Friday was the last day for candidates for Berkeley city offices to file the requisite paperwork to appear on the November ballot. -more-

Public officials switched on a 50-foot long, 130-ton tunnel-boring machine today and made the first grinding cuts into a retaining wall that will eventually become the fourth bore of the Caldecott Tunnel, project spokesman Jeff Weiss said today. -more-

Berkeley has one new historic landmark—a 127 year old Victorian house familiar to those who travel through the central part of town—as the result of efforts of a neighborhood history group and favorable action at the August 5, 2010, regular meeting of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. -more-

Clean-tech firms seek to reuse a variety of rare, potentially toxic materials. New businesses emerge as manufacturers prepare for modules' end of life. -more-

Other Change of Hobbit, Berkeley's pioneering science fiction-fantasy bookstore, now in spacious new digs at 3264 Adeline Street, between Harmon and Alcatraz, near popular destinations like The Vault and Sweet Adeline's, has been forced to contemplate the future—the near future—and survival in a gloomy economy. -more-

Dear Friends-

Over the past year and a half as your Councilmember, I have been an independent voice on the Berkeley City Council, fighting for District 4 and continuing Dona Spring’s legacy of progressive leadership. -more-

State Senator Loni Hancock, Assemblymember Nancy Skinner and Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates have all joined in endorsing Josh Daniels as a consensus choice in the Berkeley School Board race. -more-

Where Are the Black American Men? Ex-H-P CEO Mark Hurd;Libraries and the Proposed Changes;RPP Renewals; Truth Will Out;“Most Americans seem to view those who are mentally ill as a bit less than real human beings”; Jack Bragen on Schizophrenia -more-

There are roughly one and a half billion Muslims living on this planet, and it is a very heterogeneous group. It is fragmented and disparate, communal and even tribal in some parts of the Middle East, Pakistan, Africa, and Afghanistan. I know of no other community of this proportion that is politically so disorganized, and communally this incoherent. -more-

In the online BERKELEYSIDE, Aug. 4th, 2010, Frances Dinkelspiel writes of a $2.25 million budget for the city to make over the downtown “Bart Plaza to become an inviting spot.”. A City planner has the audacity to say the Plaza is worn and outdated, and "It is really exciting to think we will have a space people will feel really good about being in and using.… The goal is to create a space that is more welcoming to bigger and more diverse groups of people”. -more-

Several weeks ago the Express published a front page article ("Factories for the Future...momentum shifts toward preservation of land suitable for light manufacturing" ) describing how Oakland and other East Bay cities are now realizing the value of maintaining their industrial production lands for the important goods, services, and jobs the companies that occupy these lands provide. -more-

Weak links in a chain often break and that's just what happened in the loss of the U.C. theater a decade ago and now Reel Video, both killed off by their parents. -more-

Some subscribers have discovered that their personal letters from the Planet editor sometimes end up in Spam. To prevent this from happening to you, put my email address in your contact list right away. If you aren't a subsciber but would like to be, write to subscribe@berkeleydailyplanet.com. It's free, though all it gets you is notification when new or special issues are posted. -more-

This week’s theme: UC Berkeley asked incoming freshmen to volunteer for genetic tests this year. The program was met with accusations that it is bad science. Some have also charged that the program is the corrupt product of commercial and personal conflicts of interest. We examine the arguments for these accusations by examining source materials found on the Internet. -more-

If you want to understand what’s behind the recent tension between Colombia and Venezuela, think “smokescreen,” and then go back several months to some sick children in the Department of Meta, just south of Bogota. The children fell ill after drinking from a local stream, a stream contaminated by the bodies of more than 2,000 people, secretly buried by the Colombian military. -more-

Three months before the mid-term elections, Americans are angry. As a result, it’s likely that Democrats will lose control of either the House or Senate. While the negative political trends can be attributed to the stagnant economy or ruthless Republican negativism, the primary culprit is the White House: Barack Obama has failed to communicate the accomplishments of his Administration. -more-

This is not a Bay Area story, at least not yet. But I couldn’t resist writing about one of the coolest pieces of research I’m read about in a very long time. -more-

Age discrimination is a real and growing problem. ... Age discrimination attacks a person’s sense of self-worth in much the same fashion as race or sex discrimination.” (August 3, 1998 letter) --Dion Louise Aroner ( 1944 - ) -more-

After my trip to Washington DC, and the promise that there might be a reply from Fannie Mae regarding my loan modification in as little as a week, what have I heard? Nothing. Well, not entirely nothing. A letter arrived from GMAC requesting letters from all my tenants detailing how much they pay me and how often. I guess the signed rental agreements that contain this exact same information were not sufficient. So they all wrote the letters, and I faxed them to every fax number I had- the one in the letter, the one I had for the representative I talked to in DC, as well as to NACA. No doubt they will have claimed to have never received them. Probably I should FEDEX them so someone will actually have to sign. Not that they wouldn’t “lose” them after that. -more-

A small group of innovators in the 1950s in California--Peter Voulkos, John Mason, Paul Soldner, Kenneth Price, Robert Arneson and Stephen de Staebler--began using clay no longer for its utilitarian function, but as a medium to create abstract or figurative sculpture. Called the Clay Revolution. it did not extend to ceramic tiles, which remained in the purely decorative realm. Rene Powell has done pioneering work in a narrative use of clay tiles in a show currently on view at the Doug Adams Gallery in the Bade Museum on the campus of the Graduate Theological Union. Called ECHOES AND FRAGMENTS, they deal with the Holocaust as personal experience. -more-

Fiddles, banjos, ancient ballads and square dancing will take over Berkeley this September, at the Berkeley Old Time Music Convention, with headliners including West Virginia fiddler Jimmy Triplett (former drummer with jam band Donna the Buffalo); 86-year-old mandolin player Kenny Hall in a one-time-only reunion with the Sweets Mill String Band; award-winning North Carolina ballad singer and storyteller Bobby McMillon; resonator guitar goddess Del Rey; and many others. The centerpiece of the festival is the Farmers Market String Band Contest, a free event in Civic Center Park featuring more than 20 different string bands. -more-

Alan Ayckbourn wrote 1970’s British domestic comedy in the midst of the Sexual (pronounce it seks-yoo-all) Revolution, the UK having gone in a decade from “No Sex Please, We’re British,” to a middle-class revisiting of Restoration bawdiness—just like in America. His plays must have been outrageous when first produced. That this form should have recaptured the Tony for best revival of a play last year is odd to me but attests to its durability -more-

"God, tell me an idea that makes you laugh ... "--Patrick Baresi as Stanley Jerome, is down on his knees, praying for a joke, a funny idea for a sketch that may propel him and his brother Eugene (Brady Woolery) out of the family home at Brighton Beach to Manhattan, a few miles away, and success in that new fount of entertainment, television. Or radio, at least ... -more-

As a living personification of the term "Square", I'm understandably not a devotee of rap music. Nonetheless, I'm endlessly fascinated by the highly imaginative and fanciful names of these musical groups. Most of my scholarly research on this academic subject is derived from the East Bay Express, which I pick up every Wednesday from a nearby news rack that stands next to the empty, greatly lamented Berkeley Daily Planet news rack. -more-

Though far apart geographically, Berkeley and Pasadena have some interesting commonalities. Both are home to gigantic early 20^th century football stadiums where UC teams play, both have a long history of distinguished community theater, and are known for the quality of their residential neighborhoods. -more-