The chair of the Community Environmental Advisory Commission (CEAC), Michael Goldhaber, seemed annoyed recently when I halted the plan to place cigarette butt receptacles in the smokefree area downtown after its first reading. "Have you seen cigarette butts downtown?" he asked me sternly when I visited the commission. I thought his combination of ignorance and rudeness would have been too humiliating for him to bear if accurately reported, so I wrote a humorous piece instead for the satirical Pepper Spray Times now in its twenty-sixth year of continuous publication. He is now threatening to sue me, claiming among other things that the piece is "not particularly funny." He's right about one thing - his threat is much funnier than the original piece. 

The commission's intention, protecting the bay from discarded butts, is laudable. But Save the Bay, which originated the effort, was horrified to learn CEAC had chosen smokefree areas for its butt receptacles, and supports the compromise legislation I wrote placing them outside the smokefree zone. Especially in the absence of signage, ashtrays tend to send a "smoking okay here" message no matter what signage is nearby. The first thing a restaurant does when it goes smokefree is remove the ashtrays for reasons which most people find obvious. And it is, after all, a life or death matter -- there's no safe dose of secondhand smoke. 

I could have loaded the CEAC meeting room with cancer survivors, nursing mothers with kids in strollers, or anybody who cares about the cardiovascular and pulmonary effects of secondhand smoke. One businessman downtown begged me to intervene and keep receptacles away from his own business frontage, knowing what would result. But I came alone to CEAC because I assumed there would be a few people in the room with some common sense about the best way to address the few smokers who don't comply with city restrictions. The project had not just passed CEAC and the Berkeley City Council with only Councilmember Worthington's objection and mine, but some council representatives had had no idea smokefree areas were being considered as appropriate places for ashtrays. No public health-related commissions were included in the discussion, nor was Berkeley's own Public Health Department, which used words like "broadsided" and "sandbagged" to describe their complete exclusion from any policy discussion. 

This matters. Suing someone who makes fun of the idiocy of putting ashtrays in a smokefree area won't accomplish anything. But changing smokers' behavior is easy, and people in public health know it. Smokers don't need to quit or walk far to comply with restrictions. Speaking up, letting smokers know about the regulations and the closest place to legally smoke, a little patience, and consistency is what it takes. Communication, signage, and a little enforcement works - most people don't want an expensive ticket. Even in the smokiest states in the nation smokers are outnumbered, and most want to cut down or quit. In Alameda County they're down to about 12%, and many of them consider themselves "social smokers" who indulge - or not - in some contexts but not others. Most of them support smoking restrictions and just have no idea where to go to legally enjoy a cigarette. The City of Berkeley quit its initial effort to have consistent outreach, education, and signage a very few years after 2008's commercial districts law, and it wouldn't take much to step up its efforts, efforts the public health voice knows well. 

Smokers know they can restrict their own behavior, and have done it all of their smoking lives. It's usually non-smokers who see them as helplessly in thrall to an addiction, despite the fact that the cultural and legal shift which moved smoking out of bars, restaurants, hospitals, libraries, etc. just wasn't that hard to accomplish. The Tobacco Industry and the business community said the sky would fall. But it didn't - disease rates did. 

In Paris, in Spain, in Irish bars, in English pubs, in New Orleans, all the places it was supposed to be impossible, consistent communication, consistent signage, consistent enforcement works. And the easiest place to change is a school setting, where the school administration has their students tightly held under both a registration contract and often a code of conduct. Scofflaws who find themselves unable to attend class until they've paid expensive tickets quickly change their behavior, and young smokers are the most receptive to environmental issues. 

Our environmental goals never need to be at war with our public health goals. In fact they go hand in hand. CEAC's current "Cigarette Butt Receptacle Pilot Project"-- amended to place receptacles outside the smokefree areas-- sounds beneficial, and will certainly stop some cigarette butts from reaching the bay. But they're still a measure of failure, not success, and no matter where they are placed they create a serious hazard for people nearby. Starting a "pilot project" with ashtrays, instead of education, signage, and enforcement, is nothing but a pointless, full surrender. 

