Asked what he thought would be Jim Slemp’s biggest challenge as Berkeley High School’s new principal, BUSD spokesperson Mark Coplan responded, “managing a small city.” -more-

TUESDAY, AUGUST 19 -more-

On my way to the BART station earlier this summer, I noticed an unfamiliar bird skulking in the shrubbery near the tennis courts at the corner of Martin Luther King and Russell. It was pretty nondescript: bigger than a sparrow, smaller than a robin, pale grayish-brown with vague streaking. But it had this furtive look about it. -more-

PROVOCATEUR -more-

In 1994 Josh Kornbluth got hit with what was, for him, an enormous tax bill. He suddenly owed Uncle Sam and the state of California a combined total of $27,000. -more-

TUESDAY, AUGUST 19 -more-

Rosa Parks Elementary School received failing marks and Washington Elementary School got an incomplete on the latest round of state testing, overshadowing an otherwise solid performance by Berkeley students on the California Standards Test. -more-

The Board of Education is poised to formally decide on Aug. 20 whether to move the Berkeley Adult School from its present West Campus location on University Avenue to the School District’s Franklin site on Virginia Street. -more-

Mark Twain, who chronicled America’s Gilded Age in the 19th century, joined the digital age this month when UC Berkeley researchers put 700 of his letters online. -more-

Editors, Daily Planet: -more-

Alameda County’s first West Nile Virus victim has survived her encounter with the deadly disease—contracted not here but in Colorado—say local public officials who remain deeply concerned about the virus’s spread into California. -more-

Clusters of tall white wind turbines spin gracefully atop green hillsides. Solar photovoltaics (PVs) are integrated into windows and rooftops of modern homes, factories and office blocks. Even the old renovated seat of government is fitted with solar panels. -more-

All you recall junkies, listen up. -more-

Ah, this is the life. To be on vacation near the ocean, sunning on the beach by day, and, by night, hearing Hardball’s Chris Matthews, of all people, repeatedly liken Bush to Ted Baxter, the obtuse anchorman on the old “Mary Tyler Moore Show.” As I eat fried calamari and striped bass, I get to see Matthews, hardly a friend of progressives, hammer Team Bush over their serial lying about weapons of mass destruction and yellowcake. Was Bush such a clueless puppet, sputters Matthews, that he simply read whatever Cheney or Rumsfeld put in front of him and told him to sell to the nation? Why, I must be in Margaritaville. -more-

After my husband’s bicycling accident on Claremont Avenue, our lives turned topsy-turvy. I spent six months at home taking care of him, but to pay our bills, I had to go back to work. Five years later, after his health stabilized and the stock market went gangbusters, I quit my job and set out to make our house more wheelchair accessible. -more-

As the Silicon Valley economy sputters, the ubiquitous H1-B engineers who came to the United States on temporary work visas have become a vanishing breed. Their impact on the cultural landscape, however, is here to stay. -more-

After three years rooted in leafy North Berkeley, with occasional escapes to even leafier Seattle, a week in Paris and four more in small-town Britain proved a salutary shock to the system for a commentator on East Bay buildings. -more-

Peter Jennings has tossed a Molotov cocktail into a bitter Upper West Side real-estate battle. The ABC newsman is charging that Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in America, is pulling strings to destroy the character of his neighborhood by erecting a 14-story residential building on West 70th Street next door to its synagogue on Central Park West. -more-

With its curvy shape, sleek long neck and rounded butt, a wine bottle kind of looks like a voluptuous Marilyn Monroe. But there’s more than meets the eye—there’s utility. -more-

A Stanford dropout who won a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature, John Steinbeck began his life in Salinas on February 27, 1902. His life’s journey ended when his wife Elaine and his son Thom took his ashes to the shore at Whalers Bay south of Monterey for a last visit to his favorite place and a memorial service on Christmas Eve, 1968. -more-