Berkeley has been known for its chilly winter-like weather year-round. I remember last year when Channel 5 did a news story about the first day of school and showed freshmen huddled up in sweatshirts on a foggy morning in August. This week has been an aberration. From Wednesday, high temperatures were 91, 94, and 91. I went home for the weekend only to encounter a temp of 98.

In the BART ride home, a sane enough man with a bicycle sat in front of me. About 15 minutes in, passing by Lake Merritt station, he started to talk to a woman in Chicago. She was apparently a police dispatcher. His brother had been arrested on some "bogus" charge, as he described it, and wanted to talk to the detective in charge. He got the run-around and after about three connections, got back to the same dispatcher, to whom the man just started yelling at the poor woman, wanting to get the detective on the phone. I think he got disconnected because he started yelling profanities. Once he talked again, he started yelling, "I WANT DETECTIVE FRANCIS ON THE PHONE!!! F-R-A-N... He was stopped when the person on the other end apparently identified himself as Detective Francis. The man explained his situation and calmed down since he complimented the detective for his nice attitude. Once he was done with his call, he got off the train.

Now here's the weird part of this loud incident. As I saw the man, he had no phone in his hand. I assumed he had one of the those ear pieces that connect to a cell phone, plus his finger was in the ear the entire time as if holding onto some headphone. But about 5 minutes into the conversation, only his finger was in his ear. He had yelled at himself for 15 minutes all the way up to San Leandro station.

It has been exactly a month since school let out for the traditional school year and today the summer session. Various people have asked me why I keep taking summer classes when I've got a bazillion units already. Well, I'm overachieving I guess. Besides, it's a history class. I'll busy myself with the reading this summer; a textbook, a compilation, and a course reader. And essays galore. The professor either acts high or like a surfer from socal. Either way, he's got a phd. He teaches in West Texas and is 30% deaf. What better place to put him than a 100-student classroom for 40 students. He gets easily distracted and once he gets distracted, has a hard time getting back on track, easily forgetting what he was talking about before. For example, questions about administrative things turned into a discussion about "Berkeley time" and why it's called that. Then it turned into a "What makes Berkeley, Berkeley?" discussion. Finally, once he was done, he asks the first guy who asked a question what his question was all about. With lots of yelling and tangents, he's an unorthodox teacher but it seems as though he knows his stuff.

When I got back to Berkeley, everyone seemed a bit angrier or on edge for some odd reason. Driving on University, I saw three red light runners from I-80 to my street McGee. The first bus I rode today wouldn't pick me up at first. He was closing the door and I was running toward it. I got to the door and I motioned for him to open it. And all he did was stare at me. It was the most awkward 10 seconds but he finally opened. After the aforementioned class, I stood about 3 feet from the bus pole when the bus came and went. It stopped at a nearby red light and I ran to it and asked him why he didn't stop and he yells back that I wasn't standing at the pole. Geez, three feet away with my arm waving, isn't that enough? Then there was the petition guy who was running around trying to get people to sign his petition. What was it for? I don't know. He gave me a mean look and went on his way. Finally, police cars have been racing past my apartment more than usual. 3 in the last 2 hours. It's all too weird.

There were also 3 KRON-4 vans parked around the Berkeley campus. I have no idea what could be happening unless they wanted to cover the first day of Session C.

You know, Listerine bottles get bigger and bigger with no reason for it. Sure, people need their mouthwash but I get back to my apartment and my roommate has bought a bottle of mouthwash bigger than the gallon of bleach that sits on the floor. I guess as long as he doesn't mix the two up, he'll be fine.

