Miles Wang, 6, and his sister Kyra, 9, of Oakland, pick out a Christmas tree Tuesday afternoon from the tree lot at the corner of Ashby and Telegraph avenues. “We’re running out of time and we saw the lot,” Paul Wang said as he watched his children evaluate the trees. The family had a fake tree last Christmas. “It’s still in the box,” Kyra said. “This year we want a real tree. Real trees smell good.” -more-

A new report warns that funds belonging to the city’s mental health clients could be in danger of being lost, stolen or misused due to a lack of oversight by city officials. -more-

Fred Medrano has been a constant presence in Berkeley civic life for the last 30 years. But this week Medrano will be stepping down from his position as director of Berkeley’s Department of Health Services after 14 years, during which time he oversaw California’s only independent health and mental health jurisdictions. -more-

For Berkeley resident Rash Ghosh, every day for the last two years has been a fight to win back his home. But last week, Ghosh may have finally received a sliver of hope. -more-

The Alameda County Transit Board of Directors voted unanimously Wednesday, Dec. 16, to cut bus services by 8.4 percent beginning March 2010 to offset a $57 million budget deficit next year. -more-

A new assessment of the condition of state roadways ranks Highway 13—including Ashby Avenue—as the second most-deteriorated section of roadway in the San Francisco–Oakland metropolitan area. -more-

The Berkeley Chamber of Commerce has selected Mark Berson of Alabama as the chamber’s new CEO. In a statement released Dec. 16, the chamber announced that Berson “would lead the organization through a new era of growth and expansion.” -more-

Preliminary data released by the state Employment Development Department Friday, Dec. 18, show that Berkeley’s unemployment rate is the lowest since May. -more-

Proponents of Berkeley’s first public charter school presented their proposal to the Berkeley Board of Education at its Dec. 16 meeting. -more-

A policy subcommittee of the Berkeley Board of Education once again took up the issue of equality in Berkeley High School’s governance at a Dec. 16 meeting. -more-

In my book, Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley, I presented the stories of 17 culturally important but largely forgotten local people of the 19th century. Other captivating stories I came across were not right for use in the book but are nonetheless very meaningful. -more-

SPEND TIME WITH FAMILY -more-

We read with some dismay Charles Siegel’s intemperate letter entitled “BRT and the Noisy Minority” in the Dec. 3, 2009 issue of the Daily Planet. His essential argument is that there is a “small group of naysayers” who constitute the opposition to BRT. This is simply not true. All of the neighborhood associations representing neighborhoods adversely impacted by the BRT draft plan are opposed to the current BRT plan, in addition to the Telegraph Avenue merchants and street vendors whom Mr. Siegel does mention. These neighborhood associations include the Claremont Elmwood Neighborhood Association (CENA), the Willard Neighborhood Association, the Bateman Neighborhood Association, and the LeConte Neighborhood Association. We attended a meeting about BRT this fall at Willard Middle School sponsored by the Berkeley Transportation Commission. At the meeting, one of the speakers asked all opposed to the BRT draft Locally Preferred Alternative (LPA) to stand up. My estimate is that 95 percent of the approximately 150 attendees, who filled the hall, stood up. They were indeed noisy but were a huge majority and not some small minority of naysayers.  -more-

My father speaks of his undergraduate days at Dartmouth. It seems that every year the freshmen were called together and advised not to climb Mt. Washington in the winter. New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington is billed as having the worst weather on the planet and this is so. It is a dangerous place, bleak and windblown, with fierce and dramatic weather changes caused by a strange downdraft of the jet stream exactly at that spot. “And every year some damned fool would climb it and die,” he says. -more-

At the end of a decade marked by a general failure of U.S. leadership, 2009 saw the collapse of the Senate. Confronted with an array of difficult problems, a reactionary Senatorial minority put their personal political interests above those of the nation and blocked action by the progressive majority. -more-

Houses leak. Bad news but it’s true. You knew this, so no big news flash, right? What’s not so evident to the uninitiated is why. And that’s such a large set of issues that I won’t attempt to give a quick, glib answer. That said, there are some big chunks of knowledge that experienced builders and a few architects know. So I will try to see if I can lay out some of them, especially since the rains are upon us, and many buildings are leaking now. -more-

“Romp,” according to several online lists of collective nouns, is an alternate term for a group of otters. “Bevy” is also available, but that’s too closely associated with “beauties.” And romp fits. Romp is pretty much what they do. They might even be said to rollick. -more-

Susannah Martin, who directed Threepenny Opera for the Shotgun Players, spoke about the satiric musical show she transplanted from Victorian London (and 1920s Weimar Republic) to the 1970s London of the Sex Pistols—and onstage in Berkeley today: -more-