I was tired not having slept enough the night before and my youngest daughter hadn't really slept right in three days so I insisted on renting a room for us. Otherwise, I said, "Without a nap I'm not going to this party you want me to go to."
So, we found a room at maybe it was called the Berkeley Marina Doubletree or something like that and they gave us a beautiful room overlooking the marina and Golden Gate Bridge where we watched the golden sunset set into the Golden Gate Bridge basically. We were all pretty happy about this except my youngest daughter who was unconscious by this time catching up on missed sleep. While we were driving the nearby freeways we watched riot police with helmets on overpasses above us in various areas around Oakland and Berkeley. We didn't run into any protestors ourselves because that wasn't our intention. Besides, my wife knows the area and what areas would likely have protests now. I remember all the protests in the 1960s mostly during the Viet Nam War that emanated out from institutions like UC Berkeley, UCLA in Los Angeles, and Kent State where the students were shot by U.S. National Guard troops for peacefully protesting then. Of course those were very different times than now all these years later. However, then it was mostly white kids they were shooting. But, today it is more Black kids that get shot. I guess the difference is that then all races were getting shot on the streets during the Viet Nam War by police and National Guardsmen and also all races were also getting beat up by them with billy clubs and sometimes dying of their injuries then too.
Police in the U.S. sort of go in cycles of about 20 years or so. They get desensitized, then they have to be retrained not to kill so many people then they get desensitized and then they have to be taught not to accidentally kill so many people. This is an ongoing cycle which I think began during the 1960s. So about ever 10 to 20 years they have to be retrained not to kill so many people while arresting them sometimes for doing nothing wrong at all.
Before the 1960s a whole lot of people tended to die at the hands of police and there wasn't always anything much you could do about it. Also, before about the early 1960s people tended to be vigilantes a lot more also. Law wasn't like it is now. People before about 1960 often just killed people and buried them in their back yards if they didn't like them and often police didn't investigate unless it was someone famous or noteworthy. This is why what people could do was very narrow before the 1960s. If you were odd or unusual in any neighborhood in any way you might just disappear and never be heard from again. So, you might die from being black, from being crippled, for being unusual, for being crazy, for literally anything. So, we have come a long way from then.
So, we all should be grateful for just how far we have come. And one of the places this type of freedom we have now was championed was Berkeley and especially from UC Berkeley with the Free Speech movement led by Mario Savio.
So, when I found:
A Step-by-Step Guide to Berkeley's Many Quirks - NYTimes ...
www.nytimes.com/.../a-step-by-step-guide-to-berkele...
The New York Times
I was interested in this because we were also visiting the Berkeley Area.
Cataloging Berkeley’s Quirks
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
BERKELEY, Calif. — Tom Dalzell looks too strait-laced to be the arbiter of the eccentric.
Nonetheless, almost two years ago, Mr. Dalzell, 63, set out in his khakis and comfortable shoes to walk every street, alleyway and path and document this city’s material oddities on a website he calls Quirky Berkeley. “There is a tremendous diversity of thought here,” Mr. Dalzell said. “And one of the ways we express our lack of conformity is with the quirky things we put on our houses and in our yards.”
The rules are simple: no seasonal decorations, and all quirk must be viewable from the street.
So far, Mr. Dalzell has walked nearly 150 miles and shot some 9,000 photos of rogue garden gnomes who moon passers-by; a four-foot-wide peace sign outside a house long occupied by Wavy Gravy of Woodstock fame and his Hog Farm commune compatriots;dozens of colorful hard hats hanging from a front yard tree; a massive wolf sculpture made from old car parts; a menagerie of animal-shaped mailboxes; a giant metal orange that once served as a roadside refreshment stand but now sits in a wooded side yard; and a variety of wildly painted houses and sculptures.
Sometimes Mr. Dalzell uses the site to riff on the city’s culture and history. Introducing items filed under “Peace,” he writes: “I make the following claim: Berkeley is the peace symbol/flag/pole capital of the world. Go ahead, prove me wrong.”
