe, Both admirers of British novelist Virginia Woolfe, they chose the name, “Mrs. Dalloway,” who, if you read the book, loved flowers. Entering this store is a joyful experience, thanks to the taste and imagination of the two charming women who have fashioned a marvelous display of best selling books, on the right side, while on the left side there are gorgeous books on gardening, as well as exotic plants. The walls are decorated with lovely pastel watercolors by Berkeley Artist, Annette Goldberg. Wicker chairs are an invitation to wile away pleasant hours perusing a book or two. When I enter this sunny store, I sometimes feel I’ve been transported to London’s “64 Charring Cross Road,” the site of a tender memoir of some years ago. During the first months of its opening, I brooded that Mrs. Dalloway’s might not make a go of it, recalling that Avenue Books, a former tenant, failed, like so many other book stores. But I need not have worried. In past months, the store has become a veritable bee hive of activity—readings (I.e, Mary Gordon), a lively, jam-packed reception for the opening of the Annette Goldberg exhibit, and just two nights ago, a “Decca” Mitford program, with Barbara Oliver reading the Mitford letters. Pick up a list of coming events at the store (or, of course, refer to the Berkeley Daily Planet calendar) and see the marvelous books to be discussed in coming weeks. 

Will Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary and Garden Arts succeed where so many other book stores have failed? I believe it will, because this is a neighborhood store, unique to Berkeley, cherished by faithful readers and informed people who want to preserve old traditions. We’re lucky to have such a store! 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

• 

XXXXXXXXXX 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I was astonished to read that Rob Browning had received a citation for parking slightly on a sidewalk. Perhaps the Berkeley police department is overcompensating for its prior impotence, to wit:  

During UC’s construction of the new dorms at Units I and II, a private food-vending truck serving the construction workers regularly parked squarely across a crosswalk, blocking the wheelchair curb-cut, in a red zone on Dwight Way near Benvenue. The proprietors opened a service window on the street side of the truck, from which they served patrons lined up in the traffic lanes of Dwight Way. They also set up a little condiment table in the middle of Dwight Way. This novel mid-street restaurant, which everyone could see violated a variety of laws (they also had no vending permit), and was very dangerous both for pedestrians and motorists on Dwight Way, happily raked in the bucks during the lunch hour, five days a week, for about eleven months. 

During all this time, it seems that not a single parking enforcement officer nor police officer witnessed the operation, although I and others notified the police department, the city managers’ office, and several council members about it many times—in addition to university officials. It finally ended when I drew it to the attention of a passing Berkeley police officer who happened to be a new recruit to the police department. This helpful rookie did not understand that he was not supposed to enforce any traffic or parking laws that interfered with UC projects or activities (construction, special events, football games, etc.). He immediately instructed the vendor to move into a location on UC property a few feet away, where it operated during the rest of the construction project. It was an obvious, safe location, off the commons, that I and others had suggested eleven months before. 

Our southside sidewalks are also regularly blocked by discarded furniture and trash, which sometimes remains for months; this is also illegal obstruction of the sidewalk but results in no action. 

Therefore, I humbly suggest two ways in which Mr. Browning might avoid future tickets: First, he might obtain a UC staff or UC construction sticker for his van, or perhaps even a CAL Bears sticker might do. This should protect him against parking citations. Second, he could camouflage his van with old furniture and garbage. This should render it invisible to city staff. Good luck, Mr. Browning. 

Sharon Hudson 

• 

XXXXXXXXXX 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

North Shattuck is already overcrowded. The surrounding residential areas already suffer from traffic congestion and lack of parking.  

I live 2 blocks away from the site of the prospective plaza, and I (and my neighbors) constantly feel the negative impact of the businesses on North Shattuck. Parking is, at best, difficult, but on weekends and around Christmastime and on street-sweeping days and during Live Oak Park events, parking is horrendous. 

I hope that the city does not approve this frivolous project. This money can be better spent so that it benefits those in need. 

Debbie Dritz 

• 

XXXXXXXXXX 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Well, ain’t that swell? They’re building a prototype newer, safer hydrogen bomb—right here in our li’l ol’ East Bay, heart and soul of the U.S. peace movement. Say the old ones won’t do—wear and tear of time, chemical aging--very sophisticated stuff. We know best, not for the masses. Not certain how they would perform—function or not. Allows the boys to make a “realistic,” reasonable demand. What a stake Livermore and environs has in this election, hey? Comrade Vonnegut, would you please join us in this discussion? 

Arnie Passman 

• 

IRAQ 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Carlyle had it right: “War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them in uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.” 

Six out of 10 voters polled at election sites said it’s time to get out of Iraq. Democrats who now control the House and Senate have to come up with a viable exit strategy from Iraq, a timetable for bringing home the troops and develope a plan to clean up the mess Bush and Republicans have left in Iraq. 

The war has created a terrorist breeding ground in the Middle East that has to be dealt with and can’t be allowed to spread into the rest of the area. 

Ron Lowe  

Grass Valley 

LIES AND DISTORTIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have helped organize and worked to elect the “Concerned Listeners” slate for the KPFA board and I’m insulted and shocked by the lies and misinformation that People’s Radio and their slate, “Alliance for a Democratic KPFA,” have spread about our candidates and collective. 

The Concerned Listeners group has been characterized as a “Democratic Party front” because members of the Wellstone Democratic Club have been involved in organizing the slate. I have also been a part of the organizing committee from the earliest meetings along with many others from diverse activist backgrounds including folks from Wellstone. Never has the Democratic Party been discussed. None of the candidates on the slate are members of the Wellstone Democratic Club. One candidate used to work with one of their committees but is currently registered Green. Most outrageous may be the sectarian notion that the fine activists from Wellstone shouldn’t be included, in fact welcomed, in the KPFA listener community and the progressive left of the Bay Area. 

I’ve heard our slate referred to as the “corporate” slate. Then why would Pratap Chatterjee of Corpwatch and Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange endorse our slate? As someone with the class struggle in my veins who has stood side by side in the struggle with several members on the Concerned Listeners slate, I find this characterization of our candidates insulting. 

The attacks on Sarv Randhawa have been particularly personal and the lies spread about this kind and gentle man are shameful. It’s ironic that in today’s political climate the People’s Radio supporters have falsely accused the South Asian man on our slate of being violent… A blatant lie. 

Finally, as a longtime union activist and a shop steward, I am most offended by the anti-worker attitudes of the Alliance slate. They show disdain for the workers of KPFA and the extraordinary work they do. KPFA has been on in my household since my parents got a radio in 1950. I listen to KPFA 3 to 5 hours a day. I also follow the mainstream press and to equate the two is ridiculous. KPFA’s programming has been referred to as “low budget NPR” or a repetition of the “AP wire service.” That’s a straw man. The fact is, the coverage and information on KPFA is completely different from PBS and the corporate media. KPFA is a lifeline for me and thousands of other activists. I went into the streets in ‘99 in support of the work of the people who staffed the station. 

The other slate calls the staff “entrenched” and “dead wood” and behaves like your nightmare boss. I ask anyone reading to imagine doing their own job with a group of micro-managers, who don’t know what it takes to do your job and have no respect for the craft, telling you what you should do and how to do it. That’s how members of the current board have acted and that’s the attitude of People’s Radio and the Alliance slate. 

Finally, as a singer songwriter and cultural activist I have to say the other side’s hostility toward cultural programs and programmers is sad. I deeply appreciate and depend on access to KPFA’s airwaves, the only station supporting musicians like me. There is no revolution without singing and dancing.  

I urge KPFA members to support the Concerned Listeners slate and check out the website, www.kpfalisteners.org.  

Jon Fromer 

• 

TELEGRAPH AVENUE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

After reading and then rereading Becky O’Malley’s winded editorial regarding the District 7 district debate and council race, I came to the conclusion that Ms. O’Malley is not a frequenter of Telegraph Avenue, despite the fact she has much to say about the issue. Though she tells tales of living on Telegraph as an undergraduate and starting a business in the area, it is obvious that the Telegraph that Becky O’Malley is remembering is one of the past, and, like so many Berkeleyans, she is out-of-touch with the situation on the avenue today. The very fact that Ms. O’Malley can say, “The majority of the stores on Telegraph evoke what’s left of the counter-culture, which inevitably attracts young people whose brand of nostalgia includes deliberate, self-conscious anti-social street behavior” shows that she is not a citizen who spends much time on the avenue. The issue with street behavior is really dependent on a handful of problematic and anti-social individuals in serious need of intervention, not the general “young people” who frequent the avenue. As a woman who lived through the golden hippie age of Telegraph, I would think Ms. O’Malley would be less inclined to judge and blame the general “young people” who visit or live in the area, perhaps remembering what it was like to be a part of that counter-culture once. Ms. O’Malley goes so far as to say, “Today the newest tenant (of Telegraph) is a tattoo parlor, and is it any surprise that there are surly tattooed and pierced kids on the street, some of whom might even use rude language and sit defiantly in doorways displaying their piercings?” It is obvious, once again, that Ms. O’Malley knows nothing firsthand about Telegraph’s current situation. Those “tattooed and pierced” individuals are actually the paying customers who frequent Telegraph, dropping about $60 for a piercing and often hundreds for a tattoo; these are not surly individuals leering out of store doorways, these are today’s patrons. These are not abusive people; the small number of problematic individuals neglected by the city mental health system and continually falling through the cracks of the criminal justice system are the abusive people. And, by the way, there is a vast difference between abusive behavior and free speech. 

Counter-culture is the only separation Telegraph has from any other street in Berkeley—as a veteran of the 1960s Telegraph, Ms. O’Malley should be a little more open minded and accepting of that counter-culture. Finally, she refers to there being “too many nasty fast-food places” on Telegraph, which only further proves how out of touch Ms. O’Malley is with the avenue. Besides a Subway on Bancroft and Telegraph and a Noah’s Bagels on Durant and Telegraph, I can’t even think of a fast-food chain that exists on upper Telegraph Avenue. Maybe if Ms. O’Malley actually visited the avenue now and then she wouldn’t make these kinds of mistakes in her haughty editorials. 

Faith Gardner 

District 7 Resident and Telegraph Avenue employee 

• 

TRADER JOE’S 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A new Trader Joe’s would be great for Berkeley families for several reasons:  

1. Decrease overall Berkeley traffic. Although traffic would probably increase locally near the MLK/University Avenue intersection, overall traffic may decrease across town as fewer people would have to drive to get groceries. Currently, once a week I drive several miles across town to El Cerrito Plaza to shop at Trader Joe’s (TJs). I never shop at the other stores there in that plaza, just TJs. If we had a TJs in Berkeley, I could walk there most of the time. I already walk daily with my toddler to the various local parks and I could stop there on my way home to pick up a few needed items. There are so many people living nearby (esp. Cal students) who would also walk to the store. I certainly would be happy to use less gas and pollute less to get my groceries. I already walk to the post office, restaurants, and other stores. It would be so great to be able to walk to TJs too. 

2. Increase the availability of inexpensive organic food to people living in Berkeley. TJs sells many organic foods, and their foods are wholesome and minimally processed (if at all) and the prices are fantastic. What a great resource for Berkeley families! 

3. Increase tax revenue for Berkeley. TJs does very well and would be a big tax boom for Berkeley. If local people are worried about the homeless, tax revenue from TJs would add funds to Berkeley to help the homeless.  

4. Increase housing availability. Although the units proposed above TJs are one-bedrooms, they would be perfect for college students, young adults, visiting scholars from Cal, etc. This would relieve the overall housing problem in Berkeley, freeing up other apartments for families. The proposed housing is so close to UC Berkeley, BART, many bus lines, downtown. What a great location! 

I know a TJs would increase traffic for those living on Berkeley Way, but is it realistic for them to expect a quiet street forever when they live one block from a major thoroughfare in an urban environment? It’s time for Berkeley to think long term. Let’s have a Trader Joe’s and new housing at MLK and University Ave. It’s good for Berkeley. I urge Berkeley residents to write the Zoning Adjustments Board or attend the Nov. 9 meeting to support the approval of plans for a new Trader Joe’s. 

Andrea Jones 

• 

LAKESHORE TRADER JOE’S 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a resident of the Trestle Glen area and someone who patronizes Lakeshore Avenue businesses several times a week, I’m horrified to think what traffic and parking will be like once Trader Joe’s moves into the old Albertson’s on Lakeshore. The parking situation only recently improved because Albertson’s closed, which caused me to breathe a sigh of relief, not missing that old, outdated store one bit. But anyone who lives in the area can clearly see that on any Saturday when the Farmer’s Market is open, the two story Albertson’s parking structure and virtually all other street parking for blocks is completely full. Add a store like Trader Joe’s to the mix and parking and traffic will be, simply, a nightmare. 

I’ve recently noticed that City Council candidate Pat Kernighan is taking credit for bringing Trader Joe’s to this location, so I stopped by her campaign office the other evening and asked her campaign workers to explain where everyone is supposed to park once Trader Joe’s comes to Lakeshore. One woman explained that the solution to the parking problem is better enforcement, by marking tires, writing tickets and towing cars. This heavy-handed approach didn’t work when Albertson’s tried it several months prior to their closing, and it won’t work now. All it will accomplish is to alienate and further frustrate the Oakland residents who need to frequent the area. 

However, the bigger issue is that Lakeshore Avenue works, just as it is. We have a phenomenal Farmer’s market, a soon-to-reopen Safeway just around the corner on Grand Avenue, a local Asian market just next door to Pete’s Coffee, a natural foods store, Arizmendi, Starbucks, and on and on. And if that’s not enough, the new Farmer Joe’s that recently opened on Fruitvale is just minutes away, with tons of ample parking, and they open earlier than Berkeley Bowl and stock an amazing array of products, organic produce, deli and prepared foods, etc. The Lakeshore neighborhood shopping area is vibrant and alive and, if anything, it would make more sense to raze Albertson’s and create more parking, which is so sorely needed. 

In all fairness, I’m a Berkeley Bowl shopper, but that being said, I’ve learned which days and times are best for me to shop there and not be overwhelmed by their own shopping problems. And as much as I love Berkeley Bowl, when I heard a rumor that they were approached to come into the Lakeshore location, my reaction was the same as it is for Trader Joe’s. Berkeley Bowl would not enhance Lakeshore. I fully realize that Trader Joe’s is the chichi thing to do, especially with so many well-heeled residents in the area, but come on … the seeming advantages of bringing a store with such an incredible draw to Lakeshore are greatly exaggerated and will ultimately destroy the wonderful ambiance that we already have. Lakeshore works.  

No thanks, Pat Kerhighan, and no thanks Trader Joe’s. Lakeshore is better off without it. 

Lisa B. Lee 

Oakland 

• 

THE HAVOC WROUGHT BY  

CONDO CONVERSIONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In the guise of some sort of “gift” to upper middle class professionals who can’t afford million dollar starter homes, the Berkeley Property Owners Association has presented Berkeley voters with an opportunity to participate in demographic mischief right here in our town in the form of Measure I, which would remove 500 affordable rental units from Berkeley’s ever dwindling supply. How thoughtful.  

For only $400,000, Berkeley renters could leap from their $1,200 one bedroom apartment to the same apartment, now called a “condominium,” and pay $3.250 per month for the same digs. Wow. Such a deal.  

Of course, sitting renters would not be able to qualify for such largesse as their incomes fall far short of conventional lending industry standards. $3,250 monthly payments require an annual income of more than $85,000, and $85,000 is almost three times the median renter household income according to the most recent census. 

Over 100 middle income rental units were recently converted in Oakland. Less than five percent of the tenants in residence, many of whom had lived in these previously affordable apartments for over a decade, could afford to triple and even quadruple their monthly payments for housing. And, the approximate 60 percent African-American tenant residents—all middle class working people—have virtually disappeared, scattered across northern California. A vibrant friendly community hacked to pieces by the condo kings. A kind of ethnic cleansing 2006, reminiscent of the urban renewal/negro removal of the ’60s. 

I expect the citizens of Berkeley will have the decency to reject this abominable initiative. 

And by the way, Mr. and Mrs. BPOA, on your way to the bank, would you please take that sharp stick and poke me in the other eye? 

Jeffrey J. Carter 

• 

FACEBOOK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am a student a UC Berkeley and a member of the online social network named Facebook. I had thought that this site was created to be an open and safe form for students to network, collaborate and discuss politics. According to the USA Today, it is described as an “avenue” for student activism. Recently student members of this site have seen a change in the site by an infusion of political ads and monies with election. 

I created a Facebook group to challenge and ask some questions of a local Berkeley politician George Beier who is running for City Council in District 7 of Alameda County. It was called “Who Is George Beier? Kinda Creepy.” I critiqued his Facebook campaign and offered suggestions on how he could improve it. I also said a number of positive things about his ideas and proposals. Mostly I questioned why in his profile he did not bother to tell students who he was or why they should trust him. There was no mention of any of his political credentials. 

This Facebook group was just beginning to pick up membership when it was deleted apparently because it was “abusive and violated the terms of service.” I know that my Facebook group has not been the first deleted for political content such as this nor is there any count or understanding of just how widespread a problem of censorship like this is. 

The original reason that I launched this Facebook group is because I was very surprised that his over- saturation campaign on Facebook had not created a backlash manifested by a swarm of Anti-Beier groups. The only group involving Beier I found was a memory-site dedicated to the original group that had been shut down for the same reason as mine: it invited criticism and discussion of his political merits. 

I am shocked that Facebook has transformed itself into such a political beast but doesn’t not allow students/members to rally against political candidates that they don’t like. Especially when these candidates are pumping tons of money into Facebook to appeal to voters. It just doesn’t seem democratic at all. It made me think: what else are they hiding? 

The ironic thing is that at about that time I was doing my absentee ballot, this group I had created was shut down. I actually had voted for him because I agree with a lot of the things that he says and stands for. Isn’t that a democratic irony if you’ve ever heard one? 

The irony of this situation is that at UC Berkeley forty years ago the Free Speech Movement was a result of students wanting to freely express their political beliefs and not being able to. This movement resulted in a conflict between Governor Reagan and the demonstrators that arguably propelled Reagan to the Whitehouse. It’s funny that George Beier and Facebook is essentially trying to limit this same type of political discussion through the new phenomena of online social networks. 

Also Berkeley has the fortune having a highly vocal bunch of College Republicans that cling to and cherish the principles of the Free Speech Movement due to their small minority status on campus. They were recently featured in the Wall Street Journal for their activities and robust presence. 

Nathan J Danielsen 

• 

LONG WAY TO GO 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Berkeley as a “sustainable city” is a worthy ideal. But, despite the development hype, we have a long way to go. Large buildings which are not “green” or psychologically appealing are not enough to make us a sustainable city. According to Randy Hayes, Oakland’s former sustainablity czar, cities need the ability to grow at least one third of their own food. Where are the gardens in our new, bulky, unattractive buildings? Where are our green spaces? A recent report on the devastating effects of a major earthquake pointed out that transportation would be severely affected. When the trucks no longer roll in with food from other areas, where will be our gardens to grow food? Mayor Bates said that new buildings were required to have set asides for gardens, but that these could be on the roof. A few planters on roofs will not feed a city. 

Sustainability also requires that our aquifers be replenished. Without porous surfaces, water is not absorbed into the earth. Our new monoliths do not have gardens with drainage. We are becoming a concrete jungle, not a living ecosystem. 

A sustainable earth requires birds, bees, and butterflies. Where are Berkeley’s bird/bee/butterfly gardens? A sustainable city would not have its creeks buried under conrete--made into roadways for cars. 

A sustainable city is probably a city with a soul. A concrete jungle deadens the spirit. A concrete jungle cannot sustain a neighborhood or build community. A concrete jungle further estranges our youth from any connection with a living world. A child who has never experienced a butterfly or a bee cannot be expected to care about polar bears or ancient forests. 

As citizens, we need to support the effort to truly become a sustainable city. Part of that effort will be putting pressure on our city government to pay less homage to the developers and more homage to the earth which sustains us. 

L. Darlene Pratt 

• 

CAMPAIGN SIGNS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a 15-year resident it boggles my mind that in Berkeley, where we pat ourselves on the back for being so green (which is wonderful, by the way), we allow cardboard candidate and proposition signs to stay on telephone poles etc., for months without any thought to removing and recycling them. It was very important to put them up, sometimes dozens for the same person/concern per block, but then no one ever takes the time to remove them. There they stay until the rain forces them into our drainage system clogging up both our sewers and the bay or until spring when they mercifully fall down when it gets windy. I have seen some last more than a year! This is an awful eye sore and inconvenience. I suggest that campaigns be required to set aside funding to pay anyone who wants to go and get these signs and bring them to the originating campaign headquarters. At a quarter per sign I suspect we won’t see a single one on election day plus two. Other than the Democrats taking over Congress this would be my second favorite result of the election. 

Bill Feinstein 

• 

ANNA’S JAZZ ISLAND 

Editors, Daily Planet:  

Many people say that Anna’s Jazz Island is good for our community and good for the revitalization of our downtown. It seems a church and upscale dining hall is really preferred by city staff and our City Council. Perhaps someone can explain to me why it is that when I moved my Anna’s Jazz Island to the Gaia Building to be part of a cultural center, instead I share the facility with a church from Atlanta. At their website they say: “Jesus came to re-create—to make this world, and to make Berkeley, good once again” (www.christchurchberkeley.org). My entrance is often covered by a huge double marquee that states: CHRIST CHURCH OF BERKELEY, WORSHIP SERVICES 10:30 AM SUNDAYS. Both the musicians and patrons have been offended and troubled by all this. I would also like to know why, instead of cultural use, the theater in the building did not have a single night of weekend cultural use for the community in October. We are still being overwhelmed by rowdy private parties. The Berkeley City Council is deciding on the use of the Gaia Building on Tuesday, Nov. 14 at 7:30 p.m. Perhaps they can explain it all then. And perhaps they can also explain how we can survive in this situation. 