When CEAC and the City of Berkeley want to get serious about being more effective, they will do what they have avoided doing so far: include public health advocates' voices and educate people about their effect on other people's health and the health of the bay. The public health advocates who have radically changed the world despite tremendous odds and Big Tobacco (which loves ashtrays), stand ready to help. 

Editor’s note:

We received a copy of the letter which was originally printed below, which was addressed to the author of the Pepper Spray Times, and it was followed by a series of ever more urgent requests for a retraction. The writer has now informed us that the letter was not intended for publication, so it has been deleted.

The Berkeley Daily Planet does not exercise editorial control over the Pepper Spray Times, which is produced by a freelance writer who is not paid for her work. It is stored in .pdf form and we cannot alter it—we simply link to the .pdf file. Therefore we are not in a position to retract its specific contents.

It is not clear to us exactly how a publication could retract satire, anyway.

We do know that it’s satire, and knowing that we certainly accept Mr. Goldhaber’s contention that he didn’t actually use the foolish words attributed to him under Grace Underpressure’s byline. (Let’s hope not!) We also believe that he doesn’t swear in public, if he says so.  

However we cannot endorse Mr. Goldhaber’s charge that Ms. Underpressure is not “concerned about sea life as well as human life.” It seems to us that she would make fun of sea life and/or human life anytime she felt like it. 

We also do not think that Dr. Swift actually believed that eating Irish babies was a good way to deal with famine, though with our Irish connections we find his satire disturbing.  

Also, we reject W.C. Field’s opinion that when the first prize is a week in Philadelphia, the second prize is two weeks in Philadelphia. Having recently visited Philadelphia, we think that’s libel—it’s a very nice city.  

And also, Pittsburgh did not vote for Trump, no matter what he says. 

Leaders from around the Bay Area and California have condemned President Donald Trump's announcement today that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale. 

Referring specifically to the coal industry, Trump said the agreement doesn't eliminate jobs, but rather it ships them overseas to "foreign countries." 

"The rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris agreement," Trump said. "They went wild, they were so happy." 

"For the simple reason that it put our country, the United States of America which we all love, at a very, very big economic disadvantage," Trump said. 

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee released a statement Wednesday calling he move shortsighted and dangerous. 

"Climate change is real, and it is one of our world's greatest economic and health risks," Lee said. 

"In the absence of federal leadership, San Francisco will continue to take aggressive measures on climate change," Lee said. "Our city is proof that strong action on climate change is good for the planet and good for business." 

Jack Broadbent, executive director of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, said Trump's decision will significantly compromise the Paris accord. 

"The move is likely to cause a ripple-effect that will destabilize global climate efforts," Broadbent said. 

"The stakes are tremendous for air quality and public health," Broadbent said. "The effects of climate change are already being felt worldwide as global temperatures rise and catastrophic weather patterns are realized." 

Regardless, Broadbent said leadership in the Bay Area will continue to march forward despite a loss of focus and momentum at the national level. 

California Lt. Gov. and former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom also responded, saying that as one of the world's largest economies, California will step into the vacuum created by Trump's pullout, partnering with other regions and nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

"In turning his back on the future, President Trump's abandonment of the Paris Climate Change Deal demonstrates once again that he is void of basic business acumen, foresight and initiative," Newsom said. 

"Climate change is an existential threat," Newsom said. "Every nation, region and community has interest and agency in rising to this challenge." 

California Gov. Jerry Brown also released a statement on what he referred to as the "White House's reckless decision." 

"The president has already said climate change is a hoax, which is the exact opposite of virtually all scientific and worldwide opinion," Brown said.  

"I don't believe fighting reality is a good strategy -- not for America, not for anybody," Brown said. "If the president is going to be AWOL in this profoundly important human endeavor, then California and other states will step up." 

The agreement, reached by roughly 200 countries in 2015, sought to curb the catastrophic effects of global climate change by keeping the rise of average temperatures worldwide to no more than 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It takes effect in 2020.

First, let’s take a quick look at this cheery emailed message from the Institute for Policy Studies:

“Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accord this week. This is a colossal foreign policy mistake and reveals how little this administration cares about the gravest existential threat humanity has faced. But, our climate policy expert Basav Sen points out, there might be a silver lining in all of this: If the U.S. doesn’t stay in the agreement, this administration can’t use that arena to fulfill its desire to undermine global climate talks and advance the fossil fuel industry’s agenda.”

