Alex Dunne

The murder of a Cal student a few days ago made me sad and angry at how bad things are getting in the East Bay.  Crime is getting horrible in Oakland, and it quickly spills over to the areas around the Cal campus.  Beyond the senseless violence and its impact on the victims, it makes me sad at how it affects the students at Cal.  These people are there to get an education at one of the best universities in the world (yes, I’m biased), but I know firsthand that going to school at Cal is sometimes like living in a war zone.  Guys from Oakland often come into Berkeley to steal, fight, and occasionally kill.  Here’s my victim’s resume of my time at Cal:

• Bike stolen from my living room. (1988)
• Jumped by a gang while walking home from a bar in Oakland. Beaten up and robbed. (1989)
• Attacked by gang on New Years Eve in my own house. (1989)
• Room broken into, over $1000 worth of stuff stolen (1990).

And then there was the Henry’s shooting in 1990, where about a half a dozen of my friends were held hostage by an insane gunman for seven hours. (I was supposed to meet them at the bar that night, but I fell asleep in my room and didn’t make it.)

It pisses me off that such a great school is located in such a crime-ridden area. What’s the solution? Who knows.

While you’re wondering how much food to stock up on for the coming food shortages, here’s something that should provide some relief, if correct: a new report is predicting oil prices will start to fall. In a new report, Lehman Brothers’s oil strategist says that supply will catch up to demand, thanks to new refining projects coming online:

Inventories have been building since the beginning of the year. We have pretty significant projects starting soon in Saudi Arabia, and large off-shore fields in Nigeria…

I hope he’s right. There’s a part of me that believes that the high gas prices are hoping to spur automobile fuel efficiency, but in the short run it’s driving up the cost of everything. And that’s damn scary.

I was working over at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, and one of the guys I work with at Techweb, Fritz Nelson, came into the show office with an awesome balloon logo for the event. He said that the guy who does balloon animals for kids over at the Chevy’s restaurant on 3rd & Howard was bugging him to make an animal (not sure why, he was with a group of adults), and after initially blowing him off, Fritz thought better of it and commissioned the guy to make this:

Pretty cool. Fritz said he’s going to use it somehow in his video coverage of Web 2.0 Expo on Techweb.com.

Need I say more…

I can’t say I’ve followed the murder trial of Oakland resident Hans Reiser that closely, but now that it’s close to wrapping up, it’s definitely getting a bit comical. (But not for the defendant, I think.) Reiser, accused of killing his wife back in ‘06, apparently doesn’t think much of his defense attorney William Du Bois, and tried to change lawyers about a week ago. Judge Larry Goodman laid into Reiser, saying Reiser was”trying to make a mockery of [the] proceedings.”

Fast forward to today. Du Bois, winding up defense arguments to the jury, said it is “inconceivable” (hopefully in his best “Princess Bride” voice) that Reiser killed his wife. However, if he did, it would only be manslaughter. Huh? Why would a defense attorney leave the door open a crack like that for the jury? If I were on the jury, I’d take that to mean that even Reiser’s lawyer has doubts about his innocence.

Further, Du Bois laid out the prosecution’s argument for the jury, saying that the way the evidence has been presented makes it look like Reiser’s guilty no matter what:

“So if it’s clean, we can infer guilt,” Du Bois said of the car. “If it’s dirty, we can infer guilt. If he made a phone call to his wife only once, we can infer guilt. If he made many, you can infer guilt” on the ground that he was trying to throw people off, Du Bois said.

I’m no lawyer, but a lesson I recall from my rhetoric 1A class is never make a point for the other side. Clearly that didn’t occur to Du Bois. Du Bois then levels some personal attacks on his client:

“You may dislike him - that would put you in the majority of people who know him - but he didn’t commit the crime.”

Apparently Du Bois also likened Reiser to a duck-billed platypus, in some effort to make the jury understand that he’s a weird creature.

So I’m thinking now that Reiser did murder his wife, his attorney knows it and is trying to backhandedly get him convicted, and that the two men deserve each other.

Apparently the CDC went on record yesterday saying that this year’s flu season was the worst in recent years. This was definitely the case for me - I got a flu shot the last week in November, and promptly caught the flu two weeks later.  And then again a month later. Both times it leveled me.  Fortunately it was just fever and aches (no stomach symptoms), but the bug stayed with me longer than usual.  Can’t wait for the avian strains to jump to humans…that will be a hoot!