 |
|
     |
|
|
Space cadet Lieutenant colonel Rex Walheim '84 displays the Cal pennant he took along on his 4.5-million-mile journey on the Space Shuttle. Rex made two space walks during his stay at the International Space Station.  Go nuts! It's not football or Nobel Prize winners fueling the latest Cal-Stanford rivalry. The hot topic this spring was, Who's got better squirrels? It was reported in April that students in the Stanford dormitories were fending off cute invading rodents (folks on the Farm brilliantly discovered that the beasts could be rebuffed by installing screens in the windows), but the media blitz was obviously a feeble attempt to usurp Cal's title as Squirrel Capital of the West Coast. Jon's World o' Squirrels claims that "the quality of an institution of higher learning can often be determined by the size, health, and behavior of the squirrel population on campus," and rates Cal a full five squirrels. Besieged by impassioned pleas to upgrade the Stanford rating to equal Berkeley's, Jon responds: "At Berkeley, if you sit on the 'squirrel log' you will be approached by dozens of plump, cute, furry fox squirrels. Stanford is upgraded to a '4+' rating, but Berkeley is still number one!" Why didn't I think of that? "I am the very model of a modern anthropologist/A linguist, a geneticist, and quite a good ethnologist," Richard Milner sings to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Major General's Song." This is just one toe-tapping number in Milner's one-man musical, "Charles Darwin: Live and in Concert." Milner, an editor at Natural History magazine and author of the Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), began
Milner is often inspired by historic quotations: biologist Thomas Huxley's comment after reading On the Origin of Species--"How incredibly stupid not to have thought of that myself"--mutated into the self-chastising song, "Why Didn't I Think of That?" ("There was an ancient monkey with a long and curly tail/ That ape evolved into a man/ He's teaching now at Yale.") His songs often find modern relevance, too. On the eve of a school-board election pitting creationists against supporters of evolution, Milner brought down the house with his rendition of a little ditty inspired by the Scopes trial, singing "Down here you'd best be careful of your speech/ You could get yourself busted just for what you teach." "What better use for a train station than a train station." --Landmark Preservation Commission member Richard Dishnica, on news that the City of Berkeley may purchase the former Southern Pacific train depot at the foot of University Avenue for use as a new, full-service Amtrak stop. |
"I have seen exactly three women in Berkeley wearing high-heeled shoes, and two of them wore 'sensible heels.' If there are hookers in this town, they wear Rockports." --Molly Ivins, giving her impressions of Berkeley after being a lecturer in the School of Journalism this year.
| |||||||||||||
| About
CAA Contact
Us
Update
your Address CAA Career Opportunities Privacy Policy |
©2009 California Alumni
Association. All Rights Reserved For questions about CAA: info@alumni.berkeley.edu Technical inquiries: web@alumni.berkeley.edu
|
Alumni House Berkeley, CA 94720-7520 Toll-Free: (888) CAL-ALUM Phone: (510) 642-7026 Fax: (510) 642-6252
|
