Columnists

Next Tuesday morning, UC’s Berkeley Art Museum will host a public discussion of goals for its planned new downtown site. Attending will be Toyo Ito, the Tokyo architect whom the museum has engaged to design its new building. With this internationally renowned designer on board, and a downtown location on the map, BAM and its visitors face exciting possibilities. -more-

In a scene in the Civil War movie Gettysburg, a Confederate spy named Harrison is sent out on a night mission to scout out the position and strength of the Union army encamped in the Pennsylvania valley. The spy, identified in the movie as a former Mississippi stage actor, takes the assignment, but tells the general “but I must confess, sir, the thing that bothers me about this job [spying] is the absence of an audience. When you do it right, no one knows you’re doing it. Nobody watches your work. It’s very hard on an actor.” -more-

Between 1900 and 1910, Berkeley’s population more than tripled, from 13,214 to 40,434 inhabitants. Much of the growth was stimulated by the flight of thousands of San Franciscans to the East Bay following the 1906 earthquake and fire. -more-

I met a nice couple the other day. Sadly, they were clearly in some distress over the fortunes of their remodeling process. They’d engaged a GC (builder-speak for general contractor) last year to do a rather sweeping and costly rehab on a mid-sized house in the hills of Oakland and things hadn’t gone quite as well as they’d hoped. -more-

Oh my, this is a touchy time of year, all those cultural sensitivities waiting to be stepped on. Wishing someone “happy holidays” would seem universal enough, but I read a newswire piece the other day in which a guy was quoted as bragging that he’d bullied some hapless WalMart clerk into wiping that phrase off a window because, “It’s supposed to be ‘Merry Christmas!’” Honestly, sometimes it makes me miss good old Saturnalia. -more-

With conservatives still reeling from their losses in the mid-term election, and President Bush’s approval ratings heading for record lows, for the first time in six years liberals have something to cheer about. Rather than gloat about Bush’s ineptness, or the failure of the GOP-controlled 109th Congress, liberals should focus on their opportunity to sink the conservative ideology that has dominated American politics for twenty-five years. -more-

For the first time in 12-plus years I’m allowing myself to think back to what life was like before Ralph’s accident. My musings began the day after he died when I started the process of planning Ralph’s memorial service. It has continued intermittently, everyday since. -more-

A tree student learns a set of categories: the 50-mph tree, the 30-mph tree, the stop-and-think tree. The distinctions here concern how fast-moving and far away you can be and still be able to identify a tree—how distinctive it is from a distance. -more-