Anna de Leon 

Anna’s Jazz Island 

• 

MARK MORFORD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Remember when you (only half-seriously) extended an invitation to Jon Carroll to switch steeds when the Chronicle cut his columns back from daily to however many he does now? Well, who you really ought to woo is Mark Morford (he’s in Datebook Wednesdays and Fridays). God, how I love that man. I mean, whoa, is he totally awesome or what? He’s the only reason I have a limited sub. Certainly not for Jon Carroll (who’s column I barely scan since he came out posterior-smooching for Arnold, or the scandal-mongering, or the less than incisive news analysis. And on the issue of subscriptions, if I can subsidize a corporate hag like the Chronicle I can certainly donate to our beloved local midwife. I so appreciate that you always let us have our say. Thank you.  

Pamela Satterwhite 

• 

POLICE RESPONSE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

A few months ago somebody threw a rock and smashed the front picture window in my house as I was sitting behind it. It was frightening to me, and it was expensive to have repaired. It took the police over an hour to respond. Tonight some kids broke two glass aquariums that I had put in my driveway. When I called the police, first I was put on hold. When I finally got through to the police, I was quizzed by the dispatcher as to whether I had actually seen the kids break the aquariums (no, but I heard breaking glass, and when I went out, there was a kid standing beside it—it seems elementary, doesn’t it?). Once again, it took the police over an hour to respond. By that time I was seeing a client and could not talk to the officer. 

I had been hoping that a patrol car could respond quickly; what was my neighborhood patrolman doing that was so goshdarned important that he couldn’t come? We are completely at the mercy of these vandals. What will it take to get good police service in Berkeley? Now that the elections are over, I dare say I won’t be able to get any politician to respond. 

Jenifer Steele 

• 

BENEFITS OF MEASURE A 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I teach dance at Cragmont School in Berkeley, and my children attend John Muir School. Here are a few of the wonderful things your votes for Measure A will continue to support: 

• A group of second graders in dance today, asked by their teacher why it’s important to work as partners with people you don’t know well: 

“If you work with someone different, you learn about them and they learn about you.” 

“If you can’t dance with them, how can you understand them?” 

“It makes less fighting.” 

“You learn to be nice, kind” 

• Kids playing music for kids who dance to other kids’ poetry 

• Schools and class sizes small enough that everyone on campus knows everyone else, so that every child feels seen, known, supported 

• Librarians, makers of magic and weavers of worlds, people who can rattle off 400 childrens’ book preferences off the top of their heads, chuckling at each one’s ideas and originalities 

• A fourth grade group, talking about ideas for choreography about the UFW movement: 

“Well, when we could show the dances we made last week {short pieces based on words like skip and jump}, because Cesar Chavez’ ideas were about freedom and independence. When we made those dances, we were free to choose the ideas and we worked on them independently.” 

• Coach Don Burl, Art Teacher Joe McLain, and hundreds of other superb teachers whose artistry, skill, and dedication are breathtaking. 

Thank you, thank you, thank you. 

Valerie Gutwirth 

• 

SEEKING STORIES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Justin Online Military Oral History Collection is seeking the stories of Military Veterans, Merchant Mariners, War Industry Workers, CCCers, and all others who supported the troops on the Home Fronts during World War II, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam and all other eras, including memorials from families, for publication to this online historical resource. If you would like to participate please send your stories, with name, rank, unit and locations and dates of service if known, to James F. Justin CCC Museum, PO Box 5, Woodbury NJ 08096 USA or e-mail to JFJmuseum@aol.com. 

James Justin 

Holiday Haiku 

by Carol Denney 

ceramic santas 

sitting in a discount bin 

where is my hammer 

Halloween may have come and gone, but the sadly misconceived project at 1885 University Ave. still begs the question, Trick, or Treat? The answer, of course, is both. The supposed Treat? Trader Joe’s. The Trick? Trader Joe’s with a four-story, 148-unit apartment building looming menacingly above it, The Hudson-McDonald Tower of Horrors. 

In this election week, Hudson-McDonald’s continuing attempt to manipulate the facts regarding the 1885 University Ave. project can be quite accurately and appropriately characterized as a campaign of deceit and misinformation. 

If they insist on following this tack, we have three words for them: “Four more years!”  

Let’s review the evidence: 

Hudson-McDonald will continue to brazenly and misleadingly claim 1) that they have done everything we asked, and 2) that it is the neighbors standing in the way of this project, because we continue to “change the bar” on them. Correction: We gave them extremely explicit conditions for our approval of this project four long years ago. Apparently they don’t understand basic English and rudimentary math. Those conditions have not changed in the four long years they have been paying us lip service. So, Mr. Hudson, please do not even dare to assert that we have “changed the bar”. We have the original list of carefully thought-out conditions we proactively presented in October of 2002 if anyone would care to review it.  

If you entertain any feel-good fantasies that any of the 11th-hour “concessions” Hudson-McDonald brazenly claims credit for in print and public forum are not horribly mutilated versions of the conditions originally conceived by, proposed by, and fought for by the neighborhoods around this project who are deeply concerned for the future of Berkeley, think again. The painfully incremental Hail-Mary “concessions” they claim credit for have been made only under consistent and unrelenting pressure from the residents of the neighborhood. That they dare in print or otherwise to take credit for any small concessions or dare to assert that they are jumping through our hoops is laughable. They are now, and have been since Day One, the only ones standing in their way.  

Each time Hudson-McDonald pays us lip service, then blatantly ignores our concerns and changes the project design to the further detriment of our neighborhood, we have a legitimate right to respond. That Hudson-McDonald dares continue to claim that we are holding them hostage is sheer hubris, or even worse, delusion. Save your breath-no one is buying your dishonest rhetoric! 

Chris Hudson also recently challenged in the San Francisco Chronicle that Berkeley needs to decide to whether we want to live in the 1950s or the 2050s. I must respond thus: Neither, if your vision of the future is this shortsighted. I continue to marvel that this steroid-enhanced, half-baked, neighborhood-busting development is miraculously being lauded as “progress” by the masses simply because they are dangling a Trader’s Joe’s in front of you. I caution that you Trader Joe’s junkies out there are banking on the shifting-sands strategy of developers Hudson-McDonald, schooled at the hand of Patrick Kennedy, the King of Bait-&-Switch, so believe me when I say there is NO guarantee there will ever be a Trader Joe’s in this building.  

As for you shamelessly-recruited, 11th-hour, interloping TJ groupies, I must ask you: since when, in Berkeley of all places, do convenience, homogenized commerce, and corn chips trump social conscience? Inquiring minds deserve to know! Are you all so hypoglycemic that a single spoonful of sugar from Trader Joe’s helps the medicine of a 148-unit apartment building go down so easily? Have you not yet evolved beyond the stage of cavemen, when the only thing humans could afford to worry about was food & shelter? Apparently not. Your lives may get temporarily easier by this quick-fix remedy, but the supposedly sick patient Hudson-McDonald claims to be treating, Berkeley, will surely die a painful death. There is always a price to be paid for convenience. May you choke on it, because Berkeley surely will. Bon appetit! 

So yet again, another Berkeley neighborhood is being sacrificed for the greater common greed. For some of you, it’s the anticipated revenues. For others, merely food! I read Chris Hudson’s final quote in the October 24th edition of the SF Chronicle with great irony: “We’re willing to invest in the long-term future of Berkeley, but at some point Berkeley’s got to decide whether it wants to be Berkeley 1950, or Berkeley 2050.”  

Well, in case Chris hasn’t heard, on October 24th the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report reached the well-substantiated conclusion that the insatiable human footprint is far too big for the natural resources left on the planet, and that by 2050 our natural resources may well be completely depleted. As WWF International Director General James Leape observed upon the release of this study, “We are…consuming resources faster than the Earth can replace them. The consequences of this are predictable and dire.” So too will be the continuing unchecked and unorchestrated over-development of Berkeley. 

So, apparently, thanks to non-sustainable development like 1885 University Avenue, and subsequent increasingly dense urban populations, the chance there will be a 2050 is even slimmer than the chance that there will be a Trader Joe’s in this project. I seriously doubt Hudson-McDonald will acknowledge or can even begin to fathom their eager contribution to the ensuing devastation. If they want their cake and eat it too, and if they claim to be the development prophets of the future, they must be held to a higher standard: ever heard of green building, Hudson-McDonald? Welcome to the sustainable future! 

The neighbors of Berkeley Way, who intitiated the original dialogue with Panoramic Interests regarding this proposed project four long years ago in an blatantly optimistic attempt to circumvent this fruitless and tortuous process, must rightly be left wondering: Is Trader Joe’s such a potent opiate for the masses, and even the institutions we expect to protect us from the suspect financial and political machinations of big development, that you are all lulled into complacency, or even advocacy? Or, even if you are immune to Trader Joe’s, is this whitewash simply and predictably explained by the fact that Hudson-McDonald has the money, they have the influence, and they have their hands deep in the cookie jar? We are also rightly left wondering: does anyone out there really care about a truly livable Berkeley? Wake up and smell the deception! 

Regan Richardson is a Berkeley Way neighbor. 

Recently, an attorney for the Berkeley Police Association, Harry Stern, disparaged Berkeley Copwatch for its service to the community. Those remarks were absolutely unwarranted, shameful, and insulting to the citizens of Berkeley.  

Though I honor the dedication and self-sacrifice of many police officers, I recognize that such authority and power can be perverted by a few. In effect, it is essential to keep them in check 

In August, however, a California Supreme Court decision, Copley vs. San Diego, has weakened the function of civilian oversight, and the BPA is using this decision as legal fodder for sterilizing the Berkeley Police Review Commission. Furthermore, this year was marked by an appalling Berkeley police scandal involving the tampering of over 200 drug evidence envelopes.  

It is in this context—our zeitgeist of repression—that I support the efforts of Copwatch and disagree with Stern’s outrageous comments: 

First, Stern deprecated Copwatch by stating that it “carries no weight in the matter” of the future of the PRC. Obviously, Copwatch is not a body of lawmakers. Its efforts, on the other hand, are aimed to pressure the city council, to promote public discourse, and to engage citizens in political action. Nonetheless, any organization that lacks legislative power is still part of the political equation, and hence relevant and important.  

Second, he implicitly assumes that because the Copley decision is the “law of land,” it must be right. His stance is, in essence, blind obedience to the government. There were many instances where “the law of the land” was inherently wrong. A prime example is the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, which approved the practice of racial segregation. Is one to say that until the Brown decision was reached in 1954 that segregation had been justified?  

Third, he belittles Copwatch by saying that they “whine and moan.” Even so, I’m surprised not every citizen in Berkeley is whining and moaning about the condition of police review. Civilian oversight is a thirty year tradition in Berkeley and has been a model for the nation. But now, PRC hearings are closed to the public, and the BPA are relentless in their efforts to neuter the commission. Most importantly, civilian oversight is a matter of ensuring that the government is by the people and for the people.  

Fourth, Stern is wrong to want the PRC to “follow current law and its own rules,” a quote from BPA President Henry Wellington. He puts an obligation on the PRC to do what is legal; rather, the PRC has an obligation on to do what is right. It is imperative to know that the law is never always right—considering that American law has supported segregation and torture, etc. We, as rational human beings, have an obligation to what is truly moral: a form transcending irreducibly unjust laws. Current law regarding civilian oversight affords the irrational and undemocratic, and the PRC ought to be able to do what is right: to have open hearings, greater powers of investigation, independent legal counsel, and the ability to publicize itself.  

Lastly and most disgracefully, Stern fundamentally charged Copwatch and other anti-authoritarianism groups of criminal activity. He said that “when I hear bold action, what I hear is that they want to break the law.” He does violence to reason in two respects. First, he assumes that Copwatch and other groups are criminal. This is blatantly false. Instead, Copwatch performs a principled function of monitoring the police and ensuring that police brutality and abuse are documented. In addition, the group champions effective community control over the government. Second, he assumes that laws are inherently right. In contrast, civil disobedience is warranted when a law makes one “so sick at heart” and is “so odious” (to quote Mario Savio) that one must force the combine of oppression to a halt.  

Hence, I find Harry Stern’s remarks about civilian review and Copwatch to be affronts to the principles of open government. Ultimately, the comments are insulting to the progressive ethos of Berkeley citizens who have a proud tradition of civilian oversight and police accountability.  

Jonathan Huang is a Berkeley resident. 

When the people of Oakland enacted the Campaign Reform Act of 2000, they wanted to make sure that non-affluent voters had an equal voice in the political life of the city. The preamble states: “The integrity of the governmental process, the competitiveness of campaigns and public confidence in local officials are all diminishing.” The high cost of elections “gives incumbents an overwhelming and patently unfair advantage.” 

By passing a reform act, moderate in content, Oakland residents attempted to reduce the corrupting influence of money in downtown politics, to put an end to the pay-to-play system that is destroying, not only Oakland, but political discourse throughout the country. 

For six years the Reform Act served the people of Oakland by protecting the integrity of its elections. When the recent, closely watched campaigns began in District 2, some months before June 2006, all the candidates and parties, including the Chamber of Commerce, accepted the rules. 

But something dramatic happened in June that changed everything. Ron Dellums, a visionary, African-American progressive, won the election for Mayor. By late October, Aimee Allison, another dynamic African-American, especially popular among Oakland youth, moved into a tie in the polls with incumbent Pat Kernighan. In fear of losing hold of City Hall, the Chamber of Commerce fell into a panic. So long as their favorite candidates, like De La Fuente and Pat Kernighan, were winning, the rules were fine. But with the Allison ascendancy, the rules had to be changed. And fast. 

Suddenly, without any public discussion or notice, OakPAC, the Chamber’s political arm, got a compliant judge to lift Oakland’s spending limits for political action committees. The Pandora’s box of campaign finance was open, and dirty money—money spent in defiance of Oakland’s laws—began to flow into the Kernighan campaign. Kernighan herself had no say in the matter. Allison and her supporters were stunned. Outraged students, involved in elections for the first time in their lives, made picket signs for downtown business: “Elections are not for sale.”  

When I first heard about the Chamber of Commerce move, I too was shocked. The intervention reminded me of the fiasco of 2000, when right-wing Supreme Court judges intervened in Florida, changing the long-standing rules of the state, halting the counting of votes, putting the loser into the White House. I have lived in Oakland for decades. I love my city, its redwooded hills, its local jazz, its bustling waterfront and vibrant culture. But Oakland has a long history of money politics. In all my years, I have never seen a power-grab as ruthless, as unethical, and as unconstitutional, as the Chamber intervention in District 2.  

It is true that Mayor-elect Ron Dellums tried desperately to save the integrity of the election. He negotiated a truce with OakPAC. OakPAC’s Chairman, Michael Colbruno, agreed to voluntarily give up a court victory, to respect Oakland’s limits, at least for the duration of the election. It was not as big a concession as it first seemed. Twenty thousand dollars was already spent in defiance of Oakland rules, and that is a huge amount of money for one week in a single district. The damage was done. Nor was the agreement binding on other independent groups, some of whom began to spend money to match OakPAC’s profligacy. One independent group, over which Allison had no control, published a negative anti-Kernighan brochure. Colbruno charged Allison with buying the election, even while his own lawyers argued in court that elections cannot be bought, since “money is speech.” Colbruno played it both ways. He talked about a truce in Oakland, but he never withdrew his anti-Oakland suit in court. He actually got a continuance, an extension of the restraining order that originally caused the anarchy in District 2.  

The central issue regarding the post-election controversy is not political. It’s not about Allison or Kernighan, about who won or lost. The central issue is a matter of principle. It concerns the 14th Amendment and the legality of the election itself. Free elections are based on a clear, uniform set of rules, consistently applied. Not only were the rules changed at the last minute to suit the needs of one contender, the entire election was carried out under two contradictory sets of rules: one with limits, one without limits. Some groups abided by one set of rules; other groups followed another agenda.  

We have no way of knowing who would have won a legal, fair election in District 2. But the fiasco in District 2 has major implications beyond the wrecking of one election. It threatens to destroy fair election practices in Oakland as a whole—and in perpetuity. The Chamber of Commerce is resurrecting a pay-to-play, dirty money system that makes it impossible for candidates like Aimee Allison, who lack access to power-brokers and big donors—to participate in local elections on an equal basis. The Chamber is driving African-Americans and other minorities out of the electoral process. Electoral finance is not only a corruption issue; it is a civil rights issue as well. 

Paul Rockwell is an Oakland writer. 

It was a Cold War love story. Julia Robinson had never met the man she was writing. He was from Leningrad; she was from Berkeley. And yet they did one of the most precious things a man and a woman can do together. They did mathematics. And they did that beautifully, solving one of the twentieth century’s greatest conundrums, Hilbert’s “Tenth Problem.” 

This puzzle had to do with how you tell if you can solve a “Diophantine equation,” an equation exactly like the kind you dreaded in high school, like “xy-x2=0.” 

And yet when the message went round the world—“Hilbert’s Tenth Problem has been solved by Julia Robinson of Berkeley!”—and reporters flocked to the University of California to interview Professor Robinson, they couldn’t find her. 

She was not Professor Robinson. The University of California would not give Julia Robinson a job. 

While this story, like most stories, is more complex than it first appears (just watch the new documentary by Oakland filmmaker George Csicsery), the general situation for women in math and science is not. Robinson died in 1985, but the National Academies have just released a report reaffirming that the bias continues. “Compared with men,” the report says, “women faculty members are generally paid less and promoted more slowly, receive fewer honors, and hold fewer leadership positions.” Moreover, as the Robinson story suggests, “These discrepancies do not appear to be based on productivity, the significance of their work or any other performance measures.” 

The situation is not entirely bleak, fortunately, but it is not the “elite” institutions leading the way. Among the top 50 chemistry departments, Rutgers has the highest percentage and number of women faculty (26 percent; the average is 13 percent).  

The situation is worse, however, for minorities, according to the report, and another recent National Academies report concludes that university presidents need to “publicly state the institution’s commitment to diversity.” The authors buy in to the idea that the universities they studied really did support the goal of inclusiveness, because they said they did. 

In reality, though affirmative action has been a conservative vote-getter for three decades, in academia it exists in name only: Every university today pledges its commitment to diversity—even Bob Jones University, which, until recently, banned interracial dating, features African-Americans on its website—but few honor that commitment. 

For example, Stanford president John Hennessy in May declared that he was “worried to death” over the dearth of black faculty. Yet, when the Silicon Valley NAACP presented Hennessy with a list of award-winning black scientists, some of them Stanford alumni, he did not even meet to discuss the issue. A small controversy erupted when, to defuse student agitation on behalf of Edray Goins, a black Stanford and Caltech alumnus who works with the man who helped prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, Stanford’s Faculty Diversity Recruitment officer announced that Stanford had made Goins an offer, when they had not. 

Individuals who have followed higher education in California assert that Stanford has had only one black physicist (now deceased), and no blacks in mathematics. It is reported that, in 10 campuses of the University of California system, only 2 blacks have been hired in mathematics from 1990-2000, including tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure track lecturers. On the east coast, Harvard’s math department has never had a woman faculty member. 

In 2003, then-MIT president Chuck Vest won an award given by the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering. In 1991, Vest even created a much-heralded fund for instantly hiring qualified minority faculty, should they be discovered. And yet, Woodward and Bernstein would be unable to determine how many times this fund has ever been used. Similar stories apply to other top universities, such as the California Institute of Technology (“Caltech will aggressively and proactively recruit women and underrepresented minorities for faculty positions”); the president has a Special Assistant who deals with issues related to women and minoritie—although, since Caltech had one black freshman in 2005, the Special Assistant must spend a lot of her day playing solitaire. 

What the elite universities prefer is “the Harvard Shuffle.” “Get me Nelson Mandela,” the joke goes in African-American academic circles, a mimicry of a university president looking to recruit a new black faculty member. High-profile or already established black academics move from Harvard to Princeton to Stanford, and, each time they move, their new institution trumpets its diversity, even though the same people are being counted two or three times. (Last year, Stanford hired 5 African-Americans, and lost 4.) American universities hire just enough minorities to keep from being accused of racism, although happily the façade is now peeling away. 

The situation for women is improving, fortunately. Julia Robinson did get her day in the sun. After she solved Hilbert’s Tenth Problem, she was given a lectureship at the University of California, part-time. 

Professor Jonathan David Farley is a mathematician at the University of the West Indies (Jamaica). Seed Magazine has named him one of “15 people who have shaped the global conversation about science in 2005” (lattice@Stanford.edu). 

“The past is prologue” wrote Shakespeare, and it was 20 years ago that several key events predicted the future of Berkeley and framed our present. 

We zone the waterfront 

We awoke the day after the 1986 election knowing that years of work by a dedicated cadre of Sierra Club volunteers had been vindicated with the passage of Measure Q, zoning the waterfront in contradiction to Santa Fe’s massive development proposal. In the ensuing two decades, Santa Fe failed to persuade the US Supreme Court to hear their case, Citizens for East Shore Parks aided by Assemblyman Tom Bates coordinated a successful State bond to buy the land, the Specific Plan has been refined, and the park emerged. Last year saw the opening of our striking signature foot bridge across the freeway, providing access to this magnificent open space. 

So many people contributed to this long effort, most notably Berkeley’s own legendary and long lived Sylvia McLaughlin of Save the Bay, that today we can claim the waterfront victory as a community success.  

District elections begin 

In June 1986 a majority of voters approved a change to district elections with heavy turnout in the hills. In their eagerness to break the BCA majority on the City Council and to end slate campaigning, the citizens of Berkeley shot themselves in the foot with self-inflicted disenfranchisement.  

Instead of voting for the entire council, the voters now elect only one member and the mayor in a city with a strong manager/weak mayor form of government. Each councilmember is accountable to one district only, and the mayor remains as the single elected representative of the entire municipality. Council members, having the power of incumbency, can act like ward heelers, being elected again and again without term limits. 

