Berkeley

Becky and I saw Ira Glass and David Rakoff at an event in Berkeley tonight.

From Sarmad Ali’s new blog, Baghdad Life: I celebrated my first Christmas in 2004, after I had moved to the U.S. to attend Columbia University. One of my classmates, who became one of my best friends here, invited me first for Thanksgiving and then for Christmas. We went to Berkeley, Calif., where his grandparents lived. It was a welcome break from the hectic pace of New York, and it was nice to be with a family again, several months after…

During my freshman year at Berkeley (that’s 2000), I wrote an article for The Daily Californian about how Pleasures, a sex toy shop in Alabama, was being supported by Berkeley’s own Good Vibrations. Good Vibrations, a Berkeley sex toy store, is supporting the cause of Sherri Williams, owner of Pleasures, a small chain of sex shops in northern Alabama, whose business may be in jeopardy. In 1998, the Alabama Legislature passed a bill that added a ban on the sale…

My cousin, Karim Sadjadpour, will be speaking at 5:30 pm tomorrow at 145 Dwinelle Hall on the UC Berkeley campus to talk about Iran. He’ll speak for about 40 minutes followed by a Q&A. The event is being hosted by Harry Kreisler, Executive Director of the Institute of International Studies.

While I’m not much of a coffee drinker myself, I was introduced to Peet’s Coffee at a very young age. My grandparents’ home, perched alongside Claremont Canyon, is about a 20 minutes’ walk from the fourth location of Peet’s Coffee, on Domingo at Ashby Ave in Berkeley. When our family would gather around holiday times, we’d make the trek down the hill to Peet’s. The adults would get their lattes, while the kids would get their hot chocolate. Peet’s was…

Dude, how is it in that in four (ok, three) years at Berkeley, no one told me about the tradition of streaking through the Main Stacks? Damn, I missed out.

So if you’re not going to Chaharshanbeh Suri with me on March 13, maybe you’d rather hear Stephen Hawking give a lecture at UC Berkeley? I’ve got two tickets for sale if you’re interested. 10 percent discount for blog readers. Update: Been sold! Thanks!

Ok guys, Tuesday is the new Thursday (which, by the way was the new Friday). So on March 13, on behalf of the Bay Area Persian community (of which I’m a very non-active member), I invite all locals, Persian and non-Persian alike to come join me at the Persian Center for my very first Chaharshanbe Suri. Chaharshanbe Suri (in Persian: چهارشنبه‌سوری‎) is the ancient Iranian festival dating at least back to 1700 BCE of the early Zoroastrian era.[1] The festival…

When I was a sophomore at Berkeley in 2002, I took a class with Prof. Anna-Livia Brawn, on French colonial films — given that I knew I would be headed to Senegal later that fall. One of the filmmakers that she introduced us to was Ousmane Sembène, a Senegalese director and writer who she highly lauded and suggested that if ever we had the chance to see a Sembène film, that we should, given that Sembène apparently is very finicky…