If you click on the link, you can read the supporting article, which makes a good case for why it’s better that the Trumpers are leaving the table for now.

And while we’re talking about the reading list for this weekend, take a look at Between Victoria and Vauxhall, byJohn Lanchester, in the June 1 issue of the London Review of Books.

He writes about London’s problems with overbuilding of luxury housing combined with serious underbuilding of affordable housing:

“Who should you vote for … at this general election, if you want to stop what’s obviously going to happen: the creation of a huge number of the very last things the city needs, new luxury flats under absentee foreign ownership? In the case of housing, the solution to this problem is obvious and has been known for years. It is to build more housing. … We have persuaded ourselves into a corner where governments believe they have no tools to address the shortfall in housing construction, especially social and low-cost housing. The best that successive governments have been able to do is to ‘leave it to the market’, even though the market has manifestly failed, and carries on failing, to build enough new homes.

“The housing crisis is partly a question of misaligned incentives: big property companies’ main asset is land, and if an inadequate supply of houses is being built, the value of the land goes up, creating a perverse, but highly effective, incentive not to build more housing. As a demonstration of the law of supply and demand, it could not be more perfect: supply is artificially restricted, so demand surges. In plain English, there aren’t enough houses being built, so houses are too expensive for most people. This fact is well understood, but the liberal ideology of market solutions makes it impossible to adopt an alternative.

“A system which allows total primacy to economics finds it impossible to address this basic economic fact. The charity Shelter defines truly affordable housing as absorbing no more than 35 per cent of income, but the average rental cost is 47 per cent. So the average is already unaffordable. The best that can be done in the current framework is for the public sector in effect to borrow or beg for crumbs off the market’s table in the form of social and affordable housing. The legal definition of the latter is defined not in relation to pay, but as 80 per cent of the current market rate. So even the alternative to the market defers to the market. The market is very good at building luxury flats, and completely useless when it comes to solving this problem.”

Tomorrow afternoon (Saturday, June 3) we're co-hosting a fundraising party from 2-4 for Jon Ossoff, who's running in Georgia for the seat vacated by a Trumpite cabinet appointee. If you want to go, let me know by promptly emailing bomalley@berkeleydailyplanet.com and I'll send you the address and more information.

The conservative leaning Postmaster General, Patrick Donahoe, in his farewell press conference claimed that postal banking was a bad idea because "We don't know anything about banking". Is historical memory that short? For 55 years, from 1911 to 1966, United States Postal Service (USPS) provided traditional banking services. Ironically, postal banking was initiated and strongly advocated by a conservative Republican, President Taft. But without any public discussion, postal banking was abolished by President Johnson, a Democrat who was liberal on domestic issues. 

It wasn't that Taft had an aversion to the private banking system. But hundreds of thousands of immigrants did. They were unwilling to take the risk of depositing their saving in private banks. For good reason, they feared the high risk of losing their money either because of the large number of bank failures and also as a result of the unprincipled practices of the banking industry. During the decade of the 1930s 9,000 banks failed. About the distrust of these financial institutions by immigrants, the bank executives blamed their economic ignorance. But actually, the problem for the banks was that these newcomers to the US made a thoughtful and sensible decision. 

For the entire life of postal banking, deposits were "guaranteed through the full faith and credit of the United States". That guarantee preceded the FDIC deposit guarantee by 22 years! During the depression years, FDR could have expanded the postal system. Doing so would have been consistent with the Administration's policy of promoting the role of government. Instead, he decided to rescue the private banks via FDIC. 

It is not that providing insurance to private bank depositors is wrong. But just guaranteeing deposits does not address some of the serious shortcomings of private sector banking. Unlike postal banking whose mission is to serve the interests of the public, the main objective of private banks is to make a profit. With the decline in government regulation the lust for profit has prevailed. Take for example the account fraud scandal committed by Wells Fargo, which is among the nation's largest banks. Millions of customers were being charged unanticipated fees for services that they never requested and used. 

