Target

West of Berkeley, near the SF Bay, is a  Target store which I visited to find a kitchen garbage pail that didn't cost a ridiculous amount of money.

The most frustrating aspect of this store was figuring out how to get into the parking lot.  I could see the big red Target bullseye on the side of the store from a distance, and I tried to use that as a, well, target to reach the store. But the first few roads I used brought me to dead ends or other places where it was inconvenient to park, and I kept having to turn around and try another route.  I think it took me half an hour to locate the entrance to the Target parking lot, since the entrance is not well-lit at all (you can tell from the photo that I visited in the evening).

The most (only?) interesting part of the inside of the store is the shopping cart escalator (technically called a Vermaport), which is shown in the next photo.

Since the garbage pails were being sold on the 2nd floor, I sent my cart up and met it at the top. Hello, cart:

After finding my garbage pail I sent it in the cart back down:

This is not exactly new technology, even if it was new to me, so I consider this to be my George Bush supermarket scanner moment (well, perhaps not quite).

Reviews of this Target store can be read on Yelp here and they are generally positive. The website Yelp is something else I had not known about before coming to Berkeley.

Berkeley campus

Today we'll take a look at some of the buildings around the Berkeley campus.  Many are beautiful, while others are ordinary or worse.

Here is the entrance to the campus at the southwest corner:

Close to this entrance is a plaque marking a spot where a Spanish expedition in 1772 stopped to take a view of the Golden Gate (long before there was a bridge there):

You can no longer see the Golden Gate from this site, since the buildings in Berkeley block the view.

The most well-known architectural feature on campus is the bell tower, called the Campanile since it looks like the famous bell tower in Venice.

Behind the university library:

At night:

Up close:

Next to the Campanile are two benches. One has the inscription "Beneficiary to Benefactor" from the Class of 1955:

Is this a joke? Are they waiting for someone to donate money to put a real name on the bench? I can't imagine the university would name a building Benefactor Hall until someone comes around with money to pay for it.

The other bench, next to the entrance to the tower, was contributed by the Class of 1920:

The inscription reads: "This bench was erected by the Class of 1920 to commemorate the heroism of the sons of this university who died in the Great War." The Campanile was completed during World War I.

Officially, the name of the Campanile is Sather Tower, but I have never heard anyone call it that.  In addition to providing the funds for building the Campanile, the Sather family also paid for the construction of a gate near the southern entrance to the campus which is called (surprise) Sather Gate.

The above photo is a view from Sather Gate to Sproul Plaza, and the photo below is a view on Sproul Plaza looking towards Sather Gate:

Sproul Plaza has been the canonical location for large student protests since the 1960s, organized by different generations of what a friend of mine called "granola people".

The circular region in the middle of Sproul Plaza in the above photo is interesting, so let's take a closer look at it:

The words say: "This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction".  There is no soil there now.  In fact what is in the center now is a hole of garbage:

The contents (which you can see up close by clicking on the photo) seem to be leaves, a Chinese page, and the stub says "ticket void if stub is removed".  Well, that stub is certainly not going to be removed from this cesspool anytime soon, at least not by direct human contact.

A few weeks after taking the above photo I returned and found a new pile of dried-up garbage (including some glass) in the hole:

The building I teach my class in is called the Valley Life Sciences Building.  Its name is not due to being located in a valley, but because the Valley family provided money for its renovation in the 1990s. All the biology departments are located in this building, along with a paleontology museum and some classrooms. Here are some photos of it from the east

and the north

and the south:

It is huge! The abbreviation for the building is VLSB, and when I first arrived at Berkeley someone explained a second meaning for the abbreviation: Very Large Science Building.  It is the largest building on the campus.

On the west side of VLSB is a small forest of redwood trees:

The most common trees on campus are, unfortunately, not redwood trees but trees which are continually cut (pollarded is the technical term) in order to provide some ugliness to counteract the attractive buildings.

Here are some campus maintenance staff on ladders cutting the growth off these trees before the spring semester started:

The faculty club is located in a quiet part of campus:

Inside the club are two rows of windows with glass emblems of the universities which Berkeley considers itself comparable too:

I can't figure out what all of these schools are.  In the top photo, from left to right, are the shields for ??, Brown, ??, Cornell, and Oxford.  In the bottom photo, from left to right, are the shields for  Stanford (do the Berkeley undergrads know a Stanford emblem is on campus?!?), Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Anyone reading this who can tell me the missing schools should leave a comment to this post.

