green apron monkey

yelling is fun

The Free Speech Area is a puzzling thing.

It seems a little redundant. It isn't like you can't speak freely in Berkeley, unless you wanted to praise George Bush and urge people to vote Republican on open mike night at The Starry Plow. I wouldn't recommend that, even if there are not any laws against it. (There are no laws against that, right?)

But it isn't like there are a bunch of Republicans in The Free Speech Area (at least not when I've been there, though there was one fellow demanding that we take pity on George Tenet, a man that I don't plan on losing any sleep over). It really takes a moment to realize why the Free Speech Area is different from the rest of Berkeley. It isn't that the rest of Berkeley is unfree (far from it) but merely that The Free Speech Area is misnamed.

It's really The Loud Speech Area.

That's about it. The denizens of The Free Speech Area carry on their rantings at a much higher volume than is generally considered socially acceptable unless one is on a cell phone on the BART.

I expect that everyone will thank me tomorrow for clearing up this conceptual confusion.

dwight's basement

A friend of mine has just moved into a basement apartment off of Durant. Yes, he's got a letter instead of a number and the apartment looks like a place that you would open up a door and see a number of indonesian children chained to sewing machines.

Some facts about Dwight's apartment include:

• The room is heated by exposed gas pipes. Most are insulated, some are not.
• There is a large support beam that seems specially designed for the hitting of one's head.
• The hallway smells like gas.
• There will be no cat swinging going on in the kitchen.
• Someone left some razors and a mirror on top of his refrigerator.
• His doorbell is actually an arc produced by some exposed copper wiring.
• We didn't test this but it would appear that he could shut off the water to the entire building if he was so inclined.
• One of his kitchen cabinets is attached to a painted over door. We couldn't figure out where it lead to.