Your "whoa, dude, this is gnarly" for the day

Two guys suit up to ride their longboards down the Claremont Canyon road. I used to live not far from where this road ends at the Oakland/Berkeley border, and I know that road well; it's one of the few ways to get through the Oakland hills from the valley inland if you're going toward the Bay.
Back when I lived there (over 20 years ago now) I'd heard about people doing this ride at night (!) so as not to get caught (and I'll bet they weren't wearing helments!). They must have some seriously pro equipment to get that smooth a ride going that fast. Dang, I say, dang!

World Cup Fever at Bette's Ocean View Diner, Berkeley

A trip to the Bay Area almost always includes a stop at Bette's Ocean View Diner in Berkeley. This year the place was decked out for the World Cup!



Our table was right next to the board where they are tracking the play-offs.

March in northern California

Tulips by the pool at Filoli.

The gardens are full of blossoming trees.

A field of daffodils.

Forsythia at Filoli.

Magnolias in Half Moon Bay.

Top Dog

It was fun to stomp around Berkeley with my nephew. We took pictures, hiked up the hill to the Greek Theater, bopped around campus, and sat for a while at the fountain in Sproul Plaza. Right on cue, a golden retriever trotted up with a tennis ball, jumped in the water and played until he was whistled away by his human buddy. A noble tradition!
During all the years I lived in Berkeley, I was probably never farther than 5-6 blocks from Top Dog on Durant. About once a week, I'd get a calabrese, a sausage that has fennel seeds and a mildly spicy flavor. With hot mustard, mmmm. They tasted best when we were coming back from seeing a band in SF: take Muni to the AC Transit station, catch the last bus back to Berkeley, then walk up toward home from Shattuck. The last stop of the night, at about 2:30 AM was Top Dog, open all night.

Berkeley nostalgia

It is February, so the plum trees are blooming in Berkeley. I went off to college at UC Berkeley in 1974, and ended up living there, with time out for travels, until 1988. I never owned a car there, so I walked, biked or rode buses the entire time, except when a roomie or boyfriend with a car gave me a ride. I'll be going back for a brief visit over Spring break to see my family in SF, and I'll take day to get over to the East Bay to see one of my colleagues deliver a keynote talk at a graduate student conference. Here's a picture of the courtyard in Dwinelle Hall, where I spent a lot of time over the years, reading for my classes.

Berkeley has probably changed enormously since I've left: I haven't been back much. So I'm going to take a virtual tour through Walking Berkeley, a site that combines the idea of "walking every street in your town" with photos and stories about the history of the places. I plan to walk in the Botanical Gardens, and visit the Rose Garden.

Who wrote the letter?

Yesterday, B****PhD posted a story from her new home in Orange County about a letter that was mailed to 14,000 foreign-born Latino voters who were registered as Democrats. The letter was in Spanish, and the brief AP story quoted it as saying that immigrants who voted would be commiting a crime. Much discussion ensued in the comments section and on other blogs about the difference between illegal alien, immigrant, naturalized citizen, ID requirements in different states, voter intimidation, etc, but most of the discussion was based on a brief AP story that did not cite the original Spanish text. Today, this story is big news in California because it turns out that the letter was sent by a Republican candidate for office, Tan Nguyen, that it was even more clearly intimidating than the brief quotation had suggested. Not only did the letter state (falsely) that it is illegal for an immigrant to vote (immigrants who are naturalized citizens and registered to vote have every right to vote), it said that they could be deported, that a computer tracking system was being set up that anti-immigrant groups could use to track them down, and not to believe any politician who claimed otherwise. Now even the California GOP is calling for Tan to withdraw from the race. Fortunately, recipients of the letter complained, the case was investigated, and the effort has been publicly denounced. (UPDATE: GOP CALLS FOR CANDIDATE TO LEAVE THE RACE) But it does go to show why the stories about voter intimidation and fraud that I wrote about in earlier posts are still relevant.

But that's not why I had to write about this story. As we scholars know (ahem!) one should never work from a translation, if possible. So today, when I was finally able to find pdf files of both the Spanish letter and the English translation posted by the liberaloc , I discovered that the letter was signed.....Sergio Ramirez! Whoa! Did someone pull that name out of a hat, or was the author of this vicious political hoax a fan of the Nicaraguan novelist and former Sandinista leader?

Seriously, here is an essay in English by Sergio Ramirez about the upcoming elections in Nicaragua, a country once much in the news in the US, but now almost completely absent. And here is an essay in Spanish, one of the many articles archived on his web page, in which he looks back on Nicaraguan history on the occasion of the death of Ronald Reagan in 2004, and talks about what has been accomplished and what still needs to be done. I saw Sergio Ramirez give a talk about Ruben Dario in Managua when I attended a conference on Central American literature. I have a picture of him standing next to Ernesto Cardenal that I should dig up and scan so I can post it here. Now I must go read that novel I've had sitting on my shelf for years.

Filoli

On my next trip to the Bay Area, I hope to visit the Filoli Estates