The math department's building, Evans Hall, is considered by many to be an eyesore:

But Evans is not the most unattractive building on campus. The award for that goes to Wurster Hall:

Ugliness couldn't get wurster than Wurster.  The university should plant some redwood trees all around this building to hide it completely from view.  The most ironic thing about this building is that it houses the architecture school. Why would architects want to work in such a fugly structure?

The main administrative building on campus is California Hall:

As a legacy of the 1960s student protests, there are no door knobs on the outside of any doors to California Hall except at the main entrance. That way students can't lock administrators inside. California Hall is one of the few buildings on campus besides the libraries where the public can't just walk inside. There is a guard stationed at the main entrance.

Next to California Hall is the Free Speech Movement Cafe:
 

In this cafe they sell only organic, holistic, sustainable food.  Don't try asking for a hot dog. In keeping with the granola attitude of the cafe, their utensils are all biodegradable. I think they are made out of plants:

Outside the cafe are displays of many international newspapers which are updated each day:

Many humanities departments (e.g., English, history, languages) are housed in Dwinelle Hall, which is the second largest building on campus after VLSB:

Dwinelle is built on sloping ground and has 7 floors, but you wouldn't guess it from this view, would you? The floors are lettered A, B, ..., G instead of numbered, which had me confused at first since I am used to lettered floors only in basements. If you are on floor B and need to get to C, is that up or down? You'll have to walk into Dwinelle to find out.

One of the courtyards in Dwinelle Hall is named Ishi court:

Ishi is the last known Native American in the USA to spend most of his life without contact with the outside culture. He lived in northern California, and after being discovered he spent the last few years of his life being studied by anthropologists from UC Berkeley.  He died in 1916.  I first read about Ishi in The People's Almanac when I was a kid.  In Ishi Court I expected to find a plaque or sculpture explaining who Ishi was, but I found nothing. 

basketball

This week the women's basketball team at Berkeley ended their season with a loss during the Women's NIT. I attended one of their games last month, somewhat by accident.  While standing in a restaurant waiting for a table, the person behind me asked if anyone wanted a pair of free tickets to see the women's basketball team play a game later that evening.  I said "yes" and got the tickets:

The game was scheduled to start an hour after I began dinner, so during the meal I called some people I knew in Berkeley to see if anyone wanted to go to the game.  Everyone I called had something else planned, so I went by myself.

Here are two scenes from early in the game:

The most surprising thing to me is how empty the arena was.  At my school, if the women's basketball team is playing a game it is nearly always sold out.

One of the students in my class at Berkeley is on the women's basketball team: Talia Caldwell #33.  She is the player making the foul shot in the first photo above.  Here are some more action shots of Caldwell under the basket (in the white, not green, uniform)

and making a foul shot on the other side of the court:

Even though there were very few fans, the team was cheered on by the marching band (and bear)

some flag wavers

and a group of guys who took off their shirts to reveal an eloquent message:

If you're having trouble reading that, you can click on the photo to get a larger image.  I'll also just tell you: the painted letters say GOLDEN BEARS ARE GOOD! (The last guy on the right has an exclamation point on his chest.)

Here are all of the cheering groups together:

At one point the painted guys turned around and started shaking their butts to whatever music was playing over the loudspeakers (Lady Gaga?):

Unfortunately the game did not go well for Berkeley.  The opposing team, Oregon, jumped out to a lead and never looked back. Near the end of the first half, the score was California 16, Oregon 28:

In the second half Cal got close to 28 points, but by that time Oregon was at 45:

There were some cheers in the middle of the game when the men's basketball team final score against Oregon (being played up in Oregon) was shown on a screen as Cal 81 and Oregon 71:

Back in the women's game, near the end Cal got to 46, at which point Oregon had 55:

A sign that things were not going well was that the Golden Bears Are Good guys left:

When the final buzzer rang, Oregon had added a few more unanswered points to win the game 60 to 46:

An article in the school newspaper later said, about the women's basketball season, "The low point may have been the Bears' 14-point home loss to Oregon, a team that went 4-14 in Pac-10 play." In other words, I attended the worst possible game.

After the game was over, the two teams walked passed each other to shake (or slap) hands

and the Cal marching band played and cheerleaders sang the school song "Hail to California" (lyrics here):

I have some videos of the marching band at the end of the game (including a pair of tuba players high-stepping around the basketball court) which I'll post later.