The results have been disastrous. The flatlands with our multiple problems suffer from insufficient representation. Crime, the homeless, traffic, development, and commerce require greater accountability. Those activists who alienate their councilmember are left with only one elected official, the mayor, as a possible ally. When the mayor is the only elected official responsible to everyone, then a failure to please all the people all the time assumes a disproportional importance. If the mayor fails to command a majority, the city falls into gridlock, and the manager and staff take over, further weakening the power of the individual citizen. 

In my analysis, the vituperation directed against Mayor Bates and members of the City Council reveals discontent with the political process. Berkeley has always been fractious, but the current acrid tone reflects the political impotence foisted on us by district elections. I suggest a revision whereby candidates come from the districts but are elected by all the voters citywide. 

The California Ink Company is landmarked 

This white elephant, recently memorialized by a No on J mailing, became a Berkeley landmark twenty years ago on November 17. It may have historic interest, but the place is a toxic mess. Don’t take my word for it. Go to Picante for lunch, walk around the block, and see for yourself. Whatever one’s own land use preferences or prejudices, we should agree that public safety comes first. The place needs to be decontaminated, a huge expense usually borne by a developer. We can’t just let it rot. 

If I learned anything writing the Sierra Club response to the EIRs for both the waterfront and the Bayer specific plans, it’s that West Berkeley sits on alluvial soil and landfill, which tends to liquefy in a major earthquake. Consider the fate of the San Francisco Marina district in the Loma Prieta quake. Picture gas lines breaking, fire, and traffic gridlock. Imagine making a beeline on foot to the waterfront through poisonous fumes.  

I don’t share the fervor of those who interrupted the legislative process to try to force their own revision of the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, especially since the Council’s proposal was not available for comparison in the voter’s guide. It doesn’t seem practical to landmark industrial buildings when new technologies and R&D require modern facilities and when decay puts neighbors at risk. Kawneer, Durkee, and Heinz have already been appropriately designated and adapted for current use, but how many other old industrial structures have sufficient value and integrity to warrant preservation? 

The landmarks controversy generated debate and focused attention on a crucial question, which can only be beneficial.  

The Golden Bear Center is built 

This five story monstrosity at University and Milvia, built in 1986, epitomizes the reasons why Berkeley resents and resists new development; so much of what we get is ugly. As we approach the downtown on University Avenue, this huge inert box obliterates our view of the hills without substituting any attractive elements. The glass reflects the sky, but that’s about the only touch of beauty. The office building includes the UC Extension among other enterprises and provides 300 underground parking spaces, but the hulking architecture does not complement or enhance its surroundings. 

Compare the Golden Bear Center with the new Berkeley City College where little touches like the setback entrance, the slant in the windows, and the center V add movement to the mass. Those dull concrete columns could be covered with colorful mosaics to create a rainbow, spirals, or giant totem poles. Perhaps a contest could be held for artists to submit designs. 

Many of the new buildings suffer from irresolute or boxy roof lines. There’s a reason Old West builders put false fronts on even their simple structures. A building can protect or menace, inspire or dwarf, but without an upward sweep or defining flourish on top to mediate between the human eye near the ground and the great sky above, we find it unsatisfactory. 

If the City could achieve some standard of design excellence and compatibility on our major arteries instead of the current garish mish mash of styles and manage to orient traffic away from houses and schools, the citizens might warm up to the idea that we need new construction for a variety of uses. On Fourth Street, the uniformity of warm stucco creates the feel of a pueblo. People like to hang out there because it’s a human sized environment with a communal glow. We could spread that success to other parts of the City if we started with the premise that pedestrian scale and beautiful design matter. 

Loni Hancock is elected mayor 

“It was twenty years ago today; Sgt. Pepper taught to band to play… 

It’s wonderful to be here; it’s certainly a thrill…” 

Toni Mester chaired the committee for Yes on Q, the 1986 measure which zoned the Berkeley waterfront and later served on the Citizens Advisory Committee for the Bayer Development Agreement. 

As the dust settles from the tumultuous 2006 mid-term elections, let’s consider the big political winners and losers: 

Winners: The two biggest winners were Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. Pelosi not only because she’s going to be the first woman to ever hold the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives, but also because of the fine job she did leading the Dems out of the wilderness. Opponents often dismiss her as “too liberal.”  

By stereotyping the new Speaker, they overlook her toughness and inexhaustible energy. In the 2006 Congressional campaigns, Pelosi tirelessly toured the country: rallying both Democrats and Independents, and raising millions of dollars for Democratic candidates. She’s succeeded at organizing Congressional Dems—a job often described as herding cats—because she possesses a rare political quality: she’s a leader. 

Barack Obama was the Democrats’ “go to” guy in 2006. Whenever a Democratic candidate needed a boost, either of money or energy, they called in Obama. Like Pelosi, he traveled across the country: mobilizing the faithful. During this process, Obama hit two important political milestones: First, he gained universal credibility as a presidential candidate; everyone who saw Obama, came away impressed with his poise and intelligence. And, somewhere during this period, Obama ceased being “the Black Senator from Illinois” and became, instead, “the remarkable new leader of the Democratic Party.” 

Two other winners were Harry Reid and Howard Dean. Reid because he somewhat unexpectedly became Senate Majority Leader. It can’t help but be the case that his “give ‘em hell, Harry” persona will prove more telegenic than former Majority Leader Bill Frist’s “empty suit” demeanor. 

Despite the objections of Democratic leaders such as Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer, Howard Dean pushed his “fifty state strategy” at the DNC: he made sure that each state had on-the-ground operatives in the areas of field organizing, communications, technology and finance. As a result, Democrats made surprising gains in states such as Indiana and Kansas. 

Losers: While most in our “losers” category are Republicans, two Democrats stand out. Senator John Kerry was a big loser. His gaffe, several days before the election, forced him into an awkward apology. This probably didn’t affect the election results, but it did remind voters of Kerry’s unfortunate propensity for screw-ups. And, ended his long-shot chance as a presidential candidate in 2008. 

It’s difficult to characterize someone who won reelection with 67 percent of the vote as a loser. Nonetheless, it’s hard to see how Hillary Clinton strengthened her presidential chances. Outside New York, the Clinton that voters heard about was Bill. And, when the going got tough, the Democrats called upon Barrack Obama, not Hillary. She may have the money, but Obama’s got the buzz.  

Several Republicans suffered from the election results. The career of Virginia Senator George Allen went down the toilet. He took a double-digit lead and frittered it away in an epic series of campaign missteps. He’s finished as Senator from Virginia and as a GOP Presidential candidate. 

Tennessee Senator Bill Frist resigned his seat in order to launch a 2008 presidential bid. Yet, Frist had no impact on the close race in Tennessee. Indeed, during the entire 2006 Republican campaign Frist was a cipher. 

Even though he wasn’t running for any elected office, another big loser was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. A few days after telling reporters that he had no plans to replace Secretary Rumsfeld, Bush announced he’d accepted Rumsfeld’s resignation and acknowledged need for a “fresh perspective.” Bush attempted to lay all the blame for the Iraq fiasco on Rumsfeld. It was classic George Bush: rather than take responsibility for leading America into this quagmire, he opted to let Rumsfeld take the fall. 

Of course, the big loser in the midterm election was the president. Exit polls confirmed that many voters were casting their ballots against Bush. Nonetheless, the biggest loser on Nov. 7 was the man who stands behind Dubya: Republican political guru Karl Rove. It was Rove who masterminded Bush’s rise to the presidency and predicted a new conservative hegemony. And, it was also Rove who advised the President that beating drums for an invasion of Iraq would be a winning theme in the 2002 mid-term elections; who advised Bush to play the national security card in the 2004 Presidential elections. 

In 2006, Rove felt that he could continue to rely upon the theme of national security: “vote Republican or the terrorists will get you.” But it didn’t work: voters were more concerned about corruption than they were about Iraq and terrorism. And, most voters felt the war in Iraq was actually hurting the war on terror. Rove started up the GOP ocean liner, and set its initial course, but when it came time for a course correction, he couldn’t do it. Now Democrats have taken the initiative. Can Rove make a come back? Of course. But his miscalculations presented the Democrats with the opportunity to take back the Congress. And a golden opportunity to win the Presidency in 2008. 

Bottom line: the big winners in the 2006 mid-term elections were Democrats and the American people. And, everyone who treasures Democracy. 

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bobburnett@comcast.net.

I lost my husband and acquired a teenager. It’s not much of a deal. I still have to clean and shop, and carry out the trash. I still have to water the plants, pay the bills, and turn down the volume on the television.  

I no longer have to help someone get in and out of a wheelchair, or dress and assist him with eating, but now there’s a new set of responsibilities. I have to make sure my friend Jernae gets out of bed in the morning and off to school on time. I have to ascertain that she returns safely to my home by 5 p.m. I thought I would need to nag her about homework, but, surprisingly, she doesn’t have any. (A meeting with a counselor revealed that there is no homework at this continuing education high school. As I understand it, Jernae gets extra credits just for showing up.)  

I signed an agreement with Jernae and her mother and grandmother that I would make certain she is not on her cell phone after 10 p.m. on weekdays and 11 p.m. on weekends. It’s not easy. Cellphones are small and can be set on vibrate mode. Teenagers are sneaky, and know how to whisper.  

I promised Jernae that I would spend one hour per day with her reading, writing and discussing what we have read and written, but this has proven to be difficult. She only reads and writes rap lyrics and MySpace entries, and she’s not much into sharing these with an adult. She has begged me to combine reading and writing with dinner, but that wasn’t in the original agreement. We are often silent while we eat. Sometimes I’m the only one who consumes food. More lonesome than eating alone is sitting across the table from a drama princess who is simultaneously sighing, watching the minute hand on the clock, and tapping her knife against a plate of cold, untouched mashed potatoes, meatloaf, and broccoli.  

Our reading and writing period has morphed into a high stakes Scrabble marathon that includes questionable spellings and commonly used street words not always found in the Scrabble dictionary. I have learned new slang, but these are not words I can use in normal, everyday adult conversation. Recently, I discovered a new definition for the word “boy,” and a disturbing way in which to use the word “daft.” There was an argument over how to spell quote/quoate, and another over the use of the letter S. Bitter silence ensued for the next 55 minutes.  

But it’s not all bad. I could be in the house for long periods of time unaccompanied, playing Scrabble with myself. I could be in a seedy bar drinking heavily with strangers, jockeying for a parking place at Trader Joe’s, or fighting for lane space at Temescal Pool. I could be dealing with any number of the thorny situations in which parents and teenagers often find themselves. Fortunately, Jernae doesn’t drive. She doesn’t drink or do drugs and (except in cyberspace and cell phone airspace), she doesn’t chase after boys. Right now my biggest concerns involve food consumed while surfing the net, candles lit while watching television, bathroom doors locked for unbearably long periods of time, and the obsessive-compulsive use of the telephone.  

Here’s the trade-off. One of the reasons Jernae likes staying at my house is because it’s quiet and besides me, she’s the only one there. My motivations are just the opposite. Sometimes, while she is talking on the phone or watching television, I can hear her laughter from the other side of the bedroom wall.

Down a tree-canopied lane bordered by lush fields of lettuce, corn and pumpkin. Through a filigreed iron gate and white picket fence. Past goldenrod Arden Station where Tucker waits to pull a visitor-laden rail car to Deer Park Station. Drop out of the frenzied pace of modern life. Get lost in the country estate of a wealthy 20th century farmer, a place caught in time. Visit Ardenwood Farm. 

At the historic home of George Washington Patterson the clock appears to have stopped 100-years ago, when simple pursuits occupied one’s day. Watching clear water burst forth from a bright red pump, tasting cookies baked in an outdoor wood-burning stove, changing straw in the stalls of draft horses, milk cows and woolly sheep, harvesting, shucking and grinding corn and making dolls from the husks, forging horseshoes from black iron. Though life has moved on, activities such as these make for a relaxing day “down on the farm.” 

In 1849, gold fever enticed George Washington Patterson west to San Francisco and California’s gold fields. After eighteen months, sick and out of funds, Patterson turned to his area of expertise, farming, using his wages to acquire land, one piece at a time. By 1877, the time of his marriage to Clara Hawley, his 6,000-acres made him one of the area’s richest and most respected men. Today, 205-acres remain, as if preserved in amber, functioning as a working farm. From the handsome butter-yellow mansion trimmed in brown and landscaped with a Victorian garden and lawn-side gazebo, to a massive hay barn, tank house, blacksmith shop, animal pens, orchard and fields of crops, Ardenwood Historic Farm captivates the imagination and tantalizes collective memories of a simpler life. 

On a beautiful fall weekday I toured Ardenwood, map in hand, surrounded by groups of delighted school children. Amid chattering voices sprinkled with bird song I headed first to the Farmyard, the heart of a working farm. At the imposing grey and white Hay Barn I ambled past a wheeled version of the farm’s history. Here all manner of vehicles reside, from a vintage wooden buggy suitable for Sunday drives, to a more recent John Deere tractor. 

In the Corn Room, windows open to the breeze, I watched the corn shucker and grinder reduce dried ears to cornmeal. Outside, a stately black draft horse basked in youthful admiration while contented cows drowsed in the shade on thick beds of clean straw. The Blacksmith was kept busy with orders of personalized horseshoes from an enthusiastic group; numbers steadily increased from six to eight to ten. As he wrote down names and collected payment his assistant shaped iron in the heat of glowing coals. 

Towering above hundred-year-old trees, the weathered windmill-topped Tank House is now under restoration by volunteers, as a future water museum. At the Country Kitchen stood a cream colored Monarch wood burning stove, protected from the elements beneath a sturdy wood overhang. Here pots bubbled and bread baked, aromas wafting through the yard. Nearby, the Laundry occupied center stage in an expanse of green. A big cast iron pot rested above a ring of smooth river stones with a corrugated metal and wood washboard at the ready. 

Something fresh from the oven lured me to the Farmyard Café. I passed up nachos and hot dogs in favor of a warm pumpkin nut muffin and coffee. At an oilcloth-covered picnic table beneath spreading oaks I lingered, enjoying my repast and the life of the farm. Around me squirrels scurried, their cheeks bulging with walnuts plucked from the orchard nearby; peahens and peacocks foraged for orts around the picnic area; kids took turns flexing their muscles at the farmyard pump giggling amid the splashes; the alternating pounding and tapping of the blacksmith mingled with the smell of burning coal. Ardenwood is no ‘model’ farm; everything here is life size and substantial, seemingly rooted in the ground and in history. 

Sated, I was ready to tour the house and gardens, home to three generations of Pattersons. Passing through the Kitchen Garden I admired shiny green bell and jalapeno peppers, royal-purple eggplants, plump heirloom tomatoes and massive heads of parsley, all organically grown. In the Flower Garden wooden posts and white ropes separated beds of colorful cosmos in shades of pink and magenta, golden marigolds and vivid dahlias. 

Surrounding the mansion, the Victorian Gardens are an eclectic mixture of long-standing flora—redwoods, palms, maples, eucalyptus, sycamore and three red-hued sassafras trees bordering the house. Across the lawn, within an encircling hedge and sheltered by light-filtering foliage, sits the white-trimmed Gazebo with open lattice, turned posts and a peaked, domed roof, ready to hear whispered gossip and squeals of childish delight. 

Volunteers are critical to Ardenwood’s operation and appeal. My house tour was lead by Joann, a docent for 20 years, in part because she loves to dress up. In her attractive black-and-white blouse and skirt and black hat, she enthusiastically talked her way through rooms and family history. My group was regaled with the Pattersons’ stories and a glimpse into their era. In his fifties, George Patterson wed a young woman of twenty; his gift the Queen Anne addition to the old farmhouse. From the Romanesque arches and Queen Anne corner sporting curved glass windows to the rare sycamore wood used within, the Patterson home spoke of wealth and prestige. 

Lovingly restored, with almost all original furnishings, the mansion is a cornucopia of a busy family. Behind massive doors opened only for guests, the front parlor shines with parquet floors and stained glass windows. The guest bedroom occupies the premier location and the Queen Anne corner. In the master bedroom, an Italian blue tile fireplace and a mattress stiffly stuffed with horsehair, collected from the farm. On the wall, behind glass, human hair keepsakes, woven into intricate patterns and braided into bracelets and necklaces. A young gentleman’s bedroom furnished with fishing gear, tennis racket and a Stanford football photo from 1904. Another photo testament to the dances once held in the attic. Hidden below the dining room carpet, a buzzer used to summon the cook for more biscuits, freshly made. 

Still buzzing with echoes from the past, I headed to Deer Park Station to board the railcar pulled along the tracks by Tucker, a Herculean Belgian draft horse capable of towing three laden cars—90,000 pounds. Through a Monarch butterfly-festooned eucalyptus grove, we meandered back to Arden Station, leaving behind the simple life but anxious to return again at a new season, when the rhythm of life on the farm changes but continues. 

Getting there: Take Hwy 880 south to Fremont. Exit 880 on Hwy 84 toward the Dumbarton Bridge. Exit 84 at Ardenwood/Newark Blvd. Go north on Ardenwood Blvd to the park entrance. Distance 30 miles.  

Ardenwood Historic Farm: 34600 Ardenwood Blvd., Fremont, 796-0663, www.ebparks.org/parks/arden. Open year-round Tues.-Sun. 10-4 p.m. Entrance fees vary by day of the week. Adults $2-$5, seniors $2-$4, children 4-17 years $1-$3.50. 

Photograph by Marta Yamamoto 

The fully furnished Patterson Mansion artfully combines a country farmhouse with an elegant Queen Anne addition, a wedding gift from George Patterson to his bride.

Before it got drafted to be an allegedly “heathier” substitute for chocolate, carob was a dietary staple of poor folks and a treat even for the wealthy. Ceratonia siliqua is a handsome, tough, warm-climate tree that grows long, thick, flat brown pods to cradle its seeds.  

These pods are sweet, nutritious (at least as tree pods go) and contain gummy stuff that gets used in all sorts of non-food things like glue and ink and leather and fabric sizing, as well as for “stabilizers” in foods as disparate as ice cream, mustard, and salami. Look for “locust gum” in the ingredients list.  

(May I insert here a short rant about the misuse, fast becoming normal, of the word “healthy” when what’s meant is “healthful” or “nutritious”? By the time most of us, especially humans, actually eat an item, chances are it’s far from healthy. In fact, vis-à-vis human food, one hopes it’s actually dead.) 

Speaking of salami or anyway of Salome: One of the vernacular names for carob is “St. John’s bread,” because it’s thought to be the locust part of the “locusts and honey” diet that John the Baptist lived on in the desert. 

Any tree with pinnately divided leaves and long seedpods might get called “locust”—the Robinia and Gleditsia locust trees are relatives but not siblings—but carob is evidently the first owner of the name.  

Different sources transmit different theories about whether the New Testament means the tree pod or the grasshopper, and evidently the Greek is as ambiguous as the English versions. Carob-dipped grasshoppers? Perhaps we could be ecumenical about it and have chocolate-covered ants instead. 

I myself would dance the hoochie-koochie for the avenger who would bring me the head (platter optional) of the malefactor who so badly abused the tree in the photo. 

If someone actually paid for that vandalism, someone get royally ripped off and they’ve set themselves up for damage and lawsuits in the future when the tree becomes a hazard.  

I’d heap more even shame upon the ingrates because carob’s such a good tree for urban spots here. It’s drought-tolerant and stands up to the sort of intense heat it gets in parking lots and other paved areas. It’s not deciduous, but keeps its green, clean, cheerful look even at summer’s end, when everything else is all dusty and exhausted.  

You can see streetside rows of good-sized mature carobs along a couple of the main drags in Livermore and in the South Bay. There’s a newish planting of them in the financial district in San Francisco, and I do wonder how they’ll fare in the shade of those tall buildings around them. They’d likely get a noontime furnace blast of sun in some seasons at least, and they’re better suited to endure that than many trees are.  

I’ve heard that carob is invasive in southern California, especially on disturbed ground and along watercourses, so I’d advise against planting it here if your site is near wildlands.  

If you have a carob or know someone who’ll let you pick its fruit, have at it. People chew on the pods just as they are—think of it as sweet vegetable jerky—and in Lebanon they press the pods for sweet dibess kharroob, which looks rather like molasses and is good on its own, in tahini, or for dipping pita.  

It would take serious grinding equipment, I’d think, to get carob flour from the pods. If you manage it—or just go buy some—it’s good with regular flour for bread or pancakes; I’ve never tried this but I bet it would combine well with buckwheat flour. Europeans have used the roasted, ground seeds in and instead of coffee: breakfast! Just add eggs, but don’t feed carob to your chickens—I don’t know why, but it’s supposed to be bad for them though it’s good for other livestock.  

It’s a handy tree to have; certainly we should think about planting some on the streets in advance of the apocalypse of your choice, so we can feed ourselves when the freeways and railroads have all gone to rubble. I’d still prefer to like it on its own merits, and not as a fake Hershey bar.  

Photograph by Ron Sullivan.  

A very badly pruned carob tree behind a Telegraph Avenue burger place. 

“It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”  

—Union General  

William Tecumseh Sherman 

Clearly the U.S. Civil War is not on the reading list of psychiatrist Sally Satel, a scholar at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Indeed, Satel sees war less as hell, than as a golden opportunity for veteran lay-abouts to milk the government by “overpathologizing the psychic pain of war.”  

Satel, whom the AEI trots out anytime the Bush administration needs cover for cutting veteran services and benefits, says the problem for former soldiers is not Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). “The real trouble for vets,” she writes, is “once a patient receives a monthly check based on his psychiatric diagnosis, his motivation to hold a job wanes.” Her solution? “Don’t offer disability benefits too quickly.” 

