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Big wheel Some men splurge on a little red Corvette when they hit their mid-life crisis. Lars Clausen ’83 (right) chose a unicycle--and rode it from Washington to New York and back to Santa Monica, hitting all 50 states along the way. Clausen, a mechanical engineer at Cal, undertook the ride to help establish an endowment fund to benefit the Seward Peninsula Lutheran Ministry in Alaska, where he served as pastor from 1992 to 1996; his trip resulted in two Guinness world records--for longest distance unicycled (9,136 miles in 205 days) and longest distance unicycled in 24 hours (202.78 miles)--and a book, One Wheel, Many Spokes. Big deal The book has barely closed on the controversial Novartis deal, and the University has already entered into another dubious corporate contract. This time, Lexus is sponsoring the Big Game, as well as 16 other Cal–Stanford varsity sporting events, to the tune of $200,000 per school for each of the next three years. Any rights the auto manufacturer may have to first-round draft picks have yet to be disclosed. Dude, where’s my kim chee? John Cho ’96, an English major at Cal who gained a certain notoriety as the “Asian guy” from the American Pie trilogy, stars in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, this year’s installment of the great stoners-on-a-quest movie tradition. Touted as “an epic road trip of deep thoughts and deeper inhaling,” the film is causing quite a stir for its anti-model-minority portrayal of Asian Americans. “Finally, finally, finally, American audiences will meet an Asian-American male that isn’t William Hung and won’t perform any martial arts,” wrote Alex Liu in the Daily Cal. “Even more encouraging, Hollywood is willing to finance an asinine movie that follows the same formula as other lame teen gross-out flicks but with Asian-American leads. This speaks volumes. It lets me know times are changing.” Brains reign According to the latest U.S. Census, Berkeley is bursting with brains: 5,347 city residents who are 25 or older hold Ph.D.s. In other words, if you threw a rock in the air in this town, there’s an 8.1 percent chance that it would knock a knowledgeable noggin. The only towns in the country with a higher noggin-knockin’ rate were Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. What doesn’t seem so smart is the choice to live in cities where the August humidity hovers around 98%. The times they are a-changin’ The marquee on the side of Mars, the Telegraph Avenue second-hand shop, asks: "What’s red and orange and looks good on a hippie?" Answer: "Fire." |
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