I don’t think Alice Waters would be too pleased.

(papertiger–My name is Cherokee and, although I’m not, I’ve always had an affinity for them and their story–another sad chapter in the dark side of our history. Hey, do you think this entitles me to a tenured position at UC??)

Thank you.

Berkley is the clear leader in the loony left city contest but Santa Monica is a close second.

Ironic that this school, in a nest of bigoted Democrats and socialists, is changing their name to the most luminous of the victims of their first and worst scoundrel Democrat President, Andrew Jackson.

Sequoia fought and won the court case before the Supreme Court which gave the Cherokee clear soveign right over their Georgia lands. The same Supreme Court decision that Andrew Jackson hautily chose to ignore as he stole the land, and sent the Cherokee on the famous trail of tears.

Sequoia also was the man who traveled ahead and picked out Oklahoma as the Cherokee’s new home.

Not like he did squat about it,

He wants to close Gitmo? Open two more.

Today my students had their final math test abruptly interrupted for a NINTH Envt’l Indoctrination Assembly (an “EIA”). This was put on by UCLA film students. It blamed humans for the deaths of all the animals and trees. Funny, I think that 95% of this nation in gorgeous, and most animals are healthy.

I guess living in LA can taint anyone’s perspective on what is “good” about the country.

It really was the old Telegraph Avenue, Nigel thought. They had actually encased and preserved it.

He ambled slowly down the broad walkway. This nexus point of legendary Berkeley was still a broad pedestrian mall, the way he’d known it in 1994. On impulse Nigel hooked his hands into his hip pockets, a gesture he somehow associated with those earliest days. There were few people on the mall this May afternoon, mostly tourists nosing about the memento shops near Sather Gate. A flock of them had got off the BART car with him and followed him up Bancroft. Chinese and Brazilians, mostly, chattering amiably amongst themselves, gawking, pointing out the sights. They’d all stopped to read the plaque set in concrete where Leary finally died in his desperate bid for hip redemption; some had even taken photographs of it.

A bird coasted in on the prevailing Bay breeze and fluttered to a perch in one of the eucalyptus trees dotting the mall. When Nigel had studied astrophysics here in 1994, Telegraph was still a gray pallor of concrete, greasy restaurants and the faint tang of marijuana and incense. Well, the rich flavor of incense remained, drifting into the street from open shop doors. That scruffy, noisy Telegraph he remembered was now charming and soothing as it basked in the yellow spring sunlight. Nice, yes, but in the worst sense of the word. The zest of the past was missing. The hub of student life had shifted north of the campus, amid the rambling houses of redwood; anyway, Berkeley was no longer the cauldron of the avant-garde.

He checked himself: was Telegraph frozen in the past, or merely Nigel Walmsley? At forty-six such a question was worth pondering. But no—as he passed an open shop door the sounds of antique music filtered out. “White Rabbit.” Gracie Slick. Surrealistic Pillow. A genuine collector’s item in the original pressing. The shop was almost certainly using a fax crystal, though, he noted with the purist’s disdain that gave him such an odd, eccentric pleasure. Fully half a music buff’s delight lay in the careful hoarding of such details. They weren’t playing it right, either; that particular number should have been so loud he could have heard it a block away. Nigel wondered what the original Airplane would have thought of using their music to promote tourism….

He tried to see remnants of the Telegraph he knew. All the world was coming to be like this, new and strange and adrift, somehow, from its past. Perhaps people were trying to forget the crisis years. They harked back to the ’50s and ’60s of the last century and skipped over the stinging memories of the ’80s and ’90s. And, for the other side of the coin, the New Sons, another kind of turning away from reality. Ah, well, the Sons bit had to be a passing phase; the pendulum had to swing. They’d been around for decades after all.

—Gregory Benford, In The Ocean Of Night, (1977)

Good book, but memorable for that…sort of like all those showings of The Graduate I attended. The audience invariably reacted audibly to Benjamin driving the wrong way over the Bay Bridge, but remained silent while USC and locations unknown stood in for the university and the college town.

So, here’s to you Mrs. Robinson and, if I may, to my great, non-elitist alma-mater (despite a transcript littered with grades to make a parent despair) situated in a town to make an adult despair. May it always be so.

Laugh about it, shout about it

Every way you look at it you lose.