The commentary makes an interesting contrast to a powerful piece in the October 2006 magazine Registered Nurse titled “The Battle at Home” by Caitilin Fischer and Diana Reiss. Fischer is a Bay Area writer and teacher at Berkeley City College, and Reiss is a physician assistant and an associate at the Center for Investigative Reporting.  

What they found was that “In veterans’ hospitals across the country—and in a growing number of ill-prepared, under-funded psych and primary care clinics as well—Registered Nurses… are treating soldiers…and picking up the pieces of a tattered army.” 

According to the authors, RNs across the country “have witnessed the guilt, rage, emotional numbness, and tormented flashbacks of GIs just back from Iraq and Afghanistan,” as well as older vets from previous wars, “whose half-century-old trauma have been ‘triggered’ by the images of Iraq.” 

How many soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually fall victim to PTSD is not clear, although a U.S. Defense Department study in 2006 found that one in six returnees suffer from depression or stress disorders, and 35 percent have sought counseling for emotional difficulties. The Veterans Administration (VA) treated 20, 628 Iraq vets for PTSD in just the first quarter of 2006 and is currently processing a backlog of 400,000 cases.  

Out of 700,000 soldiers who served in the 1991 Gulf War, 118,000 are suffering from chronic fatigue, headaches, muscle spasms, joint pains, anxiety, memory loss and balance problems, and 40 percent receive disability pay. Gulf vets are also twice as likely to develop amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig Disease), and between two and three times more likely to have children with birth defects. 

Modern battlefields are toxic nightmares, filled with depleted uranium ammunition and exotic explosives, and strewn with deadly cluster bomblets. The soldiers are shot up with experimental vaccines, some of which have dangerous side effects from additives like squalene. In short, soldiers are not only under fire, they are assaulted by their own weapons systems and medical procedures. 

Satel need have no worries about the VA rushing to hand out cash to veteran couch potatoes. According to Fischer and Reiss, a returning vet must wait an average of 165 days for a VA decision on initial disability benefits. An appeal can take up to three years.” 

Reserve and National Guard troops—who make up between 40 and 50 percent of the front line troops in Iraq and Afghanistan—have a particular problem, because their military medical insurance benefits only cover conditions diagnosed in the first 100 days. PTSD sometimes takes years, even decades to kick in. 

When they do complain, vets can expect that their ailments will be dismissed, or their cause stonewalled. 

When Gulf War vets complained about a variety of symptoms which has come to be called “Gulf War Syndrome,” the DOD told them it was in their heads, in spite of studies by the British Medical Journal and the U.S. Center for Disease Control that showed the returnees were suffering illnesses at 12 times the rate of non-Gulf vets. 

For five years after the Gulf War the Pentagon denied that any troops have been exposed to chemical weapons. It took pressure from veterans’ organizations and Sen. Donald Riegle (D-MI) to get the DOD to finally admit that as many as 130,000 troops (the vets say the number is higher) were exposed to chemical weapons from the destruction of the Iraqi arms depot at Kamisiyah. 

Veteran organizations are currently fighting the Pentagon over its refusal to screen returning soldiers for mild brain injuries. Figures indicate that up to 10 percent of the troops suffer from concussions during their tours, a figure that rises to 20 percent for those in the front lines. Research shows that concussions can cause memory loss, headaches, sleep disturbances, and behavior problems. 

The DOD, however, argues that though the long-term effects of brain injuries needs more research, it is unwilling to fund a screening program. Given the wide use of roadside bombs, “Traumatic brain injury is the signature injury of the war on terrorism,” George Zitnay, co-founder of the Brain Injury Center, told USA Today. And according to researchers at Harvard and Colombia, the cost of treating those brain injuries will be $14 billion over the next 20 years. 

Upwards of 20,000 Americans have been wounded in Iraq, some of those so grotesquely that medicine has invented a new term to describe them—polytrauma. Estimates are that 7,000 vets have severe brain and spinal injuries, and amputations. For the blind, brain damaged and paralyzed, war is indeed hell.  

But the hell we bring home is only a pale reflection of the hell we leave behind.  

According to a recent estimate by the British medical journal, The Lancet, upwards of 650,000 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion. Most of the country’s infrastructure—already damaged in the first Gulf War or degraded by a decade of sanctions—has essentially collapsed. 

Iraq’s experience is not unique. The Vietnam War ended more than 30 years ago, but according to a recent study: “Vietnam: A Natural History” (Yale University Press), Laotians, Vietnamese and Cambodians are still dying from it.  

From 1964 to 1973, over 14 million tons of bombs were dropped on those three countries, including 90 million cluster munitions on tiny Laos alone. Somewhere between 30 to 40 percent of those fiendish devices never exploded, and, according to the British Mines Advisory Group, they have killed or maimed 12,000 Laotians since the end of the war. They continue to extract a yearly toll of 100 to 200 people, many of them children. 

Traces of the 20 millions of gallons of Agent White, Agent Blue and Agent Orange herbicides that the U.S. sprayed over Vietnam still poison the water, soil, vegetation, animals and people of Southeast Asia, producing cancer and birth defect rates among the highest in the world.  

Calculating the cost of war is tricky, but Nobel Prize winning economist John Stiglitz recently calculated that the long-term health care for Iraq war vets will exceed $2 trillion.  

So war is indeed hell—for those who fight it, for those caught in the middle of it, and for those who eventually pick up the pieces. 

For a copy of The Battle at Home, contact the California Nurses Association, 2000 Franklin St., Oakland, 94612, 273-2251. 

When Democrats quit celebrating their victory in the mid-term elections and begin to consider their priorities for the 110th Congress, they need look no further than Iraq. The basic issues that plague Iraq--security, infrastructure, and governance--are the same that beset the United States. Due to a devastating combination of managerial ineptitude and ideological inflexibility, the Bush administration has lost Iraq and severely damaged the United States. They couldn’t stop the looting there and refuse to stop the looting here. 

Shortly after American forces occupied Baghdad, on April 9, 2003, widespread pillaging broke out; the first indication the public got that things weren’t going to be hunky dory in Iraq. When queried about our troops’ failure to stop the looting, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld quipped: “democracy is messy”—a remark intended to deflect attention from the fact that the Pentagon hadn’t sent enough troops to handle the occupation. But also, a comment that revealed the grim ideology of the Bush administration: Democracy—in the minds of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others in the White House inner circle—is synonymous with unbridled capitalism. They see the world as a battleground, where individuals engage in a vicious, winner-take-all struggle for existence. From this perspective, Democracy is indeed messy. And looting is a commonplace occurrence, an inevitable consequence of life on the edge of a violent frontier. 

As a consequence of their philosophy, the Bush administration did nothing to stop the looting of Baghdad and other cities in Iraq. This shouldn’t have surprised the American public; since 2000, the administration encouraged the ravaging of America. Now it’s time for Democrats to put an end to this looting. 

In both America and Iraq, Republican pillaging followed a pattern: it began with petroleum resources. Next, under the camouflage of “privatization,” the Bush administration gave lucrative contracts to Republican donors. Finally, the White House legalized despoiling the environment, as they consider the environment a free resource to be sold to the highest bidder. 

In April 2003, one of the only Iraqi public buildings to be guarded by American troops was the oil ministry. No surprise. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, “Iraq contains 112 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the second largest in the world (behind Saudi Arabia).” A recent article described how the Bush Administration conspired with the big-four oil companies—Exxon-Mobile, Chevron-Texaco, BP-Amoco, and Royal Dutch-Shell--to control Iraq’s oil. The same energy company executives that encouraged the Bush Administration to invade Iraq, and helped write the Iraqi constitution to ensure the United Stats would control Iraqi oil, were also involved in Dick Cheney’s infamous energy task force. They’ve been favored with billions of dollars of oil subsidies. As a result, their companies enjoyed record profits. 

The invasion and occupation of Iraq gave the Bush Administration an opportunity to give their biggest supporters thousands of sole-source contracts: in July of 2004 Halliburton had Iraqi contracts worth $11,431,000,000. This war profiteering is documented in Robert Greenwald’s Iraq For Sale. Now, the $22 Billion Congress allocated in 2003 has run out and less than half the authorized projects have been completed. “Huge amounts of funds were wasted because of bureaucracy, corruption, incapacity and the spending of money on unimportant projects,” reported Ali Baban, planning minister in Iraq’s six-month-old government. On Aug. 3, the top auditor of the U.S. reconstruction effort complained to Congress about the failed reconstruction. As a consequence, the Republican Congress eliminated the auditor and his Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. 

The Bush administration doesn’t believe in the Federal government. Therefore, they’ve treated our treasury as an executive expense account, which they use to provide gifts for their supporters. The principal advisers to the Administration typically have been lobbyists: the president’s chief environmental adviser was a lobbyist for the Chemical Manufacturers Association. It’s not surprising that they’ve written legislation that favors corporate profits over the common good. 

What should the priorities of the new Democratic Congress be? First of all, they should publicize the widespread looting condoned by the Bush Administration. Then, they must hold Congressional hearings and press for criminal investigations by the Department of Justice. Third, they should take steps to limit the power of lobbyists over Congress. Last December, Democratic Representatives David Obey, Barney Frank, David Price, and Tom Allen introduced a reform package that would deal with many of the procedural abuses that plagued the Republican Congress. Their 14-point proposal Amending the Rules of the House to Protect the Integrity of the Institution is a good starting place. Finally, what the corruption of the Bush Administration illustrates is the need for fundamental reform in our political system. Democrats must begin to change the rules that govern our elections to reduce the power of big money and big corporations. Democrats must take concrete action to stop the looting of America. 

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bobburnett@comcast.net 

It’s doubtful that politics brings out more silliness in the human character than any other human endeavor—it just seems that politicians, and the people they employ, seem so much more intent than anyone else on broadcasting the odd things that are sometimes on their minds. 

And so, in response to a recent UnderCurrents column criticizing the Jerry Brown administration, we have Dave Grenell, aide to Mayor Jerry Brown, writing a letter to the last Daily Planet that “Despite his celebrity, the mayor does not surround himself with guards, handlers and chauffeurs. He refuses to isolate himself from citizens on the street. He recently called his staff at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night to report that a dozen bulbs needed to be changed on Lake Merritt’s ‘Necklace of Lights.’ Such interventions on the Mayor’s part are not unusual.”  

One wonders why Mr. Grenell bothered. His letter was appearing about the same time that California voters were roundly rejecting my long and many criticisms of Mr. Brown if even they read any of them, predictably electing the former governor, former secretary of state, and outgoing mayor by a 57 percent to 38 percent margin over Republican State Senator Chuck Poochigian. 

Still, when your defense of your two-term tenure as mayor is that you walked around the city in the evenings making sure the lights were turned on, you know you’re working on a thin résumé.  

Meanwhile, I’m not sure how long Mr. Grenell was on the team, but actually Mr. Brown once surrounded himself with at least one guard, chauffeur and handler, the since-disappeared Jacques Barzaghi, who once received a concealed weapons permit through the Oakland Police Department in order to carry out those duties. Mr. Barzaghi, who seemingly could not be physically separated from Mr. Brown from the early 1970s on, left the country and disappeared from public view about the time Mr. Brown’s Attorney General’s campaign was gaining public attention. Mr. Barzaghi, it seems, was a political albatross and embarrassment because—while on the job given to him by Mr. Brown—he had been reprimanded and punished for sexually harassing City of Oakland staff members. 

Interestingly, Mr. Barzaghi surfaced in the newspapers again about the time it became apparent that Mr. Brown was a shoo-in for the attorney general’s office, talking to a Los Angeles Times reporter by telephone from his new home in Morocco about the sexual harassment charges.  

In any event, now that the children have gotten through playing with Oakland’s problems, it’s time for the adults to step in and clean up the considerable mess left behind. 

Even before his scheduled inauguration in January of next year, incoming Mayor Ron Dellums has been attempting to deliver on his campaign promise for a more inclusive Oakland government, first over the summer organizing task forces of active and interested citizens to work up policy recommendations in several areas of city life, then convening a series of mass workshops this fall to open up the conversation to a larger layer of citizens. 

The efforts have met with some grumbling, of course, as is our right. Oakland grumbles with the best of them. 

Last September, San Francisco Chronicle East Bay columnist Chip Johnson wrote in a column called “Dellums’ Panels Are Hush-Hush” that he was having difficulty finding information about the task forces. Mayor-elect Ron Dellums… said [the task forces] would be a completely open government process,” Mr. Johnson wrote. “But the people serving on those committees since Dellums' election have not been announced. And while some of their meetings have been held on the third floor of Oakland City Hall, very little information has been released to the public—or to the media. … As with the fraternal order of Masons, you apparently have to be a member to know what's going on.” 

Given that the task forces involved close to a thousand volunteers, and given that Oakland is a town irredeemably addicted to political gossip, it’s difficult to see how a newspaperperson of Mr. Johnson’s caliber could not track down information about task force activities.  

And, in fact, a week later, Mr. Johnson admitted that in response to his “Hush-Hush” column he “received so many e-mails, phone calls and comments from participants in the citizen task forces created by Oakland's Mayor-elect Ron Dellums that it's only fair to devote more space to the process.” And though his second column on the task forces was equally as critical of the process as the first, to his credit, Mr. Johnson did grudgingly admit that the Mr. Dellums’ “task-force project is a purely democratic exercise, not one of the 800 applicants was rejected,” also noting that “no one can say is that there was a lack of interest in the mayor-elect's task-force project. The council chambers were absolutely packed for the first meeting of the groups, and organizers ran out of pencils, introductory folders and other supplies.” 

What was true of the task force process—an abundance of interest—was also true of Mr. Dellums’ “Neighbor to Neighbor” mass strategy sessions last month.  

Held in various sections of the city in late October (Calvin Simmons Middle School and Castlemont High School in East Oakland, Oakland Tech in North Oakland, and McClymonds in West Oakland), the gatherings invited citizens to share their thoughts and ideas on a wide group of topics ranging from health care, economic development, housing, diversity, and transportation to education, arts, youth affairs, and public safety. The idea was to have members of the various mayoral task forces come and mainly listen to the conversation, taking back information on community attitudes and policy and implementation suggestions to the task forces. 

Mr. Dellums himself has been conspicuously absent during the Neighbor-to-Neighbor meetings, and that has prompted some grumbling, at least in some quarters. On one local email list, one woman, saying that she supported Councilmember Nancy Nadel in last June’s election, wrote that “Dellums—like most other smooth-talking politicians—likes to use homespun phrases like ‘neighbor to neighbor’ but it takes a bit more than that to deal with the myriad crises that face Oakland today. Besides that, when my neighbors plan a neighborhood meeting, my neighbors actually show-up.” 

The sentiment is understandable. After the Jerry Brown years there is considerable touchiness in Oakland about mayoral accessibility, and not having been in close proximity to Ron Dellums for many, many years—members of Congress, after all, do most of their work in Washington—Oakland residents have a right to wonder how extensive will be the ability to have direct citizen communication with the newly-elected mayor. We won’t know that for a while. 

The Neighbor-to-Neighbor meetings, however, were not the proper forum for direct chats with the mayor. They were designed for citizens to break up into small meetings and speak among themselves, to ourselves, and had Mr. Dellums begun wandering in and out of the meeting rooms, it would have led some to the conclusion that the time for “important” pronouncements was only when the new mayor was present, and the time when he was not was just so much wasted space. Keeping away—while trusting his aides to get back unfiltered reports to him—was probably the best thing Mr. Dellums could do to keep the mass meeting process going. 

Citizen participation is, however, a dangerous leap for any officeholder who does not intend on keeping it up. For many years, the average Oakland citizen has been shut out of much of Oakland decision-making, relegated to two-minute presentations before City Council to speak on too many issues that were long-ago decided once the pay-to-play big boys and girls in the business had their input and say. By operating on a whomsoever-shall-let-them-come policy so early in the process, Mr. Dellums gives Oakland citizens the distinct impression that they have a right to be heard on and participate in city decisions. History has taught us that once having taken hold, such a notion of democratic rights is hard to take away, even by the ablest politician. We know Mr. Dellums to be a keen student of history, and so we can only assume, for the present, that he intends to keep his “inclusive government” word. 

Dear Matt, 

I read your article about house foundations, and I was wondering how do I tell if my house is bolted to the foundation. I live in the Seattle area, and my house was built in 1972, so I’m pretty sure that it is bolted, but I’ve torn apart a few small drywall piece, and haven’t seen any bolts. Is there an easy way to tell?  

I’m asking because I am looking at getting earthquake insurance, and it is one of the requirements.  

—Tom  

Dear Tom, 

This is a toughie as there are a number of questions you have to ask yourself to get a clear answer. The first one is, Do you have a crawl space? If there is a space between your floor and the ground then your removal of drywall isn’t going to tell you what you need to know. If you’re on a slab, where the foundation and your floor is the same thing, then it will. If you are on a slab, and there are plenty of those from the 70’s, you will probably have to remove drywall along the floor for up to 6’ before you see a bolt and possibly further. Bolt spacing in this time was roughly at a 6’ spacing and the bolts are usually 1/2” with small washers (if there ARE washers). The nuts may be square or hex and these are likely to be quite rusty since they were almost always non galvanized. Your insurance company probably doesn’t care how many bolts are present, just so long as some can be sighted.  

If you have a crawl space, you will notice that your floor is a) usually raised above ground level any where from 2’ on up and you’ll usually have to walk up some stairs to get into the house from at least one side. If you have a crawl space, you’ll also usually see vent on the side of the building just above ground level. If you have a crawl space, you will also, generally, be able to hear a drum-like sound when you jump up and land on the floor. A slab won’t make any sound beyond the sound of loose flooring. It will also feel very hard and unforgiving.  

If you have a crawl space, you’ll need to get inside of it to see the bolts and they will be on the top of the foundation around the perimeter of the building. They hold the bottom piece of wood that makes up the framework of the house, called a mudsill, to the foundation. This board literally lies flat on top of the footing and is held in place by an occasional bolt. Since bolting was a requirement in virtually all of the U.S. at that time, you can expect to see a small compliment of 1/2” bolts just as I’ve described above. Keep in mind that with a slabbed house, you’re only going to be able to see a sampling. Bolting frequency may vary and the spot you see won’t tell the entire picture. That said, it’s a good idea to find out for your insurance company and for yourself. I hope you’ll consider upgrading the bolting since almost all of the bolting done this long ago, is now considered to be far too weak and Seattle is much like Berkeley in its seismic activity.  

Say hi to Bill and Melinda for me,  

Matt  

Dear Matt:  

I have a 15 year old composite shingle roof. About five years ago I noticed that all the mineral granules on the ridge shingles were gone. The ridge shingles are two or three shingles thick to give a perky profile. Another roofer doing my garage said the problem is the shingles on the ridge get too hot because the heat in the unventilated attic crawl space is hottest at the ridge. 

Does this make sense to you? the flat shingles that start at the edge of the ridge shingles, just a few inches down from the apex of the ridge look fine.  

Sam Craig  

Dear Sam, 

That roofer of yours is a pretty sharp fellow and there’s a darned good chance that a lack of roof venting is involved in the wear on those shingles, however, I’m going to ask you to take a closer look at the shingles to see if there’s something else going on, perhaps in addition to the problem with heat and very possibly the root cause of the problem. I’ve seen a similar condition on quite a few occasions. You may be looking at a problem that occurred as a result of folding the shingles. When shingle get folded over the ridge they tend to more rapidly shed their mineral coating. Some roof ridges, such as the one you’ve described even involve a complex fold in which the shingle is folded in half and THEN folded partially once again to bend over the ridge.  

This creates a more elaborate ridge detail that sort of puffs up like a bird’s crest. It’s pretty but it involves paying a price. This folding immediately knocks some mineral granules off and then promotes more failure of the mineral coating over time. If the mineral is only missing (to a significant degree) on the ridge shingles and the adjacent ones, which lie flat, seem completely fine, I’ll bet that the folding is the primary problem. If heat is the problem, I would expect the top 2-5 courses to have a graduated effect in which the top is most strongly effected and the next few courses have a decreasing but noticeable loss of the granules. Heat in the attic, if this involved, will also tend to curl the shingles and I’ve seen cases where all the shingles had some lift to them as the heat waves were driving them upward. The shingles also become quite brittle in these cases and begin to crack and break prematurely.  

If it’s just the ridge shingles that are badly worn and the rest looks all right, I’d suggest replacing the ridge shingles with new ones. It’s not hard to get a similar color. At 15 years, you may only have a few years left on the whole roof so consider this when you think about putting money into a repair. I DO think that roof heat is an issue that should be addressed during the next roof replacement by the installation of vents (they can go in several places and are best distributed somewhat over the height of the roof (some near the top and some near the bottom). You can also consider a fan (and solar fans are nice in that they don’t require any wiring).  

Good luck, Matt  

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor at mgcantor@pacbell.net.

I just had to ask. The charming young salesperson at Berkeley Indoor Garden did have list of what, other than the obvious, customers grow using B.I.G.’s wares: orchids and other tropicals, carnivorous plants, some rare and picky succulents, sometimes lettuce and herbs and baby greens just to have them handy.  

She showed me some Hawai’ian kalanchoes that drop baby plants from their leaf edges, roots already a-reaching, the way good old mother-of-millions does. (M-o-m, a Bryophyllum hybrid, reproduces as advertised in pots outdoors here, as I’ve found out. Want some? Keep it away from wildlands.) 

She showed me dinosaur kale growing in styrofoamy blocks, and calendulas in a test bed with a Brazil-style octopus of silver ductwork—“Not the best way to arrange ducts; they should be straight”—slithering between the light hoods and whooshing fans overhead.  

She showed me a rig with a light fixture in a sort of zippered fabric: just the thing for a few prize poinsettias. They need measured doses of darkness to bloom, and that’s becoming harder to get as city and “security” lights get more obnoxiously ubiquitous.  