Mr. Dalzell moved to Berkeley 30 years ago, after a stint working for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. He manages a labor union of gas and electric utility workers by day and moonlights as an author of slang dictionaries and a collector of idiosyncrasies.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Dalzell stood on the sidewalk outside what he considers the crown jewel of Berkeley’s quirk: a strange, bulbous structure that locals call “the fish house” built on a block of low-slung, single-family homes on the city’s south side. “As Ken Kesey would say, this is ‘bull goose loony,’ ” Mr. Dalzell said.
The house is not, it turns out, modeled after a fish but rather a tiny, indestructible microcreature called a tardigrade, or water bear, which can survive deep freezing, boiling and 10 days in space. The architect Eugene Tsui — who said he was in the process of legally changing his surname to Tssui after a dream he had in China that involved Genghis Khan — designed the home for his parents, who had no idea what a tardigrade was but wanted an earthquake-proof home.
In a sign of the changes underway here, Mr. Tsui now rents it to four young men and their technology start-up.
Like most things in this city of close to 117,000 residents, the question of whether Berkeley is actually more bohemian in thought and yard ornamentation than, say, Denver, is the subject of heated debate. “All the assumptions about Berkeley are flat-out wrong,” Mr. Tsui said. “It is a myth that this is a liberal-minded, freethinking place; at its heart, it’s a conventional bedroom community.”
Mayor Tom Bates, for one, disagrees. The large state university here has long drawn creative types, and the city’s residents have always embraced “things that are different,” the mayor said. The city was a center of the antiwar and Free Speech movements of the 1960s, and has consistently passed laws that look left-of-center to much of the country, including most recently the nation’s first tax on sweetened sodas.
“One of the real joys of walking this city,” said Mr. Bates, who does not own a car, “is to come across a house or lot where someone has done something zany.”
After a year of meticulously inventorying and cataloging, Mr. Dalzell has settled on a few general theories of quirk. First, quirk begets more quirk. “If one person puts up an animal mailbox, you’ll often see other animal mailboxes pop up around them,” he said, describing a kind of keeping up with the Joneses, Berkeley-style.
Second, the density of quirk is thicker in the city’s traditionally lower- and middle-class flatlands than up in the hills, where the wealthier tend to live. Third, nothing (as the Buddhists say) is permanent. “Sometimes you’ll see something really interesting, only to go back a week later to find it gone,” Mr. Dalzell said.
Still, there are some who view the whole Quirky Berkeley enterprise more as a testament to its creator’s kookiness than its subjects’.
“We urban and architectural historians exhibit variants of this strange behavior in cities around the globe,” said Stephen O. Tobriner, a professor emeritus of architectural history at the University of California, Berkeley. Upon close inspection, he said, any urban area yields all sorts of evidence of curious human behavior — including, sometimes, an inhabitant’s desire to walk every city block.
Even in the era of Google Street View, walking each mile of a city has become something of a fad. A woman finished walking every street in Berkeley in 2007. A man in his mid-90s walked over 300 miles of Sydney, Australia, before he died in 2008. It took three years for a Minneapolis woman, Francine Corcoran, to walk the 1,071 miles that make up the city. London has been walked, as has San Francisco.
And while the other walkers did not set off explicitly to round up wackiness the way Mr. Dalzell did, at a walker’s pace, they no doubt saw plenty of it anyway.
“When you walk a city block by block, you are forced to slow down and look at everything — you see more, you feel more, you get into the rhythm of the neighborhoods,” said William B. Helmreich, a professor of sociology at City College of New York who wrote “The New York Nobody Knows,” a book about walking every street — some 6,000 miles — of the city’s five boroughs.
“In urban areas, you often don’t feel like an individual, which makes you want to put your stamp of uniqueness on something,” Professor Helmreich said, “even if it is just the paint on your house.”
Correction: December 6, 2014
An earlier version of a caption in a slide show about cataloging the quirks of Berkeley, Calif., incorrectly described a piece of art on the garage of a house. It was a painting of a deer, not a sculpture.
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