2009 March April The Soul of Wit
A Righteous Man
Legendary basketball coach Pete Newell. Pete Newell, the coaching legend who led Cal to its only NCAA basketball championship in 1959, died last November 17. His friends are still trying to figure out how he managed to cram so much living into only 93 years. He was one of only three coaches—along with Dean Smith and […]
Sketch Comedy
Q&A with New Yorker cartoonist Mike Twohy Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor at The New Yorker, says cartoonists are smarter than scientists. Not funnier, mind you. Smarter. As Mankoff explains, “If a scientist comes up with one new idea a year, he’s a genius. If a cartoonist comes up with only one new idea a day, he’d […]
The Prince and the President
In which the author recalls meetings with Edward, Prince of Wales and Ulysses S. Grant Several weeks ago, in Chapter XLI, I spoke of how rare a thing a good memory for names and faces is. I wish to recall now, under that head, an incident or two. About the middle of the last quarter of […]
Hell or San Francisco
In which the author recalls the “Great Earthquake of 1868” in the wake of a much greater one in 1906 During fifty-six years, the whole great globe has been continuously contributing to the population of San Francisco, therefore its destruction was a matter of personal concern to families scattered everywhere upon the globe’s surface. Its population, […]
Funds for the Future
Ensconced on the top floor of the Bancroft Library, a tiny band of scholars have been laboring for more than four decades on an impossible assignment: to collect, organize, annotate, and publish everything Mark Twain ever wrote, including letters, manuscripts, scrapbooks, business documents—even laundry lists. "The Bancroft often has been called the jewel in […]
Two Turntables and a Symphony
With a laptop, turntable, and a pair of headphones, composer Mason Bates is turning heads in the concert hall—and in the most unlikely of those, no less: the classical music hall. By artfully bringing the groove-loving sounds of electronica and techno to classical music, Bates has become a sought-after composer. But the 32-year-old Bates, whose […]
Funny as a Crutch
Is there anything more resistant to dissection than humor? A joke, a funny situation or story…subject any of them to intensive scrutiny, parse out their elements for detailed analysis, and all you end up with are clichés, disjunct phrases, mere words. All of the qualities that make them “funny”—the social or cultural contexts, the ambiguity, […]
Infinite Jest
The bibliography of Nat Schmulowitz Every April Fool’s Day, the San Francisco Public Library showcases a rather sizable but little-known archive within its holdings—the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit and Humor, or SCOWAH. It’s said to be one of the largest such assemblages in the world. And though it’s safe to say that few San Franciscans are […]
Pelican Daze
Humor in the time of protest By the time I got to the Pelican, the heyday of campus humor magazines was almost over. They were artifacts of the twenties and thirties, when a certain shared set of cultural assumptions ensured that every student would probably find the same things funny. Jokes about the cluelessness of Stanford […]
TV Eye
Bay Area artists Trevor Paglen and Desirée Holman work in very different spheres, using different methods and media, to get at different contemporary issues. But the two share an attitude, a way of getting audiences to challenge what they know to be true about themselves and the world around them. “I’ve never crossed paths with […]
Hella Hula
Choreographer Patrick Makuakane has a progressive approach to Hawaii’s ancient dance form Ask Patrick Makuakane about his work, and the phrase “only in San Francisco” comes up often. The San Francisco-based choreographer creates hula of a kind you won’t see at tourist luaus. “Only in San Francisco” could just as easily describe Makuakane, who has made […]
Sweet Honey in the Rack
March is the cruelest month for Kristin Colvin Young, stage manager of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Every year around this time the troupe performs at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, and they always join the Cal Performances stage crew for a huge barbecue in the theater’s courtyard. This year’s cookout was held during the Saturday […]
Seriously Funny
Legendary folklorist Alan Dundes took jokes to another level. Alan Dundes died with a joke on his lips. At least, that’s one version of the story. This much is certain: The beloved Cal professor died unexpectedly in 2005, while lecturing. Dundes was a giant in the field of folklore scholarship, an inveterate collector of, and prolific […]
Voices from the Past
Using today’s technology in unexpected ways A linguist and a physicist walking into a room may sound like the start of a joke, but there’s nothing funny about the collaboration between Carl Haber, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Berkeley linguist Andrew Garrett. The two are capturing and restoring sound from wax cylinders at […]
Life in the Trees
Q & A with Berkeley’s Landscape Architect From the sounds of it, Jim Horner ’71, was practically groomed to be campus landscape architect from boyhood. “I grew up in Berkeley, and I enjoyed the campus as a park when I was a child riding his bike around town. And then, as a student at Berkeley, when […]
Salty or Sweet?
Inland ants make a beeline for the salt shaker Experience has shown us where there’s sugar, there’s usually ants. But Berkeley biologist Robert Dudley and his colleagues found that in inland areas, ants swarmed to salt solutions in preference to sugar, their basic food. The study suggests that the availability of sodium could be what limits […]
Foolproof Funny
Better humor through computer science For those with a refined punchline palate, Jester, the Online Joke Recommender, is a dream come true. The website’s premise is simple: Read eight jokes and rate them according to how funny you find them. After that, Jester will begin suggesting new material tailored to your tastes. Whether you’re a fan […]
The Meek Shall Inherit the Earthquake
The Fritz Institute gets Bay Area nonprofits ready to head up relief efforts when disaster strikes. From his tiny upstairs office in San Francisco’s Mission Neighborhood Health Center, where a large portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe watches over the other Catholic saints covering the walls, Chris Sandoval tries to imagine how his clinic will handle […]
Avant Garden
The Center for New Music and Technology’s interdisciplinary work bears fascinating fruit. Alto saxophonist Steve Coleman leaned back in his chair and slid a sheaf of sheet music across the table to give me a glimpse of a recent composition. At least I assumed it was sheet music, though it was covered with markings that looked […]
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