I have seen other plants in indoor hydroponics stores: tobacco, chili peppers, a boisterous banana tree that bore several big hands of fruit for its staff. I’ve also explored indoor hydroponics as a possibility for immunocompromised friends, especially one passionate gardener whose beloved cats had bad habits about her potted plants. 

I suppose it’s cheap irony that free light is getting hard to take for granted too, as those trendy “dense” buildings mushroom all over town. 

You can grow mushrooms in the backyard after one such monolith goes up on your south or west border, but good luck with the squash and beans. So maybe we’ll need these elaborate indoor set-ups for food security.  

They’ll certainly drive the utility bills up. Handily, B.I.G. has a chart that tells you how much, for a number of possible setups. There are also lots of growing media—from something approximating soil to something approximating red clay hailstones—and a bewildering assortment of organic fertilizers, including (pricey!) mycorrhizal inoculants.  

The varieties and intensities of light get bewildering, too. This is gardening for wonks, I guess, and though I have wonkish tendencies myself I suspect I’d be flipping coins instead of crunching numbers after a few layers of this chemistry and engineering. If you like that stuff and don’t mind all that fluorescent light, well, you’re trimming your consumption by growing things instead of getting them trucked to you, I suppose.  

When I want a sunshine supplement I go just up the street to the Templebar, especially since they’ve started serving lunch four days a week. 

Time your shopping right and you can catch comedy, or better yet some wonderful Hawai’ian slack-key guitar and song from the duo Pulama, Wednesday the 15th from 7 to 9 and one Wednesday a month through January. And have dinner there to take care of the munchies.  

Berkeley Indoor Garden 

844 University Avenue, Berkeley 

(510) 549-2918 

Monday-Friday 10 a.m.-7 p.m. 

Saturday 10 a.m.-6 p.m. 

Sunday 12 p.m.-5 p.m. 

Have You Met Your Neighbors? 

Back in the 1950s, everyone on the block knew everyone else. Unfortunately, that’s rarely the case now. 

The Big One in our future, however, now makes it more important than ever to be on a first name basis with everyone on the block.  

For example, if you’re not at home when the Big One hits, you’ll want a neighbor to check inside your home for gas and water leaks. 

Why? It’s in everyone’s self-interest: if one home has a gas build-up and catches fire, it puts the rest of the block at risk (remember, the fire department won’t be there!). 

Note: if each house has an automatic gas shut-off valve installed, it makes it safer for the entire block.  

Someone needs to get all the neighbors together—why not you? 

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and kit supply service. Call him at 558-3299, or visit www.quakeprepare.com.

TUESDAY, NOV. 14 

CHILDREN 

P&T Puppets “Just So Stories” in celebration of children’s book week at 6:30 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

FILM 

“Generations of Women” with filmmaker Gunvor Nelson in person at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Susan Dunlap reads from her newest Darcy Lott mystery “A Single Eye” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Poet M.K. Chavez reads at Works in Progress Women’s Open Mic at 7:30 p.m. at the Montclair Women’s Cultural Arts Club, 1650 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. 276-0379. 

Freight and Salvage Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Stone-Zimmerman Duo, violin and piano, performs works by Brahms, Enescu, Rohde and Critten at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $20. 525-5211. www.berkeleychamberperfrom.org 

Bandworks, band recitals, at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $5. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ellen Hoffman and Singers’ Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Frank Jackson at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$12. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazzschool at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 15 

EXHIBITIONS 

“At Thadeus Lake” by Sherri Martin, winner of the 2006 Kala Board Prize at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. Exhibition runs to Nov. 25. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

“Full-Plate Tintypes: Painted Puzzles” at The Ames Gallery, 2661 Cedar St., through Jan. 10, Mon.-Fri. 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. 845-4949. www.amesgallery.com 

FILM 

“Lottery of the Sea” with filmmaker Allan Sekula in person at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Bettina F. Apthekar reads from “Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Wednesday Noon Concert, with music from the graduate seminar in jazz improvisation at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Free. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Diana D. Zamba and Aaron Sage, jazz at 1 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. Free. 981-5190. 

Danceworx Showcase at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $5-$8. 925-798-1300. 

Whiskey Brothers Old Time and Bluegrass at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Calvin Keys Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Balkan Folkdance at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $7. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Orquestra Candela at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa lessons at 8 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Kids and Hearts, soul, punk, jazz at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Liz Caroll & John Doyle, Irish fiddle and guitar, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Tito y su Son de Cuba at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$15. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, NOV. 16 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Process and Sustainability” Works of Robert Becker Reception at 5:30 p.m. at AIA East Bay Chapter, 450 Clay St., Oakland. 464-3600. www.aiaeb.org 

Winter Dreams Reception at 5 p.m. at Transmission Gallery, 1177 San Pablo Ave. 558-4084. 

Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle Guided tour at 12:15 and 5:30 p.m. in Gallery 2, Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. 

“Drawings” by Amy Sollins opens at North Berkeley Frame and Gallery, 1744 Shattuck Ave. and runs through Jan. 13. 549-0428. 

FILM 

“Dog Day Afternoon” with screenwriter Frank Pierson in person at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Guerrilla Radio: The Hip-Hop Struggle Under Castro” at 6:30 p.m. and “Las Comnatientes” at 8:15 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $6-$8 for each film. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Barbara Sjoholm reads from “Incognito Street: How Travel Made Me a Writer” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Heriberto Yepez, Mexican poet, at 6:30 p.m. in the Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall, UC Campus. holloway.english.berkeley.edu 

“The Politics of Music” A panel discussion wth Mat Callahan, Golnar Nikpour and Joel Schalit at 7 p.m. at AK Press Warehouse, 674 A 23rd St., Oakland. 208-1700. www.akpress.org 

Judy Yung will give a slide talk of historical photographs from her new book “San Francisco’s Chinatown” at 7 p.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave. 526-7512. 

Joseph McBride, in conversation with Jim Kitses on “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of An Independent Career” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Blue Roots, New Orleans blues, jazz, gospel, and soul, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Gidon Kremer, violin with Andrei Pushkarev, percussion and Andrius Zlabys, piano, at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $36-$68. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Girlyman, contemporary folk, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Linda Zulaica & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Paufve Dance “8 x 8 x 8” at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Jazz Mine at 6:30 p.m. at King Tsin Chinese Restaurant, 1699 Solano Ave. 525-9890. 

Hubert Laws at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $14-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

The Trucks, electroclash from Seattle, at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $8. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

FRIDAY, NOV. 17 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “Hedda Gabler” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. through Nov. 18 at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. at Berryman. Tickets are $12. 525-1620. www.aeofberkeley.org 

Aurora Theatre “Ice Glen” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through Dec. 10. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Azeem’s “Rude Boy” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at The Marsh, 2120 Allston Way, through Nov. 25. Tickets are $15-$22. 415-826-5750. www.themarsh.org 

Berkeley Rep “Passing Strange” at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. through Dec. 3. Tickets are $45-$61. 645-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Central Works “Andromache” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. through Nov. 19. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1382. 

Contra Costa Civic Theater, “And Then There Were None” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. Sun. at 2 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Dec. 9. Tickets are $11-$18. 524-9132. www.ccct.org 

Impact Theater “Jukebox Stories” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through Dec. 10. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. www.impacttheatre.com 

Masquers Playhouse “Company” by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through Dec. 16. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org  

TheatreFirst “Criminal Genius” Thurs.-Fri. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m. at Old Oakland Theatre, 481 Ninth St., at Broadway, Oakland, through Nov. 19. Tickets are $19-$25. 436-5085. www.theatrefirst.com 

UC Dept. of Theater “Suburban Motel” six plays by George Walker at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus, through Nov. 19. Tickets are $8-$14. For schedule see http://theater.berkeley.edu 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Living Dreams in a Dying Village” A documentary exhibit about children affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in central China. Receptions at 3:30 and 6:30 p.m. at Berkeley High School, Building C, 2nd Flr. 486-1221. 

FILM 

“Dog Day Afternoon” Shot-by shot analysis with screenwriter Frank Pierson at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Poeta del Guaran” at 6:30 p.m. and “La Sagrada Familia” at 8:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $6-$8 for each film. 849-2568.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Panel Discussion on Adoption with authors Micky Duxbury, and Susan Ito at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

University Chorus performs “Elijah” by Mendelssohn at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $4-$12. 642-9988. http://music.berkeley.edu 

San Francisco City Chorus performs Mendelssohn’s St. Paul Oratorio at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $15-$20. 415-701-SONG. www.sfcitychorus.org 

The Jack Gates Trio, jazz, Brazilian and popular music at 7:30 p.m. at A Cheerfull Noyse, 1228 Solano Ave., Albany. Donations accepted. 524-0411. 

V Neck, Ross Hammond on guitar and Tom Monson on drums, at 8 p.m. at 1510 8th St., Oakland. Donation $5-$15. sfjazzmusic@yahoo.com 

Lua Hadar & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Reggae Angels at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

John Gorka, songcrafter, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Bill Bell Trio at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

The Freys at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Everest, The Parties, Praba & the Substitutes at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Jason Webley, Jherek & Alex Sprouts, The Pastries, Shakey Bones at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

Ashkon, hip hop, urban at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5. 548-1159.  

Beatropolis at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Partyline, Dinky Bits at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100.  

Hubert Laws at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $14-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, NOV. 18 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Orange Sherbert at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $4 for adults, $3 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Asheba, calypso music and stroytelling, at 11 a.m. at Studio Grow, 1235 10th St. at Gilman Cost is $6, children under 1 free. 526-9888.  

FILM 

“Cool Hand Luke” with screenwriter Frank Pierson in person at 6:30 p.m. and “Cat Ballou” at 9:15 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Lee Tanner on “Masters of Jazz Photography” at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Flauti Diversi “Classical Rhapsody” Quartets by CPE Bach and Mozart, at 8 p.m. at Music Sources, 1000 The Alameda, at Marin. Reservations recommended. Tickets are $15-$18. 527-9840. 

Chora Nova “Treasures of Michale Haydn” at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, Dana and Durant. Tickets are $15-$20. www.choranova.org 

Trinity Chamber Concerts Music of Aaron Blumenfeld with Pamela Hicks, soprano and John D. Frederick, baritone, at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. www.trinitychamberconcerts.com 

San Francisco Taiko Dojo at 7 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32-$46. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

“The Music Party” Song, dance and poetry at 7 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. Cost is $15-$20. 525-0302. 

Works in the Works Dance performance by St. Mary’s College Dance Company, Davalos Dance Company at 7:30 p.m. at Eighth Street Studio, 2424 Eighth St. Tickets are $10 at the door. 527-5115. 

Kirtan: Jagadambe at 8 p.m. at Studio Rasa, 933 Parker St. Cost is $16-$18. 843-2787. 

Linda Tillery & The Cultural Heritage Choir at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Robin Gregory & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Haitian Vertieres Day Celebration with Kalbasskreyol and Rasine Bambou at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Kompa dance lesson at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $12-15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Crooked Roads and Zac Cahn at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

John Gorka, songcrafter, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Maya Kronfeld Trio at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Kurt Ribak at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $3. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Mark Lemaire with Elaine Kreston at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7-$10. 558-0881. 

Matthew Hansen Band, The Trenchermen, The Inversions at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. All ages show. Cost is $5. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

The Living Remix at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

Sarah Manning Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Babyland, Replicator at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 19 

EXHIBITIONS 

The Photography of Matt Heron Artist talk by the civil rights photojournalist on his work covering the struggle for voting rights in the South, at 2 p.m. in the Community Meeting Room, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. 

Berkeley Arts Center Annual Members’ Showcase opens at 1275 Walnut St. in Live Oak Park, and runs through Dec. 21. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

“Wild About Birds” mixed media paintings Rita Sklar. Reception at 4 p.m. in the Foyer Gallery of the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave., Albany. Exhibition runs to Feb. 16. 524-9283. www.ritasklar.com 

Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle Guided tour at 2 p.m. in Gallery 2, Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. 

THEATER 

Wilde Irish Productions “Beckett Centennial Celebration” with staged readings of his work at 2 p.m. at Berkeley City Club Library, 2315 Durant Ave. Free, but reservations suggested. 644-9940. www.wildeirish.org 

FILM 

Yiddish Films “Letter to Mother” at 3 p.m. at the JCC, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

“King of Gypsies” with director Frank Pierson in person at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Riches, Rivals and Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America” A talk and film screening with Marjorie Schwarzer at 2 p.m. at the Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. Cost is $6-$8. 549-6950. 

Poetry Flash presents a reading for 26 Magazine with Kit Robinson, Sarah Rosenthal and Todd Melicker at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

St. Mark’s Choir Association, Music of Arvo Part: Berliner Messe, at 10 a.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. 845-0888. 

Prometheus Symphony Orchestra at 3 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 116 Montecito, Oakland. Admission free, donations requested. www.prometheussymphony.org  

Contra Costa Chorale and Octangle Wind Octet at 7 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. Tickets are $12.50-$15. 527-2026. 

“The Bringer of Light” Early Scandinavian Yuletide Music and Nordic Folk Music at 7:30 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. Tickets at the door are $12-$15. 486-2803. 

“Jazz at the Chimes” with vocalist Kenny Washington at 2 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland Tickets are $10, children under 12 free. 228-3218.  

Paul Arnoldi, folk and western, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Feminina & Cerro Negro/Brasil at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

“Thangs Taken” Rethinking Thanksgiving, A People’s Holiday event with poetry, music, visual art and hip hop at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Works in the Works Dance performance by St. Mary’s College Dance Company, Davalos Dance Company at 7:30 p.m. at Eighth Street Studio, 2424 Eighth St. Tickets are $10 at the door. 527-5115. 

Gabriela Frank, music of the Americas, at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Flamenco Open Stage at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Montara Mountain Boys at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Demonstrations, The Slits, Tussle at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $15. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

MONDAY, NOV. 20 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Journeys East: Patterns of Collecting” Art and artifacts fromNorth Africa, India and the former Ottoman Empire on display at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St., through May 7, 2007. 549-6950. www.magnes.org 

“Through the Eye of the Needle: Fabric Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz” opens at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St., through Feb. 11, 2007. 549-6950. www.magnes.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

PlayGround Six emerging playwrights debut new works at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Repertory Theater, 2025 Addison St. Tickets are $18. 415-704-3177. www.PlayGround-sf.org 

Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day” Countdown to the release from 9:30 p.m. to midnight at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Poetry Express with Lucy Lang Day and Chas from Los Angeles at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $4-$12. 642-9988. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Blue Monday Blues Jam at 7:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

Khalil Shaheed, all ages jam, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Ben Goldberg Group at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com  

THE MAGIC OF ANIMATION 

Pixar Animation Studios Software Engineer Sarah Shen will provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the studio’s techniques with a lecture entitled “The Making of Today’s Magic: Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Cars,” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the South Berkeley Community Church, 180. $10. Proceeds go to the restoration fund. Kids under 16 free. For additional information, call Leona Martin at 652-1040. 

THE RAVAGES OF AIDS 

Opening receptions will be held at 3:30 and 6:30 p.m. Friday on the second floor of Berkeley High School’s Building C for a documentary exhibit about children affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in central China 486-1221. 

NOMADIC MUSIC 

Saturday is singer-songwriter night at Oakland’s Nomad Cafe. This week features the Crooked Roads Band who describe themselves as a cross between Hank Williams and The Beatles, and Portland, Ore. musican Zac Cahn. 6500 Shattuck Ave., Oakland. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net.  

GUILTY PLEASURES AT MIDNIGHT 

Downtown Berkeley’s UA Theater will conclude its series of midnight screenings of guilty pleasures from the 1980s with a Thursday night showing of The Goonies. 2274 Shattuck Ave.

The visitor from New York, who wandered into the Gaia Building lobby by mistake, caught a glimpse of the program for Azeem’s solo show at The Marsh, and said as he left, “I get enough ‘Rude Boy’ at home!” 

But as Azeem performs it in a string of black-out vignettes, it’s not so much in your face as an anatomy of a rough-hewn man (who shows various faces, one Jamaican) getting caught up in the wrong side of the Stateside system. 

Sung, declaimed, rapped, gestured out at the audience, Rude Boy is a sad, loosely episodic tale enacted—or acted out—with humor and high spirits, an attempt to see things from the other side of the social mirror. 

Taking the stage, which is covered with janitorial gear, after sweeping up in the pit, Azeem starts in: “Listen, man, I’m not complaining or nothing,” moving by degrees into the turmoil of surviving street life, mirrored by an inner turmoil and humor—and into a character, Tommy Burke, based on two of Azeem’s late cousins—through tough situations that just seem to erupt, and the institutionalizations that follow.  

Azeem’s like a channel for “hearing voices, not like a murderer hears, but a psychic”—with the disclaimer, “except I’m not psychic.” He uses his expressiveness to slip in and out of character, besides narrating or commenting on what’s happening in a variety of styles. 

The show’s a bunch of vignettes, broken up, but not abruptly, with blackouts. It plays like a series of sketches, and still reads like a work in progress; maybe the rough edges reinforce the rudeness of the characters, its real material. 

The sketches go from the rhymed tirade on identity Azeem delivers, looking down from the desk of a social worker, who has him committed, to the visions of a fellow inmate (“Don’t think you watching TV—TV is watching us”) who only speaks in acronyms and numbers; a dissertation on Anger and his stepsister Sadness, and about Rage and those twins, Reason and Logic; Johnny Burke’s predicaments, which land him in The Hole, the prayer he learned from his cellmate (“a muslim dude—that’s Arab. You learn a lot when you get locked up”); a letter to “The President, Santa Claus, Governor or Mayor—Dear Sir;” and songs, raps and assorted ramblings that form the interlocking soliloquies that blossom into fantasy (“Space is, like, God’s Rolex!”) or burst out in tart anger (“Do the police a favor; I’ll kick my own black ass.”). 

Azeem appeals directly to the audience, and he is an appealing presence. You want to hear what he’s got to say. And maybe to see him in a more rigorous show, too, responding to others, not just the characters in his head, something more intensive, not just bursts of intensity that transfix Azeem’s geniality. 

AZEEM’S RUDE BOY 

8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays through Nov. 25 at The Marsh Berkeley, The Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way.  

Contributed photo  

Azeem’s appealing presence makes you want to hear what he has to say.

Down a tree-canopied lane bordered by lush fields of lettuce, corn and pumpkin. Through a filigreed iron gate and white picket fence. Past goldenrod Arden Station where Tucker waits to pull a visitor-laden rail car to Deer Park Station. Drop out of the frenzied pace of modern life. Get lost in the country estate of a wealthy 20th century farmer, a place caught in time. Visit Ardenwood Farm. 

At the historic home of George Washington Patterson the clock appears to have stopped 100-years ago, when simple pursuits occupied one’s day. Watching clear water burst forth from a bright red pump, tasting cookies baked in an outdoor wood-burning stove, changing straw in the stalls of draft horses, milk cows and woolly sheep, harvesting, shucking and grinding corn and making dolls from the husks, forging horseshoes from black iron. Though life has moved on, activities such as these make for a relaxing day “down on the farm.” 

In 1849, gold fever enticed George Washington Patterson west to San Francisco and California’s gold fields. After eighteen months, sick and out of funds, Patterson turned to his area of expertise, farming, using his wages to acquire land, one piece at a time. By 1877, the time of his marriage to Clara Hawley, his 6,000-acres made him one of the area’s richest and most respected men. Today, 205-acres remain, as if preserved in amber, functioning as a working farm. From the handsome butter-yellow mansion trimmed in brown and landscaped with a Victorian garden and lawn-side gazebo, to a massive hay barn, tank house, blacksmith shop, animal pens, orchard and fields of crops, Ardenwood Historic Farm captivates the imagination and tantalizes collective memories of a simpler life. 

On a beautiful fall weekday I toured Ardenwood, map in hand, surrounded by groups of delighted school children. Amid chattering voices sprinkled with bird song I headed first to the Farmyard, the heart of a working farm. At the imposing grey and white Hay Barn I ambled past a wheeled version of the farm’s history. Here all manner of vehicles reside, from a vintage wooden buggy suitable for Sunday drives, to a more recent John Deere tractor. 

In the Corn Room, windows open to the breeze, I watched the corn shucker and grinder reduce dried ears to cornmeal. Outside, a stately black draft horse basked in youthful admiration while contented cows drowsed in the shade on thick beds of clean straw. The Blacksmith was kept busy with orders of personalized horseshoes from an enthusiastic group; numbers steadily increased from six to eight to ten. As he wrote down names and collected payment his assistant shaped iron in the heat of glowing coals. 

Towering above hundred-year-old trees, the weathered windmill-topped Tank House is now under restoration by volunteers, as a future water museum. At the Country Kitchen stood a cream colored Monarch wood burning stove, protected from the elements beneath a sturdy wood overhang. Here pots bubbled and bread baked, aromas wafting through the yard. Nearby, the Laundry occupied center stage in an expanse of green. A big cast iron pot rested above a ring of smooth river stones with a corrugated metal and wood washboard at the ready. 

Something fresh from the oven lured me to the Farmyard Café. I passed up nachos and hot dogs in favor of a warm pumpkin nut muffin and coffee. At an oilcloth-covered picnic table beneath spreading oaks I lingered, enjoying my repast and the life of the farm. Around me squirrels scurried, their cheeks bulging with walnuts plucked from the orchard nearby; peahens and peacocks foraged for orts around the picnic area; kids took turns flexing their muscles at the farmyard pump giggling amid the splashes; the alternating pounding and tapping of the blacksmith mingled with the smell of burning coal. Ardenwood is no ‘model’ farm; everything here is life size and substantial, seemingly rooted in the ground and in history. 

Sated, I was ready to tour the house and gardens, home to three generations of Pattersons. Passing through the Kitchen Garden I admired shiny green bell and jalapeno peppers, royal-purple eggplants, plump heirloom tomatoes and massive heads of parsley, all organically grown. In the Flower Garden wooden posts and white ropes separated beds of colorful cosmos in shades of pink and magenta, golden marigolds and vivid dahlias. 