But even honest banking is no assurance that customers, particularly the poor, will be adequately served. Since the deposits of poor customers yield very small profits, the banks are not enthusiastic about serving them. When the banks do serve poor customers, they charge high annual fees. Since the banks generally avoid low income communities it should not be surprising that many millions of Americans, disproportionately minority members, do not have a bank account. Without access to banks, many who need financial services are forced to turn to very expensive alternatives. To Just cash a legitimate check, then, the poor depend on unscrupulous businesses that charge high fees. 

More generally, when the poor obtain loans from these so called payday lenders, they are forced to pay much higher interest rates than most borrowers. When the poor default on their loans the costs are even more exorbitant and even punitive. According to the federal Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, one in every five persons who borrow against their automobiles have their cars repossessed. Many of these borrowers depend on their cars to go to work. As Bernie Sanders remarked, the payday lenders trap the poor "into a vicious cycle of debt". Clearly, the result of depending on these predators is that it further impoverishes the poor. 

The California state legislature recently considered an excellent bill in support of an interest rate cap on high cost consumer loans. About one hundred organizations around the State are doing their best to abolish predatory lending. But despite their efforts the lending lobby persuaded the Assembly's Appropriations Committee not to release the bill. 

What the public needs is not predatory banking institutions. It needs postal banking, which proved its worthiness in the 55 years of its existence. Moreover, the 32,000 local branches makes the post office accessible to almost everyone, regardless of income bracket. As the Washington Post noted, "customers could walk down the street to the post office with their money and deposit it in a savings account there". Poor Americans could cash their checks for a small fee and obtain loans on good terms at low interest rates. In fact, postal banking is able to charge for its services relatively low rates and with far more integrity than private banks and payday lenders. So for most Americans, not only the poor, postal banking would be by far their best option.

Climate change is real and will have a real and devastating effect on our local communities. Trump's disastrous decision to back out of the Paris Accord will have devastating impacts to green jobs, climate change, and our country's standing as a world leader. While we had hoped that the federal government would show leadership in the face of this crisis, it now turns to us, local and state governments to take the lead. 

The City of Berkeley has been always been at the forefront of environmental leadership. Now more than ever, it is urgent we take bold leadership to address the climate crisis. I am introducing legislation for Berkeley to continue its commitment to the Paris Accord. I have signed a statement with 61 mayors representing 36 million Americans to take action in protecting our only home. The world cannot wait and neither will we. 

Did Trump’s campaign rhetoric of anti-immigrant rantings of Muslims precipitate the recent death of two “good Samaritans,” on a Portland train? Three men tried to rescue two teenage girls by a knife wielding white terrorist who was spewing anti-Muslim racial slurs. The attack came attack came just six days after 23-year-old Richard Collins III, an African-American student at Bowie State University was fatally stabbed by a white supremacist Facebook group called "Alt-Reich: Nation."Heidi Beirich, the Intelligence Project director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, accuses Trump and his supporters of unleashing a barrage of neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hatred during the presidential campaign. This tragic event comes on the heels of discussions by top Republicans who are considering using militia groups as security for public events. Multnomah County GOP Chair, James Buchal, told The Guardian that Republicans would likely make their own security arrangements rather than relying on city or state police, including groups like the “Oath Keepers” and the “Three Percenters”. A video has recently surfaced of Buchal lamenting what he called "open borders." He has expressed his intense hatred of people from Third World countries who “would destroy everything that is special about America.” Clearly he is no shining example of what is so special about America.

Editor's Note: The latest issue of the Pepper Spray Times is now available.

You can view it absolutely free of charge by clicking here . You can print it out to give to your friends.

Grace Underpressure has been producing it for many years now, even before the Berkeley Daily Planet started distributing it, most of the time without being paid, and now we'd like you to show your appreciation by using the button below to send her money.

This is a Very Good Deal. Go for it! 

In my recovery from psychiatric illness, doctors have commented that I responded well to medication. To me, this is an indication that my illness is biologically based.  

Psychiatric medications essentially saved my life. Had medications not been discovered before I became mentally ill, I might have lived in a primitive "insane asylum," under horrific conditions, and I certainly wouldn't have survived to the age I am now. If you look at me, "on" versus "off" medication, it is like day and night. Off medication, I was badly psychotic.  