Surrounding the mansion, the Victorian Gardens are an eclectic mixture of long-standing flora—redwoods, palms, maples, eucalyptus, sycamore and three red-hued sassafras trees bordering the house. Across the lawn, within an encircling hedge and sheltered by light-filtering foliage, sits the white-trimmed Gazebo with open lattice, turned posts and a peaked, domed roof, ready to hear whispered gossip and squeals of childish delight. 

Volunteers are critical to Ardenwood’s operation and appeal. My house tour was lead by Joann, a docent for 20 years, in part because she loves to dress up. In her attractive black-and-white blouse and skirt and black hat, she enthusiastically talked her way through rooms and family history. My group was regaled with the Pattersons’ stories and a glimpse into their era. In his fifties, George Patterson wed a young woman of twenty; his gift the Queen Anne addition to the old farmhouse. From the Romanesque arches and Queen Anne corner sporting curved glass windows to the rare sycamore wood used within, the Patterson home spoke of wealth and prestige. 

Lovingly restored, with almost all original furnishings, the mansion is a cornucopia of a busy family. Behind massive doors opened only for guests, the front parlor shines with parquet floors and stained glass windows. The guest bedroom occupies the premier location and the Queen Anne corner. In the master bedroom, an Italian blue tile fireplace and a mattress stiffly stuffed with horsehair, collected from the farm. On the wall, behind glass, human hair keepsakes, woven into intricate patterns and braided into bracelets and necklaces. A young gentleman’s bedroom furnished with fishing gear, tennis racket and a Stanford football photo from 1904. Another photo testament to the dances once held in the attic. Hidden below the dining room carpet, a buzzer used to summon the cook for more biscuits, freshly made. 

Still buzzing with echoes from the past, I headed to Deer Park Station to board the railcar pulled along the tracks by Tucker, a Herculean Belgian draft horse capable of towing three laden cars—90,000 pounds. Through a Monarch butterfly-festooned eucalyptus grove, we meandered back to Arden Station, leaving behind the simple life but anxious to return again at a new season, when the rhythm of life on the farm changes but continues. 

Getting there: Take Hwy 880 south to Fremont. Exit 880 on Hwy 84 toward the Dumbarton Bridge. Exit 84 at Ardenwood/Newark Blvd. Go north on Ardenwood Blvd to the park entrance. Distance 30 miles.  

Ardenwood Historic Farm: 34600 Ardenwood Blvd., Fremont, 796-0663, www.ebparks.org/parks/arden. Open year-round Tues.-Sun. 10-4 p.m. Entrance fees vary by day of the week. Adults $2-$5, seniors $2-$4, children 4-17 years $1-$3.50. 

Photograph by Marta Yamamoto 

The fully furnished Patterson Mansion artfully combines a country farmhouse with an elegant Queen Anne addition, a wedding gift from George Patterson to his bride.

Before it got drafted to be an allegedly “heathier” substitute for chocolate, carob was a dietary staple of poor folks and a treat even for the wealthy. Ceratonia siliqua is a handsome, tough, warm-climate tree that grows long, thick, flat brown pods to cradle its seeds.  

These pods are sweet, nutritious (at least as tree pods go) and contain gummy stuff that gets used in all sorts of non-food things like glue and ink and leather and fabric sizing, as well as for “stabilizers” in foods as disparate as ice cream, mustard, and salami. Look for “locust gum” in the ingredients list.  

(May I insert here a short rant about the misuse, fast becoming normal, of the word “healthy” when what’s meant is “healthful” or “nutritious”? By the time most of us, especially humans, actually eat an item, chances are it’s far from healthy. In fact, vis-à-vis human food, one hopes it’s actually dead.) 

Speaking of salami or anyway of Salome: One of the vernacular names for carob is “St. John’s bread,” because it’s thought to be the locust part of the “locusts and honey” diet that John the Baptist lived on in the desert. 

Any tree with pinnately divided leaves and long seedpods might get called “locust”—the Robinia and Gleditsia locust trees are relatives but not siblings—but carob is evidently the first owner of the name.  

Different sources transmit different theories about whether the New Testament means the tree pod or the grasshopper, and evidently the Greek is as ambiguous as the English versions. Carob-dipped grasshoppers? Perhaps we could be ecumenical about it and have chocolate-covered ants instead. 

I myself would dance the hoochie-koochie for the avenger who would bring me the head (platter optional) of the malefactor who so badly abused the tree in the photo. 

If someone actually paid for that vandalism, someone get royally ripped off and they’ve set themselves up for damage and lawsuits in the future when the tree becomes a hazard.  

I’d heap more even shame upon the ingrates because carob’s such a good tree for urban spots here. It’s drought-tolerant and stands up to the sort of intense heat it gets in parking lots and other paved areas. It’s not deciduous, but keeps its green, clean, cheerful look even at summer’s end, when everything else is all dusty and exhausted.  

You can see streetside rows of good-sized mature carobs along a couple of the main drags in Livermore and in the South Bay. There’s a newish planting of them in the financial district in San Francisco, and I do wonder how they’ll fare in the shade of those tall buildings around them. They’d likely get a noontime furnace blast of sun in some seasons at least, and they’re better suited to endure that than many trees are.  

I’ve heard that carob is invasive in southern California, especially on disturbed ground and along watercourses, so I’d advise against planting it here if your site is near wildlands.  

If you have a carob or know someone who’ll let you pick its fruit, have at it. People chew on the pods just as they are—think of it as sweet vegetable jerky—and in Lebanon they press the pods for sweet dibess kharroob, which looks rather like molasses and is good on its own, in tahini, or for dipping pita.  

It would take serious grinding equipment, I’d think, to get carob flour from the pods. If you manage it—or just go buy some—it’s good with regular flour for bread or pancakes; I’ve never tried this but I bet it would combine well with buckwheat flour. Europeans have used the roasted, ground seeds in and instead of coffee: breakfast! Just add eggs, but don’t feed carob to your chickens—I don’t know why, but it’s supposed to be bad for them though it’s good for other livestock.  

It’s a handy tree to have; certainly we should think about planting some on the streets in advance of the apocalypse of your choice, so we can feed ourselves when the freeways and railroads have all gone to rubble. I’d still prefer to like it on its own merits, and not as a fake Hershey bar.  

Photograph by Ron Sullivan.  

A very badly pruned carob tree behind a Telegraph Avenue burger place. 

TUESDAY, NOV. 14 

Tuesday is for the Birds An early morning walk for birders through Bay Area parklands. Bring water, sunscreen, binoculars and a snack. This week we will visit Sobrante Ridge. For meeting location or to borrow binoculars, call 525-2233.  

“The Way To Win: Taking the White House in 2008” with ABC News political director Mark Halperin and Washington Post editor and author John Harris at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500.  

“GMOs and the Law: One Farmer’s Battle with Monsanto” with Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser at 7 p.m. 121 North Gate Hall, UC Campus. 643-3840.  

Berkeley High School Governance Council meets at 4:15 p.m. in the Berkeley Community Theater Lobby. Topics will include Attendance Policy, Homework Inequity, CAHSEE Funding, Student Placement Demographics, Late Start Schedule. 644-4803. 

Haymarket Commemoration with Barry Pateman speaking on the history and legacy of the Haymarket Martyrs, and live music by the Devin Hoff Platform at 7 p.m. at the AK Press Warehouse, 674-A 23rd St., Oakland. Suggested donation $5-$10, no one turned away for lack of funds. 208-1700. 

American Red Cross Blood Services volunteer orientation at 6 p.m. at the Oakland office. Advanced sign-up is required. 594-5165.  

Choosing Infant Care A workshop for parents at 7 p.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Registration required. 658-7353.  

Choosing a Pre-School for Your Child at 6 p.m. at Habitot Children’s Museum. Registration required. 647-1111, ext. 14. 

“Population Policy in Senegal and Nigeria: Framing the Future Through Health and Progress” with Rachel Sullivan, doctoral student, at 4 p.m. at 652 Barrows Hall, UC Campus. 642-8338. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Training workshop for volunteers interested in helping the public schools, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

Free Prostate Cancer Screening for men age 40-70 at Alta Bates Herrick Campus. To schedule an appointment call 869-8833. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991.  

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 15 

Silent Walking Vigil to Save the Oaks Join students and community members at 11:45 a.m. at Telegraph and Bancroft for a one-hour walk through the UC campus to mark the day the Regents will be voting on UC’s plan to cut down the oak trees at Memorial Stadium. Co-sponsored by Save the Oaks at the Stadium and the Student Coalition to Save the Oaks. 845-6441. 

“A Glimpse of South Berkeley” with Sarah Shen on “Pixar in the Neighborhood” at 7:30 p.m. at South Berkeley Community Church, 1802 Fairview St. at Ellis. Tickets are $10 and benefit the church’s restoration efforts. 652-1040. 

“These Streets Are Watching” documentary on police misconduct and what to do and say when stopped by police, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Donation $5-$20. Benefit for Copwatch. 415-810-4665. 

“Voices of Courage” Family Violence Law Center Annual Dinner at 6 p.m. at Scott’s Seafood Restaurant, Jack London Square. Cost is $90. 208-0220, ext. 18. 

New to DVD “Word Play” at 7 p.m. at the JCCEB, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

Bayswater Book Club meets to discuss “Drugs, Oil & War” by Peter Dale Scott at 6:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito. 433-2911. 

Open House at Revolution Books from 7 to 9 p.m. at 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. 

Natural Solutions for Holiday Stress at 7 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. 548-9840. 

THURSDAY, NOV. 16 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll learn about the water cycle, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

“Anatomy of an Oakland Redevelopment Project” The History and Politics of West Oakland’s Central Station Project at 7:30 p.m. at the Piedmont Gardens Residential Center, 110 41st St., Oakland. Sponsored by the Metropolitan Greater Oakland Democratic Club. www.mgoclub.org 

“How Museums Represent Native People” with Amy Lonetree of Portland State Univ, and a member of the Ho-Chunk Tribe at 7 p.m. at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum, UC Campus. 643-7649. 

Diversity Film Series “Waging a Living” at 7 p.m. followed by discussion, at Frank Havens Elementary School Auditorium, 325 Highland Ave., Piedmont. 835-9227.  

“Invisible Children” A documentary on the war in Nrothern Uganda and the impact on children recruited to fight at 8:30 p.m. in 2050 Valley Life Sciences Bldg., UC Campus. 209-648-2578. 

NorCal High School Mountain Bike League presents “Cobbles, Baby!” Scott Coady’s Paris-Roubaix Adventure at 8 p.m. at Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $12. 452-3556.  

WriterCoach Connection seeks volunteers to help students improve their writing and critical thinking skills. Training session from noon to 3 p.m. For information call 524-2319.  

“Natural Solutions to Manage Arthritis” with Dr. Jay Sordean, LAc, OMD., at 1 p.m. at The South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5174. 

Easy Does It Disability Assistance Board of Directors meets at 6:30 p.m. at 1744A University Ave. 845-5513.  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. Spud's Pizza, 3290 Adeline at Alcatraz.  

Red Cross Blood Drive from noon to 6 p.m. at East Pauley Ballroom, MLK Student Union, UC Campus. 1-800-GIVE-LIFE. 

FRIDAY, NOV. 17 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Professor Emeritus Didier de Fontaine on “Cosmology.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925.  

“The State Vs. Reed” A documentary on a death row inmate’s case, followed by discussion at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Donations requested. 528-5403.  

“Mission Against Terror” A documentary about five Cuban men in prison in the U.S. at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., between Broadway and Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

Movies that Matter “The Secret” at 6:30 p.m. at Neumayer Residence, 565 Bellevue St. at Perkins, Oakland. 451-3009. http://joyfulharmony.org 

Share Berkeley History The Berkeley Historical Society is looking for photographs, stories and other memorabilia of Berkeley history. Drop by the North Berkeley Senior Center from 1 to 3 p.m. with your stories and photographs so that Berkeley Historical Society embers can archive them. 848-0181. 

Panel Discussion on Adoption with authors Micky Duxbury and Susan Ito at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

“Go to Your Library and Make Art” A craft program for children in grades 4-12 at 3 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 524-3043. http://ccclib.org  

SATURDAY, NOV. 18 

Finalists for the Position of Library Director will give presentations from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Story Room, 4th floor, Central Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. at Shattuck. 981-6195.  

Dig In To Fall Planting Season Volunteers need to help with the ongoing restoration of West Stede Marsh from 9 a.m. to noon at The Watershed Project, 1327 South 46th St., Richmond. To register call 665-3689. www.thewatershedproject.org 

Solo Sierrans Sunset Walk in Emeryville Meet at 3:30 p.m. behind Chevy’s Restaurant small parking lot for an hour’s walk through the Marina. Paved trail, wheelchair accessible. Rain cancels. 234-8949. 

Origami Ornaments at 10:30 a.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll learn about the water cycle, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Kid’s Garden Club for ages 7-12 to explore the world of gardening, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 636-1684. 

Arts and Crafts Faire, with activities for children, from 9 to 5 p.m. at Cottage in the Woods Preschool, 3917 Lyman Rd., Oakland. 531-3121. 

“No Safe Haven” with Leena Khandwala, Appellate Advocacy Fellow with the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies on the exploitation of women and girls, at 2 p.m. in the basement auditorium at Berkeley City College. 

Music Business Seminar from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice St., Oakland. Cost is $30-$65. Sponsored by California Lawyers for the Arts. 415-775-7200, ext. 107. 

“Video Games Review” with Gen Katz of games4girls, and Lou Katz of Family Media Literacy, at 1:30 p.m. at the Oakland Public Library, Rockridge Branch, 5366 College Ave., Oakland. Sponsored by American Assn. of University Women. 

“Positively No Filipinos Allowed” Building communities and discourse, a panel discussion with Antonio Tiongson, Rick Bonus and Dylan Rodriguez at 2 p.m. at Heller Lounge, 2nd flr., Student Union building, UC Campus. 548-2350. 

California Writers Club meets to discuss Writers’ Dilemmas: Markets, Mania and Melancholy at 10 a.m. at Barnes & Noble, Jack London Square. 272-0120. 

Friends of the Albany Library Book Sale begins at 9 a.m. in the Edith Stone Room of the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. For more information or to volunteer to help call 526-3720, ext. 5. 

ProArts Benefit Auction “Box Art” at 6 p.m. at 550 Second St., Oakland. 763-9425. 

Kol Hadash Non-Theistic Thanksgiving Shabbat at 10 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Please bring finger dessert to share, and non-perishable food for the needy. 428-1492. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 19 

Turkey Tales Meet Tilden’s tom turkey and learn all about him at 10 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Open Garden at the Little Farm Join the gardener for composting, planting, watering and harvesting at 2 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Rain cancels. 525-2233. 

Clouds and You Join us on a short hike to learn about cloud names and cloud families. Meet at 3 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Community Labyrinth Peace Walk at 3 p.m. at Willard Middle School, Telegraph Ave. between Derby & Stuart. Everyone welcome. Wheelchair accessible. Rain cancels. 526-7377.  

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour “UC in 1931: An Era of Change” led by Steve Finacom at 10 a.m. Cost is $8-$10. To register and learn meeting place call 848-0181.  

Mayan Weaving with Celia Santiz Ruiz Learn about her experience as a weaver and a member of the Jolom Mayaetik weavers’ fair trade cooperative at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Live Oak Park. 644-6893. 

“Learn How To Build A Living Roof Garden” Learn how to convert a flat roof into a planted garden with Steph Lind. This is a hands-on workshop, converting the Ecohouse tool shed roof into a living garden and add a duck pond and planted drainage swale. From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Berkeley Eco-House, 1305 Hopkins St. Cost is $15 sliding scale, no one turned away. 548-2220 ext. 242. ecohouse@ecologycenter.org 

Play Reading Group meets to read Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” at 2 p.m. in the community room of 1471 Addison St., corner of Sacramento, rear of the 1473 building. Donation $5. 655-7962. 

Yiddish Films “Letter to Mother” at 3 p.m. at the JCC, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Lama Palzang and Pema Gellek on “Cultivating the Mind of Compassion” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, NOV. 20 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Kaiser Permanente Dining Conference Room, 1950 Franklin St. To schedule an appointment, call Rachelle at 625-6188. 

CodePINK Monthly Eat and Greet at 6 p.m. at 1248 Solano Ave. Donation $20. 524-2776. www.bayareacodepink.org 

ONGOING 

All Net Youth Basketball for ages 9-11 begins Nov. 21 at Berkeley Youth Alternatives, 1255 Allston Way. For information call 845-9066. 

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., Nov. 14, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. 

Berkeley School Board meets Wed. Nov. 15, at 7:30 p.m., in the City Council Chambers. Mark Coplan 644-6320. 

Citizens Humane Commission meets Wed., Nov. 15, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6601.  

Civic Arts Commission meets Wed., Nov. 15, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7533.  

Commission on Aging meets Wed., Nov. 15, at 1:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5344.  

Commission on Labor meets Wed., Nov. 15 at 6:45 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7550.  

Downtown Area Plan Advisory Commission meets Wed. Nov. 15, at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7487. 

Design Review Committee meets Thurs., Nov. 16, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Anne Burns, 981-7415.  

Fair Campaign Practices Commission meets Thurs., Nov. 16, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6950. 

Transportation Commission meets Thurs., Nov. 16, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7010. 

FRIDAY, NOV. 10 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “Hedda Gabler” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. through Nov. 18 at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. at Berryman. Tickets are $12. 525-1620. www.aeofberkeley.org 

Albany High School Theater Ensemble “Pretend-O-Cide” Thurs. at 7 p.m., Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Albany High School Little Theater, 603 Key Route Blvd, Albany, through Nov. 11. Tickets are $5-$10. www.myspace.com/ahsuburoi 

Altarena Playhouse “Merrily We Roll Along” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 1409 High St, Alameda, through Nov. 12. Cost is $15-$18. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Azeem’s “Rude Boy” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at The Marsh, 2120 Allston Way, through Nov. 25. Tickets are $15-$22. 415-826-5750. www.themarsh.org 

Aurora Theatre “Ice Glen” Wed.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at 2081 Addison St., through Dec. 10. Tickets are $38. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org 

Berkeley Rep “Passing Strange” at the Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. through Dec. 3. Tickets are $45-$61. 645-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org 

Central Works “Andromache” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. through Nov. 19. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1382. 

Chorus Repertory Theatre “Nine Hills One Valley” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $24-$48. 642-9988.  

Contra Costa Civic Theater, “And Then There Were None” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. Sun. at 2 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave., at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Dec. 9. Tickets are $11-$18. 524-9132. www.ccct.org 

Impact Theater “Jukebox Stories” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through Dec. 10. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. www.impacttheatre.com 

Masquers Playhouse “Company” by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through Dec. 16.. Tickets are $18. 232-4031. www.masquers.org  

Shotgun Players “Love is a Dream House in Lorin” by Marcus Gardley, inspired by true stories of Berkeley’s historic Lorin District, Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through Nov. 12. Sliding scale $15-$30. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

TheatreFirst “Criminal Genius” Thurs.-Fri. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m. at Old Oakland Theatre, 481 Ninth St., at Broadway, Oakland, through Nov. 19. Tickets are $19-$25. 436-5085. www.theatrefirst.com 

UC Dept. of Theater “Suburban Motel” six plays by George Walker at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus, through Nov. 19. Tickets are $8-$14. For schedule see http://theater.berkeley.edu 

Youth Musical Theater Company “Guys & Dolls” Fri.-Sat. at 7:30 p.m. at Longfellow Middle School, 1500 Derby St. Tickets are $6-$15. 595-5514. www.ymtc.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“R.S.V.P.” Art for the Table Opens at 6 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuk Ave. and runs through Dec. 2. 843-2527. 

The Photography of Matt Heron “Voting Rights: The Southern Struggle, 1964-1965” on display in the Catalog Lobby, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St., through Jan. 6. 981-6100. 

FILM 

“Iraq in Fragments” A documentary film by James Longley opens at Landmark Shattuck Cinema, 2230 Shattuck Ave. 464-5980. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

William L. Fox reads from “Driving to Mars: In the Arctic with NASA on the Human Journey to the Red Planet” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

T. J. Clark introduces “The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. 

Elizabeth Rosner will read from her novel “Blue Nude” at 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble 6050 El Cerrito Plaza, El Cerrito. This event is a fundraiser for the Friends of the Contra Costa College Library. 524-0087. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland East Bay Symphony “Made in America” A new work by Joan Tower at 8 p.m., pre-concert lecture at 7 p.m. at Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $15-$62. 625-8497. www.oebs.org 

Donna Lerew, violin, Miles Graber, piano perform works of Bach, Schubert, Ravel and Rochberg at 8 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery 2911 Claremont Ave. Tickets are $10-$15. 848-1228. www.giorgigallery.com 

“Past, Post, and ... Now!” Mills College Repertory Dance Concert at 8 p.m. Fri. and Sat. at Lisser Hall, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd. Oakland. Tickets are $12-$15. 430-2175. 

African Sabar/Tannebeer Drum and Dance Festival at 10 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10. 548-1159.  

Slammin All-Body Band at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $13-$15. 849-2568.  

Melanie O’Reilly & Tir na Mara at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ.  

Duck Baker, American fingerstyle guitarist, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

Elaine Lucia Quartet at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

The Nomadics, jazz, at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

With River, Rick Hardin, Fred Odell & the Broken Arrows at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Lights Out, Have Heart, Go It Alone at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

Electric Vardo “ShadowDance” at 8 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway, at 2nd, Oakland. Cost is $10-$15. 415-259-8629. www.darkerstill.com  

Broun Fellinis at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Cedar Walton Trio with guests Steve Turre and Vincent Herring, at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $20-$24. 238-9200.  

SATURDAY, NOV. 11 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Bonnie Lockhart in an autumn sing along at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $4 for adults, $3 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Jen Miriam Puppets and Music at 11 a.m. at Studio Grow, 1235 10th St. at Gilman Cost is $6, children under 1 free. 526-9888.  

EXHIBITIONS 

International Arts and Crafts on display and for sale from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Finnish Kaleva Hall, 1970 Chestnut St. 

FILM 

Matinees for all Ages: “The General” with Buster Keaton at 2 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Young Performers Celebrate “The Whole World’s Watching You” in coordination with Berkeley Art Center’s exhibit of photos from the peace & social justice movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Readings at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St., between Eunice & Rose Sts., behind Live Oak Park. 527-9753. 

Tom Hayden reads from “The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature, Spirit and Politics” at noon at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kenyan novelist, playwright, and poet will read from “Wizard of the Crow” at 2 p.m. at the African American Museum and Library, 659 14th St., Oakland. 637-0200. 

Piano Seminar on the Taubman Approach Sat. and Sun. from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Berkeley Piano Club, 2724 Haste St. Cost is $110-$220. 523-0213. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Metanioa, A Universalist Mass” by Daniel Zwickel at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. Donation $10, benefit for School of the Americas Watch. 925-427-9611.  

“L’Dor Va Dor” Jewish Composers in the Renaissance English Court at 8 p.m. at St. John's Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. at Garber. Tickets are $10-$25. 

Piano Concert on the Taubman Approach at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Piano Club, 2724 Haste St. Cost is $20. 523-0213. 

Works in the Works Dance performance by Leigh Riley, Rebecca Johnson, Kirsten Wilkinson and others at 7:30 p.m. at Eighth Street Studio, 2424 Eighth St. Tickets are $10 at the door. 527-5115. 

Gamelan Sari Raras at 7:30 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $4-$12. 642-9988. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Fronteras Flamencas at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $18-$20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Walter Savage Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Aux Cajunals at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Caribbean Party at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $15. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Joshua Eden and Mike Gibbons at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Eddie From Ohio, folk, at 5 and 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

John Zorn, saxophone, an evening of improvisation with Ikue Mori, at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $20-$25. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Wire Graffiti, Castles in Spain, the Judea Eden Band at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Vernon Bush Trio at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Red Fang, from Portland, at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $8. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

Melissa Rivera, world/Latin rock at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7-$10. 558-0881. 

Joshi Marshall Project at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Aggression, Verbal Abuse, The Sick, Troublemaker at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 12 

CHILDREN 

Children’s author Daniel San Souci talks about how he develops his stories and sketches at 3 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, James Moore Theater, 1000 Oak St. Co-sponsored by the Oakland Public Library. 238-3615. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Winter Bright” Ceramic sculptures by Elizabeth Orleans, and acrylic paintings by Rosalie Cassell and Diane Rusnak at the Community Art Gallery, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, 2450 Ashby Ave. through Jan. 5. 204-1667.  

Works by April Hankins opens at 2 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle Guided tour at 1 p.m. in Gallery 2, Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Reading with Diane DiPrima, Michael McClure, David Meltzer and Ron Loewinsohn at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. 

Cecile Andrews reads from “Slow is Beautiful: New Visions of Community, Leisure and Joie de Vivre” at 4 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Nahid Rachlin reads from her memoir “Persian Girls” at 6:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

20th Century Music and Beyond: Composer John Zorn at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32. 642-9988. 

Laurel Ensemble Music from Russia and Eastern Europe at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Tickets $12 at the door www.laurelensemble.com 

Kingston Players String Quartet performs Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven at 4 p.m. at United Methodist Church, 201 Martina Street, corner of W. Richmond Ave., Point Richmond. Suggested donation $5. 236-0527. 

Four Seasons Concerts with Amadi Hummings, violin, and Wendy Law, cello, at 7:30 p.m. at Regents Theater, Holy Names University, 3500 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. Tickets are $35-$40. 601-7919. www.fourseasons concerts.com 

Sheila Alix and the Dan Damon Trio at 5:30 p.m. at the Baltic, 135 Park Place, Point Richmond. 237-4782.  

“When I Was a Boy in Brooklyn” Songs by Gary Laplow at 4 p.m. at the JCC, 1414 Walnut St. Tickets are $12-$15. 848-0237. 

Works in the Works Dance performance by Evangel King, Ruth Botchan, Minoo Hamzavi and others at 7:30 p.m. at Eighth Street Studio, 2424 Eighth St. Tickets are $10 at the door. 527-5115. 

Sparky & Rhonda Rucker at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Weber Iago Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Coco Linares, guitarist from Peru at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Erik Jekabson at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Bandworks, band recitals at 1 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $5. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Gift Horse at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

MONDAY, NOV. 13 

CHILDREN 

National Children’s Book Week with presentations and illustrator workshops for children at various Oakland Public Library Branches. For details see. www.oaklandlibrary.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Christopher Robin and & Joe Pachinko read at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Douglas H. Chadwick introduces “The Grandest of Lives: Eye to Eye with Whales” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Poetry Express with The Pasedena Poets at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Fruit at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Khalil Shaheed, all ages jam, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Blue Monday Blues Jam at 8 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

Tribute to Shirley Horn with Frankye Kelly, Babtunde Lea, Glen Pearson, Ron Belcher and Michael O’Neill at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$12. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com  

TUESDAY, NOV. 14 

CHILDREN 

P&T Puppets “Just So Stories” in celebration of children’s book week at 6:30 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

FILM 

“Generations of Women” with filmmaker Gunvor Nelson in person at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Susan Dunlap reads from her newest Darcy Lott mystery “A Single Eye” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Poet M.K. Chavez reads at Works in Progress Women’s Open Mic at 7:30 p.m. at the Montclair Women’s Cultural Arts Club, 1650 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. 276-0379. 

Freight and Salvage Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Stone-Zimmerman Duo, violin and piano, performs works by Brahms, Enescu, Rohde and Critten at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. Tickets are $20. 525-5211. www.berkeleychamberperfrom.org 

Bandworks, band recitals, at 7:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $5. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ellen Hoffman and Singers’ Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Frank Jackson at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$12. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazzschool at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 15 

EXHIBITIONS 

“At Thadeus Lake” by Sherri Martin, winner of the 2006 Kala Board Prize at Kala Art Institute, 1060 Heinz Ave. Exhibition runs to Nov. 25. 549-2977. www.kala.org 

“Full-Plate Tintypes: Painted Puzzles” at The Ames Gallery, 2661 Cedar St., through Jan. 10, Mon.-Fri. 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. 845-4949. www.amesgallery.com 

FILM 

“Lottery of the Sea” with filmmaker Allan Sekula in person at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Bettina F. Apthekar reads from “Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Wednesday Noon Concert, with music from the graduate seminar in jazz improvisation at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Free. 642-4864. http://music.berkeley.edu 

Diana D. Zamba and Aaron Sage, jazz at 1 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. Free. 981-5190. 

Danceworx Showcase at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $5-$8. 925-798-1300. 

Whiskey Brothers Old Time and Bluegrass at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

Calvin Keys Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Balkan Folkdance at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $7. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Orquestra Candela at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa lessons at 8 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Kids and Hearts, soul, punk, jazz at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Liz Caroll & John Doyle, Irish fiddle and guitar, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Tito y su Son de Cuba at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$15. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, NOV. 16 

EXHIBITIONS 

Winter Dreams Reception at 5 p.m. at Transmission Gallery, 1177 San Pablo Ave. 558-4084. 

Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle Guided tour at 12:15 and 5:30 p.m. in Gallery 2, Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. 

“Drawings” by Amy Sollins opens at North Berkeley Frame and Gallery, 1744 Shattuck Ave. and runs through Jan. 13. 549-0428. 

FILM 

“Dog Day Afternoon” with screenwriter Frank Pierson in person at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $4-$8. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“Guerrilla Radio: The Hip-Hop Struggle Under Castro” at 6:30 p.m. and “Las Comnatientes” at 8:15 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $6-$8 for each film. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Barbara Sjoholm reads from “Incognito Street: How Travel Made Me a Writer” at 7:30 p.m. at Black Oak Books. 486-0698. www.blackoakbooks.com 

Heriberto Yepez, Mexican poet, at 6:30 p.m. in the Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall, UC Campus. holloway.english.berkeley.edu 

“The Politics of Music” A panel discussion wth Mat Callahan, Golnar Nikpour and Joel Schalit at 7 p.m. at AK Press Warehouse, 674 A 23rd St., Oakland. 208-1700. www.akpress.org 

Judy Yung will give a slide talk of historical photographs from her new book “San Francisco’s Chinatown” at 7 p.m. at El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave. 526-7512. 

Joseph McBride, in conversation with Jim Kitses on “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of An Independent Career” at 5:30 p.m. at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Blue Roots, New Orleans blues, jazz, gospel, and soul, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $9. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Gidon Kremer, violin with Andrei Pushkarev, percussion and Andrius Zlabys, piano, at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $36-$68. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Girlyman, contemporary folk, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Linda Zulaica & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $7. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Paufve Dance “8 x 8 x 8” at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Jazz Mine at 6:30 p.m. at King Tsin Chinese Restaurant, 1699 Solano Ave. 525-9890. 

Hubert Laws at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $14-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

The Trucks, electroclash from Seattle, at 8:30 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $8. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com

50 YEARS OF GREAT ARTHOUSE CINEMA 

Pacific Film Archive continues its series of classic foreign and arthouse cinema from Janus Films with three screenings this weekend: Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962) at 7 p.m. Friday; Juan Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist (Spain, 1955) at 9 p.m. Friday; Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (Denmark, 1943) at 3 p.m. Sunday; and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (Sweden, 1957) at 6-5 p.m. Sunday. 2575 Bancroft Way. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.  

‘METANOIA, A UNIVERSALIST MASS’ 

Local composer Daniel Zwiekel ben Avram will premiere “Metanoia, A Universalist Mass” as a benefit for the School of the Americas Watch at 7 p.m. Saturday at St. Joseph the Worker Church. $10 donation.1640 Addison St. (925) 427-9611. 

KENYAN NOVELIST READS IN OAKLAND 

Kenyan novelist, playwright and poet Ngugi wa Thiong’o will read from his latest novel, Wizard of the Crow, at 2 p.m. Saturday at the African American Museum and Library. 659 14th Street, Oakland. 637-0200. 

‘WHEN I WAS A BOY IN BROOKLYN’ 

Gary Lapow brings his multi-media musical memoir of life in the 1940s and ’50s—Coney Island, stickball, doo wop, and the Brooklyn Dodgers—to the Jewish Community Center at 4 p.m. Sunday. $12-$15. 1414 Walnut St., Berkeley.848-0237.

“I did not stop to consider, I did not care, whether the book was of any value or not; it was easier and cheaper to buy it than to spend time in examining its value. The most worthless trash may prove some fact wherein the best book is deficient, and this makes the trash valuable.”  

That was the attitude of H. H. Bancroft (1832-1918) in 1860, when he began collecting and storing California “stuff”: books and newspapers, business directories, account books, handbills, ships logs, train tickets, letters written by the famous and the obscure. When written records were lacking he took oral histories that he called “dictations.” By 1870, 16,000 volumes of materials were housed in a building on Valencia Street in San Francisco. He expanded his search to the southwest and Mexico, then East and to Europe—wherever colonial lines of the Americas led. 

By the time of the 1906 quake Bancroft had completed negotiations to sell this motley, unorganized mountain of material to the University of California. Fortunately, the Valencia Street building came through the quake undamaged, and the university quickly moved everything to the Berkeley campus, where graduate students began the never-ending work of sorting and classifying its materials to make them accessible. In later years the University Archives and the Regional Oral History Office came under the Bancroft’s wing. In 1970, Bancroft absorbed the Rare Books Department of the UC Library, “expanding its reach to include the entire sweep of Western civilization,” and in 1972 the History of Science and Technology Program further broadened its view. Meanwhile, valuable gifts were coming from all over the world, as respect for this collection of “stuff” grew. The advent of the internet and on-line access in the 1990s continues to bring new possibilities and challenges. But the philosophy of Bancroft remains the same: collect everything and anything within the defined collecting areas, and let future generations interpret what it all says about us.  

This story and more is contained in a well-designed and readable, large-format book published in celebration of the centenary of Bancroft: Exploring the Bancroft Library, edited by Charles B. Faulhaber, Director of the Bancroft, and Stephen Vincent, poet and essayist. The book manages to divide the vast holdings of the Bancroft into a manageable few categories of collections, research programs, technical services, and outreach, accompanied by brief essays by historians connected to Bancroft in one way or another, and by scores of illustrations. (The 100th birthday of the The Bancroft Library comes during an extensive enlarging, renovating, retrofitting construction project to be completed in 2008. Until then, scholars may visit the temporary headquarters of the Bancroft at 2121 Allston, most of its collection in storage.) 

Anyone age eighteen (sooner, with a high school diploma) or older can use the Bancroft. Security measures make you feel kind of important: surrender bags, purses, pens, backpacks (you get a locker for a quarter, refundable when you leave); provide two IDs, one with photo; take a pencil and paper provided at the desk, and you’re in. I’ve done minor research for my writing: old photos of the Santa Clara Valley, or of old Californios, or oral histories by California Indians before 1900, or Japanese Americans after the World War II internment. Usually I ended up spending an extra two hours getting sidetracked into something irresistible, like the oral history of one of my (and everyone else’s) heroes, Walter Haas (Levi-Strauss). 

I asked Deputy Director Peter Hanff about unusual researchers. He recalled one “very old, very large, very addled” lady who came repeatedly, always calling herself by a different name, Washington one time, Lincoln the next. She was delving into old Spanish land grants, which, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, were still technically valid (with daunting documentation and court action). “One day two federal agents appeared with some questions on the same subject. I mentioned this lady to them. They smiled and said they knew her. One of them said, ‘I bet you thought she was just some eccentric character haunting the Bancroft, but she actually is part of the family with a credible claim to the land under the Oakland Airport.’” 

While I’m sitting in Bancroft, examining the papers of some California writer, the people sitting nearby may be scholars, not only from the university, but from Germany, the Netherlands, Egypt, or Japan. Collected at the Bancroft are original Rube Goldberg cartoons and a fragment of a Sophocles play on papyrus—and everything imaginable and unimaginable in between: 600,000 volumes, 60,000,000 manuscript pieces, 43,000 microforms, 23,000 maps, 2,800,000 pictures and photos, 2,000 oral histories, many on video as well as in print.  

Samples of these images—people, landscapes, designs, ancient book pages, maps, letters—appear on almost every page of Exploring the Bancroft Library. (A personal discovery: I knew Yoshiko Uchida and had read her books, but I had never seen her watercolor of the internment camp at Topaz, Utah (page 37). 

When I mentioned this to Peter Hanff, I triggered another memory. In 1987 Peter was asked to arrange the first “ethnic” exhibit for the Bancroft Library Gallery, on Japanese and Chinese in California. “I said, well, I’ll have to borrow some stuff,” which was against Bancroft policy in those days. Peter had to defend his plan to borrow items to exhibit. “It wasn’t hard. All I had to do was to cite the early historical material we had, all written by white people—newspapers, handbills, cartoons about ‘orientals.’ It would have been an exhibit of white racism. I got an introduction to Seizo Oka, then the unofficial historian of Japan Town, and Tom Chinn, authority on Chinese culture in America. Brilliant men, they generously provided wonderful things. I learned a lot from them, and so did everyone who saw the exhibit.” 

Eight years ago Peter began teaching a research workshop with no pre-requisites, one of the special courses where lower division UC students are exposed to senior faculty in research instead of a T. A. “The assignment is to pick a subject, do research only in primary sources, then do an oral report to the group. So off they go to Bancroft, and they come back with a report—well, I still remember the look of wonder on the boy who stood in front of the group and said, ‘I held it in my hand! A letter by Albert Einstein!’ He had been bitten. No one will ever convince him that research is dry, dusty, dispassionate work.” 

If the illustrations and lists in the book whet your appetite for the real thing, trek up to the UC Museum, where, all this year (closing December 3), Gallery 4 is showing hundreds of acquisitions of the Bancroft: Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Meriwether Lewis, suggesting the exploration that became the Lewis and Clark expedition; the beribboned army jacket of “General-Waste-More-Land” worn in 1967 by Thomas Michael Dunphy to protest the Vietnam War; the astonishing 16th century Codex Fernandez Leal, a pictographic scroll illustrating the lineage of Cuicatec rulers in Oaxaca; a fragment of the Iliad in Greek on 2nd century A.D. papyrus; a 1906 painting by Theodore Wores— spectral ruins of San Francisco with a few gleaming white flowers sprouting in the foreground. Or watch a video of a recent oral history session. (A welcome feature—no hard-to-read printed captions on the walls or the sides of display cases. You can pick up a small catalog with concise descriptions of all 353 items, and you even get to keep it.) 

Then you can stop at the Museum Bookstore—or any local bookstore—and buy a copy ofExploring the Bancroft Library. (There’s at least one more chance to hear and question the editors at Book Passage in Corte Madera, December 6 at 7 p.m.) 

This is what a coffee table book ought to be, full of surprises for people (even librarians) who thought they knew what The Bancroft Library has and does. If I had a teenager in the house, I’d want to have the book lying around so s/he could dip into it now and then, absorbing some idea of what there is to know from archived “stuff.” And some time after the renovated Bancroft re-opens, and s/he turns eighteen, s/he’ll probably be waiting at the door, ready to surrender pen and backpack, and to enter an unimaginably larger world. 

Ira Nowinski’s San Francisco 

The Berkeley Art Musuem will host its final program commemorating the Bancroft Library’s centennial exhibition on Sunday, Dec. 3 at 3 p.m., the day the exhibit closes. 

Ira Nowinski has been photographing the people of San Francisco—opera divas, tenant organizers, North Beach poets—since 1970, making work that speaks eloquently of dignity, courage, and everyday life. 

BAM will celebrate his humanist photography and the latest publishing collaboration between the Bancroft and Heyday Books, Nowinski’s San Francisco: Poets, Politics, and Divas. 

Nowinski will give a brief visual presentation in the Museum Theater orienting the audience to his work while essayist Rebecca Solnit shares her thoughts on the cultural possibilities expressed in his images. 

Jack von Euw, the Bancroft’s curator of pictorial collections, will place Nowinski’s photographs in the context of the library’s holdings. Jack Hirschman, San Francisco’s prolific poet laureate, offers reflections on the city from his years of portraying it in words. Heyday Books publisher Malcolm Margolin will moderate the discussion. 

Seating is limited at the panel; first come, first served. A book-signing with the panelists will follow the program.  

Image: Book Cover:  

EXPLORING THE  

BANCROFT LIBRARY 

Edited by Charles B. Faulhaber and Stephen Vincent.  

Bancroft Library/ Signature Books. 

$29.95

In 1998, amid an orgy of end-of-the-millenium top 100 lists, the American Film Institute released its list of the 100 best American films, a list that included three Charlie Chaplin movies but inexplicably no Buster Keaton films, despite the fact that several of his works, most notably The General (1926), rank among the silent era’s best and frequently hover near the top of many critics’ lists of the best films ever made.  

But this has been Keaton’s lot in life, both during his career and since his death: to toil away in the shadow of the most famous comedian who ever lived. Though a late-career rediscovery of his work saw Keaton hailed as a cinematic genius, even Chaplin’s superior as a director, Keaton still retains his underdog status.  

Pacific Film Archive will show The General and One Week (1921), Keaton’s first independent film, as the first installments in a new series: “Movie Matinees For All Ages.” The series debuts at 2 p.m. Saturday with Keaton and will be followed over the next couple of Saturdays with the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers (1932) and Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). 

These films may be available on DVD, but there’s no substitute for the shared experience of comedy on the big screen. Especially The General, for the silent masterpiece will feature live accompaniment from pianist Judith Rosenberg.  

The General is essentially one big chase sequence, brilliantly constructed and expanded to feature length. The story, based on a true incident from the Civil War, concerns a Southern train stolen by Northern soldiers, who spirit the engine back into Northern territory, burning bridges and destroying telegraph wires as they go. Buster, as Johnnie Grey, is the General’s engineer, and sets out to recapture his beloved locomotive. Along the way, Keaton stages a series of beautifully choreographed and increasingly dangerous stunts until he arrives in enemy territory, rescues his train—and, almost by accident, his girl—and then heads back to Southern territory while hounded by Northern soldiers. Thus the chase folds back on itself, like an arc that delivers Keaton back where he began—the “Keaton Curve,” as critic Walter Kerr put it—with gags and stunts from the first half now expanded upon in the second.  

The General and Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) are unique among screen comedies in that they combine two seemingly incongruous genres: the comedy and the epic. Such a pairing had never been attempted before, as the grand scale of the epic seemed at odds with the smaller, more personal nature of character-based comedy. But whereas Chaplin’s film only contained a few outdoor shots in the early scenes before retreating to the comfort of studio sets, Keaton preferred to shoot on location; few of his comedies take place in studio sets. And though location shooting and period costumes were nothing new in Keaton’s work, The General dwarfs his previous efforts in scale and detail. Many critics consider it the most convincing celluloid recreation of the Civil War, the imagery recalling Matthew Brady’s photographs from the period.  

Keaton instructed his crew to make it “so authentic it hurts” and carefully replicated the trains, uniforms, styles and terrain of the era. There were no special effects; Keaton’s desire for authenticity extended to every shot, culminating in the dramatic scene in which a train crashes through a burning bridge as scores of Northern soldiers pour over the hillside to converge on the Southern army’s front lines.  

Critical reception was mixed. Some critics thought it a solid picture while others considered it Keaton’s weakest effort, taking offense at the notion of making light of the Civil War. Ultimately the considerable expense of the production caused Joseph Schenk, Keaton’s producer, to intervene with the usually autonomous director-star, requiring that his next feature be decidedly less extravagant. Keaton dutifully followed up with College (1927), one of his most restrained efforts, before embarking on the more elaborate Steamboat Bill, Jr (1928). It was while making Steamboat that Keaton learned that Schenk had sold his contract to MGM, bringing an end to Keaton’s independent career.  