The long-term neurological result of untreated psychosis apparently includes deterioration of brain structure. In untreated schizophrenia, there is something called the "burned out phase." This is where the illness has essentially wrecked the patient's brain, and the person has become an empty shell. (This is one argument supporting the stance that persons with schizophrenia who are noncompliant should be forced into treatment without excessive delay.)  

Yet, despite the fact that I believe medication is an essential, I also believe it is only applicable to the illness. It is applicable to keeping an individual stabilized, but it doesn't solve a person's problems. Medication doesn't solve the human predicament. Medication is not the answer to the normal suffering that can come about through life events and common habits of thought. Medication should not be thought of as a bringer of well-being, or as the ultimate answer.  

The purpose of psychiatric medication is to get patients into the ballpark of what is rational, and to get us out of clinical depression, extreme mood swings, or being a danger to self and/or others.  

In the old days, more than thirty years ago, I'd heard about a psychiatrist at a funeral who was passing out Valium tablets. That wouldn't happen today with our consciousness about the misuses of prescription drugs. It is a misuse of psychiatric medication when it is taken to avoid the pain of normal and expected life situations. Mourning for a loved one usually should not be suppressed through medication, unless the grief is exaggerated, and is to the point where it is putting one's mental stability at risk. (I should qualify this: It is a nonprofessional opinion, coming from a non-M.D.) 

It is not unusual for a psychiatric consumer to fall into the habit of looking to medication to fix emotional pain. When emotional pain is tolerable, is not debilitating, and if it is not accompanied by other symptoms, the consumer should look to psychotherapy, cognitive techniques, and other types of mindfulness, rather than taking medication to escape from it.  

When mental health consumers rely too heavily on meds in the vein of getting someone or something other than oneself to repair oneself, it can be a miserable existence.  

(Psychotherapy can also create problems, because some of the techniques that therapists often use sometimes make an individual worse off than he or she would be without therapy. However, that is an entirely different can of oysters that I won't open this week.) 

When anxiety, depression or other symptoms are extreme, it can be time to look at taking medication to remedy these problems. Someone once said, if you are miserable and a pill can fix it, take the pill. We shouldn't be masochistic, or try to tough it out, when symptoms get too big to handle.  

I've heard of some people who are extreme in their unwillingness to even take an aspirin for a headache. Sobriety and being "clean" are just fine. However, if there is a real illness that necessitates treatment, such treatment does not impinge on an individual being "clean and sober."  

People who have an extreme stance of being against all drugs, such as an expectorant if one has bronchitis, or Penicillin if one has an infection, are not being realistic. Antipsychotic medication for someone with schizophrenia is essentially the same idea as taking thyroid pills for hypothyroidism. These are medical issues.  

I'll go even farther to say, if someone suffers from psychosis, being willing to take medication is analogous to sobriety. Antipsychotic medications do not get you high. Antipsychotic medications aren't an escape. The willingness to take antipsychotic medication is a sign of bravery and of maturity.  

These medications can do awful things to the human body and mind, and they aren't fun to take--not in the least. They have uses, however. If the alternative to being medicated, and thus experiencing suffering created by side effects, is that you can't live in society and can't even process information normally, then taking medication is the lesser of two predicaments.  

Getting on medication and being compliant with doctors is usually a good idea. If you think your doctor is an ass, and she or he seemingly wants to inflict pain on you, then by all means, get a second opinion from another psychiatrist. Psychiatrists aren't all the same, and some have a better manner with patients than do others. Even if the prescriptions are the same from one psychiatrist to the next, a patient could be better off with a doctor who isn't as rude.  

Taking medication and being compliant with treatment won't make life easy, but doing this will possibly make life workable, where, without treatment, we've got nothing--not even the ability to think. However, medication shouldn't be perceived as a solution to normal suffering.

"Soiled Doves" was the monicker for ladies of the evening during the Gilded Age on the Barbary Coast in old San Francisco--and the name of the "immersive, circus-infused culinary exravaganza" dinner theater The Soiled Dove, put on by the Vau de Vire Society, creators of the Edwardian Ball, returning to the Tortona Big Top at The Point in Alameda Friday and Saturday nights, June 9th through July 1st. 