Under MGM, Keaton struggled to keep control over his work but quickly became subsumed by the studio system after his first feature, The Cameraman (1928). Thus Keaton, like Erich von Stroheim before him and Orson Welles after him, became something of a victim of his own success as the expense of and lack of contemporary public appreciation for his greatest achievement ultimately undermined his career. 

PFA’s screening of The General will be preceded by One Week, the first two-reeler Keaton released as an independent artist after his apprenticeship with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. One Week was hailed as the year’s best comedy upon its release, establishing Keaton as one of cinema’s most innovative artists. The film is an excellent introduction to Keaton’s work as it features many of the characteristics that would become his hallmarks: a fascination with machinery, a semi-surrealist perspective, trains, and of course, the Keaton Curve, as the efforts of Buster and his bride to construct a pre-fabricated house eventually leave them homeless once again. 

Photograph: Buster Keaton struggles to tame an errant cannon in his 1926 epic comedy The General.

Now that the election is over, with all its slogans and clichés and simplistic solutions for myriad complex problems, along comes a documentary that provides a solid, sobering dose of geopolitical reality. 

Iraq in Fragments, opening today (Friday) at Shattuck Cinemas, is like a Terrence Malick celluloid tone poem, an epic tale in three chapters examining the hope, despair, fear and tragedy of occupied Iraq. But most of all it is about humanity, about people of all ages and walks of life reflecting on what it means to be an Iraqi under the most difficult and tenuous of circumstances.  

Director James Longley has fashioned a documentary that plays like the most meticulously planned fictional narrative, taking the words of Iraqis and draping them over his lush photography. Lines of great beauty and poignancy adorn a continuous stream of stunning imagery that captures the essence of the land and its people at a time when the nation’s fate is at best uncertain.  

Longley’s compositions are lovely, his images haunting, and his subjects are the most engaging of characters. The film could not be more striking and affecting had it been crafted with great foresight and care in a Hollywood studio.  

Longley himself never intrudes, not upon the images and certainly not upon the words. There is no narration other than the words spoken by the Iraqis onscreen; the photography never draws attention to the photographer, the images never betray his presence. It is easy to forget there is a camera there at all; it’s as though we are simply catching glimpses into everyday lives, the lives of anonymous everyday Iraqis, the poor and the powerless, people whose names will never spread beyond their small villages, but lives which, under the patient gaze of Longley’s lens, take on epic proportions. Iraq in Fragments elevates each life by respecting its inherent dignity and beauty.  

The film recalls Malick’s Thin Red Line, the 1998 movie that tracked soldiers in battle in World War II and made audible their private thoughts, memories and fears. Iraq in Fragments has that quality; the words of the subjects almost seem to be flowing directly from their minds to ours, as though we are not hearing them but receiving them—a sort of stream-of-consciousness documentary. 

There have been many documentaries made by filmmakers who have spent time in Iraq over the past few years, and several of them have been excellent. But none has covered the terrain staked out by James Longley in this film. He has adopted much of the cinema verité style while bringing to it an eye for imagery that calls to mind the dramatic landscapes of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi trilogy. He has transformed the words and lives and visuals of the Iraqi people into poetic incantations that provide an impressionistic glimpse of the struggle to retain one’s dignity and humanity in the face of global machinations over which they have no control. 

IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS 

Written, directed and photographed by James Longley. 94 minutes. Playing at Shattuck Cinemas.

Dear Matt, 

I read your article about house foundations, and I was wondering how do I tell if my house is bolted to the foundation. I live in the Seattle area, and my house was built in 1972, so I’m pretty sure that it is bolted, but I’ve torn apart a few small drywall piece, and haven’t seen any bolts. Is there an easy way to tell?  

I’m asking because I am looking at getting earthquake insurance, and it is one of the requirements.  

—Tom  

Dear Tom, 

This is a toughie as there are a number of questions you have to ask yourself to get a clear answer. The first one is, Do you have a crawl space? If there is a space between your floor and the ground then your removal of drywall isn’t going to tell you what you need to know. If you’re on a slab, where the foundation and your floor is the same thing, then it will. If you are on a slab, and there are plenty of those from the 70’s, you will probably have to remove drywall along the floor for up to 6’ before you see a bolt and possibly further. Bolt spacing in this time was roughly at a 6’ spacing and the bolts are usually 1/2” with small washers (if there ARE washers). The nuts may be square or hex and these are likely to be quite rusty since they were almost always non galvanized. Your insurance company probably doesn’t care how many bolts are present, just so long as some can be sighted.  

If you have a crawl space, you will notice that your floor is a) usually raised above ground level any where from 2’ on up and you’ll usually have to walk up some stairs to get into the house from at least one side. If you have a crawl space, you’ll also usually see vent on the side of the building just above ground level. If you have a crawl space, you will also, generally, be able to hear a drum-like sound when you jump up and land on the floor. A slab won’t make any sound beyond the sound of loose flooring. It will also feel very hard and unforgiving.  

If you have a crawl space, you’ll need to get inside of it to see the bolts and they will be on the top of the foundation around the perimeter of the building. They hold the bottom piece of wood that makes up the framework of the house, called a mudsill, to the foundation. This board literally lies flat on top of the footing and is held in place by an occasional bolt. Since bolting was a requirement in virtually all of the U.S. at that time, you can expect to see a small compliment of 1/2” bolts just as I’ve described above. Keep in mind that with a slabbed house, you’re only going to be able to see a sampling. Bolting frequency may vary and the spot you see won’t tell the entire picture. That said, it’s a good idea to find out for your insurance company and for yourself. I hope you’ll consider upgrading the bolting since almost all of the bolting done this long ago, is now considered to be far too weak and Seattle is much like Berkeley in its seismic activity.  

Say hi to Bill and Melinda for me,  

Matt  

Dear Matt:  

I have a 15 year old composite shingle roof. About five years ago I noticed that all the mineral granules on the ridge shingles were gone. The ridge shingles are two or three shingles thick to give a perky profile. Another roofer doing my garage said the problem is the shingles on the ridge get too hot because the heat in the unventilated attic crawl space is hottest at the ridge. 

Does this make sense to you? the flat shingles that start at the edge of the ridge shingles, just a few inches down from the apex of the ridge look fine.  

Sam Craig  

Dear Sam, 

That roofer of yours is a pretty sharp fellow and there’s a darned good chance that a lack of roof venting is involved in the wear on those shingles, however, I’m going to ask you to take a closer look at the shingles to see if there’s something else going on, perhaps in addition to the problem with heat and very possibly the root cause of the problem. I’ve seen a similar condition on quite a few occasions. You may be looking at a problem that occurred as a result of folding the shingles. When shingle get folded over the ridge they tend to more rapidly shed their mineral coating. Some roof ridges, such as the one you’ve described even involve a complex fold in which the shingle is folded in half and THEN folded partially once again to bend over the ridge.  

This creates a more elaborate ridge detail that sort of puffs up like a bird’s crest. It’s pretty but it involves paying a price. This folding immediately knocks some mineral granules off and then promotes more failure of the mineral coating over time. If the mineral is only missing (to a significant degree) on the ridge shingles and the adjacent ones, which lie flat, seem completely fine, I’ll bet that the folding is the primary problem. If heat is the problem, I would expect the top 2-5 courses to have a graduated effect in which the top is most strongly effected and the next few courses have a decreasing but noticeable loss of the granules. Heat in the attic, if this involved, will also tend to curl the shingles and I’ve seen cases where all the shingles had some lift to them as the heat waves were driving them upward. The shingles also become quite brittle in these cases and begin to crack and break prematurely.  

If it’s just the ridge shingles that are badly worn and the rest looks all right, I’d suggest replacing the ridge shingles with new ones. It’s not hard to get a similar color. At 15 years, you may only have a few years left on the whole roof so consider this when you think about putting money into a repair. I DO think that roof heat is an issue that should be addressed during the next roof replacement by the installation of vents (they can go in several places and are best distributed somewhat over the height of the roof (some near the top and some near the bottom). You can also consider a fan (and solar fans are nice in that they don’t require any wiring).  

Good luck, Matt  

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor at mgcantor@pacbell.net.

I just had to ask. The charming young salesperson at Berkeley Indoor Garden did have list of what, other than the obvious, customers grow using B.I.G.’s wares: orchids and other tropicals, carnivorous plants, some rare and picky succulents, sometimes lettuce and herbs and baby greens just to have them handy.  

She showed me some Hawai’ian kalanchoes that drop baby plants from their leaf edges, roots already a-reaching, the way good old mother-of-millions does. (M-o-m, a Bryophyllum hybrid, reproduces as advertised in pots outdoors here, as I’ve found out. Want some? Keep it away from wildlands.) 

She showed me dinosaur kale growing in styrofoamy blocks, and calendulas in a test bed with a Brazil-style octopus of silver ductwork—“Not the best way to arrange ducts; they should be straight”—slithering between the light hoods and whooshing fans overhead.  

She showed me a rig with a light fixture in a sort of zippered fabric: just the thing for a few prize poinsettias. They need measured doses of darkness to bloom, and that’s becoming harder to get as city and “security” lights get more obnoxiously ubiquitous.  

I have seen other plants in indoor hydroponics stores: tobacco, chili peppers, a boisterous banana tree that bore several big hands of fruit for its staff. I’ve also explored indoor hydroponics as a possibility for immunocompromised friends, especially one passionate gardener whose beloved cats had bad habits about her potted plants. 

I suppose it’s cheap irony that free light is getting hard to take for granted too, as those trendy “dense” buildings mushroom all over town. 

You can grow mushrooms in the backyard after one such monolith goes up on your south or west border, but good luck with the squash and beans. So maybe we’ll need these elaborate indoor set-ups for food security.  

They’ll certainly drive the utility bills up. Handily, B.I.G. has a chart that tells you how much, for a number of possible setups. There are also lots of growing media—from something approximating soil to something approximating red clay hailstones—and a bewildering assortment of organic fertilizers, including (pricey!) mycorrhizal inoculants.  

The varieties and intensities of light get bewildering, too. This is gardening for wonks, I guess, and though I have wonkish tendencies myself I suspect I’d be flipping coins instead of crunching numbers after a few layers of this chemistry and engineering. If you like that stuff and don’t mind all that fluorescent light, well, you’re trimming your consumption by growing things instead of getting them trucked to you, I suppose.  

When I want a sunshine supplement I go just up the street to the Templebar, especially since they’ve started serving lunch four days a week. 

Time your shopping right and you can catch comedy, or better yet some wonderful Hawai’ian slack-key guitar and song from the duo Pulama, Wednesday the 15th from 7 to 9 and one Wednesday a month through January. And have dinner there to take care of the munchies.  

Berkeley Indoor Garden 

844 University Avenue, Berkeley 

(510) 549-2918 

Monday-Friday 10 a.m.-7 p.m. 

Saturday 10 a.m.-6 p.m. 

Sunday 12 p.m.-5 p.m. 

Have You Met Your Neighbors? 

Back in the 1950s, everyone on the block knew everyone else. Unfortunately, that’s rarely the case now. 

The Big One in our future, however, now makes it more important than ever to be on a first name basis with everyone on the block.  

For example, if you’re not at home when the Big One hits, you’ll want a neighbor to check inside your home for gas and water leaks. 

Why? It’s in everyone’s self-interest: if one home has a gas build-up and catches fire, it puts the rest of the block at risk (remember, the fire department won’t be there!). 

Note: if each house has an automatic gas shut-off valve installed, it makes it safer for the entire block.  

Someone needs to get all the neighbors together—why not you? 

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and kit supply service. Call him at 558-3299, or visit www.quakeprepare.com.

FRIDAY, NOV. 10 

City of Berkeley Offices Cosed Today 

Hopalong Animal Rescue of Oakland Annual Fur Ball, with an international buffet, live music and a silent auction benefitting homeless dogs and cats of the Bay Area, from 6 to 10 p.m. at the International House, 2299 Piedmont Ave. Tickets are $45. 267-1915 ext. 500. www.hopalong.org  

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Dr. James Hanson on “Successful Healing at Children’s Hospital of Oakland.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

Berkeley Historical Society Walking Tour “75 Years of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab” at 10 a.m. Cost is $8-$10. To register and learn meeting place call 848-0181.  

Womansong Circle with Betsy Rose A participatory circle of song for women with guest Edie Hartshorne at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Cost is $15-$20. 525-7082. 

“Our Synthetic Sea” presented by Jan Lundberg at 8 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., between Broadway and Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 

African Market and Sabar Party at 10 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Tickets are $5-$10 . 

SATURDAY, NOV. 11 

March and Rally “Tell Pacific Steel Casting to Stop Polluting” Meet at 11 a.m. at 9th and Gilman. Sponsored by Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, Ecology Center, West Berkeley Alliance for Clean Air and Safe Jobs and others. 415-248-5010. 

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Goats are Great Come meet the Nubian goat twins, Cleo and Lily, at 2 p.m. at the Little Farm in Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Stream Study Day for the whole family on a two-mile hike. Wear layered clothing that can get wet and muddy. Meet at 2 p.m. at Lone Oak Picnic Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Veterans Day Ceremony at 2 p.m. on board the Red Oak Victory Ship at 1337 Canal Blvd., Richmond. Tea Dance and Dinner follows the ceremony for $25. For information and reservations call 222-9200. 

“Enemy Combatants” Robert Harmon of the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force on “Repealing the Constitution: The Military Commissions Act of 2006,” at 7 p.m. at Home of Truth, 1300 Grand St., Alameda. An Alameda Public Affairs Forum. www.alamedaforum.org 

Vegetarian Cooking Class “Thanksgiving is for the Birds” from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St., at Castro, Oakland. Cost is $50. To register, please call 531-2665.  

“Lifting the Fog: The Scientific Method Applied to the World Trade Center Disaster” from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. at Room 2050, Valley Life Sciences Bldg., UC Campus. www.liftingthefog.org 

Nourishing Your Aging Parents and Yourself with Edward Bauman at 10 a.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

Bilingual Storytime Stories in English and Spanish for toddlers and preschoolers at 10:30 a.m. in the Edith Stone Room at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Produce Stand at Spiral Gardens Food Security Project from 1 to 6 p.m. at the corner of Sacramento and Oregon St. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

“Healing the Mind” a workshop from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Dzalandhara Buddhist Center, 953 Arlington Ave. Cost is $25. 559-8183. 

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, NOV. 12 

Farm Stories and Songs Learn some new songs, then meet the animals, at 10 am. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Hike to Find the Monarch Butterfly in the eucalyptus groves, and learn about the incredible migration of these insects. Meet at 1:30 p.m. at Pt. Pinole. 525-2233. 

Open Garden at the Little Farm Join the gardener for composting, planting, watering and harvesting at 2 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Rain cancels. 525-2233. 

“Orchid Identification & Culture” with orchid expert Jerry Parsons from 9 a.m. to noon at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $40-$50. Reservations required. 643-2755. 

“Women in Overdrive” with author Nora Isaacs at 1 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

“Rites of Passage” Fundraiser with jazz, and speakers at 6 p.m. at Swarm Studios, 560 Second St., Oakland. Tickets are $50-$100. https://secure.suntoria.com/ritesofpassage.html 

Handmade Holiday Cards on sale from 10 a.m. at 2 p.m. at Kensington Farmer’s Market, 303 Arlington Ave. Benefit Katrina victims at the Progress Elementary School in Lousiana. kensingtonfm@yahoo.com  

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712.  

Tibetan Buddhism with Donna Morton on “Relaxing Tension through Kum Nye” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. 

MONDAY, NOV. 13  

“Heart Disease: Risks, Diet and Therapy” with Diedre Warren of Kaiser Oakland at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people aged 60 and over meets at 9:45 a.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. Donation $3. 524-9122. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, NOV. 14 

Tuesday is for the Birds An early morning walk for birders through Bay Area parklands. Bring water, sunscreen, binoculars and a snack. This week we will visit Sobrante Ridge. For meeting location or to borrow binoculars, call 525-2233.  

“The Way To Win: Taking the White House in 2008” with ABC News political director Mark Halperin and Washington Post editor and author John Harris at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500.  

“GMOs and the Law: One Farmer’s Battle with Monsanto” with Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser at 7 p.m. 121 North Gate Hall, UC Campus. 643-3840.  

Berkeley High School Governance Council meets at 4:15 p.m. in the Berkeley Community Theater Lobby. Topics will include Attendance Policy, Homework Inequity, CAHSEE Funding, Student Placement Demographics, Late Start Schedule. 644-4803. 

Haymarket Commemoration with Barry Pateman speaking on the history and legacy of the Haymarket Martyrs, and live music by the Devin Hoff Platform at 7 p.m. at the AK Press Warehouse, 674-A 23rd St., Oakland. Suggested donation $5-$10, no one turned away for lack of funds. 208-1700. 

American Red Cross Blood Services volunteer orientation at 6 p.m. at the Oakland office. Advanced sign-up is required. 594-5165.  

Choosing Infant Care A workshop for parents at 7 p.m. at Bananas, 5232 Claremont Ave., Oakland. Registration required. 658-7353.  

Choosing a Pre-School for Your Child at 6 p.m. at Habitot Children’s Museum. Registration required. 647-1111, ext. 14. 

“Population Policy in Senegal and Nigeria: Framing the Future Through Health and Progress” with Rachel Sullivan, doctoral student, at 4 p.m. at 652 Barrows Hall, UC Campus. 642-8338. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Training workshop for volunteers interested in helping the public schools, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

Free Prostate Cancer Screening for men age 40-70 at Alta Bates Herrick Campus. To schedule an appointment call 869-8833. 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991.  

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 15 

“A Glimpse of South Berkeley” with Sarah Shen on “Pixar in the Neighborhood” at 7:30 p.m. at South Berkeley Community Church, 1802 Fairview St. at Ellis. Tickets are $10 and benefit the church’s restoration efforts. 652-1040. 

“These Streets Are Watching” documentary on police misconduct and what to do and say when stopped by police, at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Donation $5-$20. Benefit for Copwatch. 415-810-4665. 

“Voices of Courage” Family Violence Law Center Annual Dinner at 6 p.m. at Scott’s Seafood Restaurant, Jack London Square. Cost is $90. 208-0220, ext. 18. 

New to DVD “Word Play” at 7 p.m. at the JCCEB, 1414 Walnut St. 848-0237. 

Bayswater Book Club meets to discuss “Drugs, Oil & War” by Peter Dale Scott at 6:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito. 433-2911. 

Open House at Revolution Books from 7 to 9 p.m. at 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. 

Natural Solutions for Holiday Stress at 7 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. 548-9840. 

THURSDAY, NOV. 16 

Tilden Tots Join a nature adventure program for 3 and 4 year olds, each accompanied by an adult (grandparents welcome)! We’ll learn about the water cycle, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

“Anatomy of an Oakland Redevelopment Project” The History and Politics of West Oakland’s Central Station Project at 7:30 p.m. at the Piedmont Gardens Residential Center, 110 41sr St., Oakland. Sponsored by the Metropolitan Greater Oakland Democratic Club. www.mgoclub.org 

“How Museums Represent Native People” with Amy Lonetree of Portland State Univ, and a member of the Ho-Chunk Tribe at 7 p.m. at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum, UC Campus. 643-7649. 

Diversity Film Series “Waging a Living” at 7 p.m. followed by discussion, at Frank Havens Elementary School Auditorium, 325 Highland Ave., Piedmont. 835-9227.  

NorCal High School Mountain Bike League presents “Cobbles, Baby!” Scott Coady’s Paris-Roubaix Adventure at 8 p.m. at Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $12. 452-3556.  

WriterCoach Connection seeks volunteers to help students improve their writing and critical thinking skills. Training session from noon to 3 p.m. For information call 524-2319.  

“Natural Solutions to Manage Arthritis” with Dr. Jay Sordean, LAc, OMD., at 1 p.m. at The South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5174. 

Easy Does It Disability Assistance Board of Directors meets at 6:30 p.m. at 1744A University Ave. All welcome. 845-5513.  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. Spud's Pizza, 3290 Adeline at Alcatraz.  

Red Cross Blood Drive from noon to 6 p.m. at East Pauley Ballroom, MLK Student Union, UC Campus. 1-800-GIVE-LIFE. 

ONGOING 

Holiday Food Drive Sponsor a Food Drive at your business, school, place of worship or community center. Help the Food Bank reach its goal of collecting 700,000 pounds of nutritious, non-perishable food for families in need during the holiday season. 635-3663, ext. 318. www.accfb.org  

UN Association’s UNICEF & Fair Trade Gift Center Closing Sale, Tues.-Sat. noon to 5 p.m. to Dec. 16, 1403 Addison St., 849-1752. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Youth Commission meets Mon., Nov. 13, at 6:30 p.m., at 1730 Oregon St. 981-6670.  

City Council meets Tues., Nov. 14, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www.ci. 

berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Berkeley School Board meets Wed. Nov. 15, at 7:30 p.m., in the City Council Chambers. Mark Coplan 644-6320. 

Citizens Humane Commission meets Wed., Nov. 15, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6601.  

Civic Arts Commission meets Wed., Nov. 15, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7533.  

Commission on Aging meets Wed., Nov. 15, at 1:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5344.  

Commission on Labor meets Wed., Nov. 15 at 6:45 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7550.  

Downtown Area Plan Advisory Commission meets Wed. Nov. 15, at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7487. 

Design Review Committee meets Thurs., Nov. 16, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. Anne Burns, 981-7415.  

Fair Campaign Practices Commission meets Thurs., Nov. 16, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6950. 

Transportation Commission meets Thurs., Nov. 16, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7010.