Like Teatro Zinzanni, formerly on the Embarcadero in San Francisco--but on the waterfront in the East Bay (with free parking)--and touting a more "risqué, decadent, delicious" experience, The Soiled Dove takes place in a 50 foot high, 125 foot round big top from a seventh generation Italian circus family in Tortona, with over 40.performers and musicians to take the audience back to the wilder days of old San Francisco. 

Spectators are encouraged to dress in period attire. Four course dinner is provided by Work of Art, no-host bar by Monarch Bar, music by JazzMafia/Realistic Orchestra with B-3 organist Mighty Dave and cameos by well-known local performers. 

7:30 dinner, 9:30 show, Fridays and Saturdays, June 9-July 1, Tortona Big Top, 2100 Ferry Point, Alameda. $50 show only; $130 dinner & show. https://thesoileddove_tortonabigtop.eventbrite.com/

In spite of its many musical virtues, if Antonín Dvorák’s Stabat Mater were just another setting of the grief experienced by Mary, the mother of Christ, as she watched her son die on the cross, I’m not sure this work would be nearly as moving as it is once one is informed about the circumstances in Dvorák’s own life which gave rise to this composition. In 1875, the recently married Dvorák and his wife had a daughter, Josefa, who died at just two days old. Overcome with grief, Dvorák began work on a Stabat Mater. He didn’t get very far, perhaps only eight bars, when he put aside this work to fulfill commissions for other music. Two years later, his 11-month old daughter, Ruenza, died, and less than a month later, his son, Otakar, also died. The Dvorák family was suddenly childless, having experienced the deaths of three children in two years. Dvorák threw himself into composing his Stabat Mater, which he completed in 1877. In this work, one senses that Dvorák took the grief of Mary, mother of Christ, as a paradigm of his wife’s grief as well as his own at the death of their three children. The Dvorák Stabat Mater thus became both an intimately personal work and, at the same time, a universal work embodying the grief of any mother who sees her child die. 

Over the weekend of June 2-4, Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra gave three performances of Dvorák’s Stabat Mater in Hertz Hall. At the Saturday afternoon performance I attended, Eris Choate conducted. Vocal Soloists were soprano Ariana Strahl, mezzo-soprano Kara Cornell, tenor Brian Thorsett, and bass Colin Ramsey. Dvorák’s Stabat Mater opens in F sharp heard in the horns. The F sharp is repeated insistently, accompanied by descending scales in the strings. This motif will anchor the entire work. The chorus enters, singing softly the words, “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” Gradually, the chorus builds up the volume. Then the tenor takes up the same words, adding more details about Mary’s grief. Brian Thorsett made an awkward entrance, smothering the “dolorosa,” but he quickly recovered and sang beautifully throughout the rest of the performance. Next it was soprano Ariana Strahl’s turn, as she sang, O quam tristis.” This was followed by all four soloists and the entire chorus singing, “Quae maerebat et tremebat.” The following section, Quis est homo,” was begun by mezzo-soprano Kara Cornell, who was soon joined by tenor Brian Thorsett and bass Colin Ramsey. After a brief choral section, bass Colin Ramsey sang, “Fac ut ardeat cor meum,” joined by the chorus. Another brief choral section ensued, followed by tenor Brian Thorsett delivering “fac me vere tecum flere,” joined by the chorus.  

Another brief choral section was followed by what was for me the highlight of this Stabat Mater, the section “fac ut portem Christi mortem” beautifully sung by soprano Ariana Strahl and tenor Brian Thorsett. Nexy came a lovely solo by mezzo-soprano Kara Cornell in the section, Inflammatus. Dvorák’s Stabat Mater concluded with a rousing “Quando corpus morietur” sung by the four soloists and the full chorus, accompanied by the full orchestra. In the final dying moments, however, the orchestra goes silent, and the chorus softly intones the words which, in translation, mean, “When this body dies, may the glory of paradise enfold my soul.” On this note, accompanied by soft violins, Dvorák’s Stabat Mater comes to a close. 

On the Saturday program Dvorák’s Stabat Mater was preceded by a brief work sung by Berkeley Community Chamber Singers, Ubi caritas, by Ola Gjeilo, conducted by Ming Luke, and Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, conducted by Paul Schrage. In the Beethoven, the tempos were a bit ragged, slow and plodding at the outset, then gathering steam but in a way that sounded uneven.