What have I been doing the last month? Seemingly nothing. Sure, there's the movies. And the friends. And that graduation thing. And that fender-bender. I don't seem to remember much more than that. The house is getting a new roof so that's something new. My parents spent three days talking to this one roofer about prices, shingles, and tiles, virtually wearing him out. Then after one hour with another roofer, they choose him, screwing over the three-day guy. With a $5,000 difference, I can understand why. But he doesn't know it yet and he still has his samples at the house. The next day, 3 Mexican guys climb up onto the roof and start tearing it apart. After two days, it's all gone and new gutters have been installed. Ever since...silence. Apparently, they don't have the tiles and won't be delivered til tomorrow. In the meantime, a big ad of the company sits in the front yard, announcing "another quality roof installed" when a big black sheet sits on the roof.

In news I've seen, TNN was supposed to change their name to Spike TV. Why they would want to do this I don't know. It's a pretty dumb name, but to them, it screams male so that's what they want to do. In comes Spike Lee, suing Viacom to stop the name change claiming people will confuse the channel with him. I don't know, the last thing I think of when I hear Spike TV, would be Spike Lee. I think of the punch at parties. I think of the things under my shoes when I play golf or soccer. I think of volleyball. Heck, I'll think of Spike Jonze before Spike Lee. It's a dumb lawsuit for a dumb name that they'll probably want to change in the future anyway.

The governor of California is on his way to being recalled. Davis is brushing this off as an effort by the losers of the last election to get him out of office. But when a million people sign a petition to do so and possibly a majority of voters in an election will agree to it, then maybe it is the right thing to do. It will only be so if there is an adequate replacement waiting in the wings. And right now, there is none. All the decent Democrats are standing behind Davis, including the two senators and the constitutional officers. On the Republican side, there's Schwarzenegger but all he's done politically is pass an after school program. There's Issa, a congressman heading the recall campaign, but he's too right-wing for a left-wing state. There's Condi Rice, National Security Adviser, but she's a foreign policy person, not a fiscal person. There's Bill Simon, but he already lost to Davis. So who's left? It could be you. All you need is 65 signatures and $3500 to get on the ballot. Then all it takes is for you to get the most votes and you're instantly governor. What a story that will be.

Before I saw The Hulk (in a half-empty auditorium, probably will only make $120 million, tops), I saw a trailer for a live-action Peter Pan. Something seemed very wrong about it. I don't know why. It's my belief they shouldn't mess with the cartoon. It's bad enough Hook was made. But what really got me was the music. They played Coldplay's Clocks. It seemed all too awkward with what was going on the screen.

The Hulk
Ang Lee's first film since the warmly received but overrated "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is anything but small. It's the major comic franchise, The Hulk. But Lee's big ideas for this green man ultimately fall flat. The action takes us to a desert base known as "Desert Base" where David Banner is working on some genetic resequencing. When his military boss, Ross, rejects the use of human subjects, David instead chooses to experiment it on himself. When his wife announces she's pregnant and has their baby, David finds that Bruce has inherited the altered genes. The consequences of this boy even being alive eventually forces Bruce to move in with foster parents. Flash forward 30 years later to Berkeley, where Bruce (Eric Bana) has also become a geneticist, coincidentally partnering with Ross' daughter Betty (Jennifer Connelly), not knowing about the whereabouts of his parents or any memories of them. A freak accident involving gamma radiation activates the altered genes inside Bruce and he becomes the Hulk. Ross (Sam Elliott) is now forced to stop the Hulk by any means necessary while David (Nick Nolte) tries to re-establish contact with his son after 30 years of prison.

Lee and writing partner James Schamus seem to specialize in filming human interactions. They bring it here to the Hulk with uneven results. The story of Bruce's origins and the constant tries to remember his past bog down the entire movie and make it tediously long. We all come to see The Hulk, but have to sit through a good hour of dialogue to get to him. It comes to a point where they're just stretching the material all the way it can be, making the audience wonder why we should care about the subject altogether and get to the more exciting things the Hulk could be doing. Lee's presentation of the long material is innovative but wasted. He uses multiple cameras to capture the same scene at multiple angles, a la 24, and putting them in as if we're moving from panel to panel in a comic book. Sure, it was nice to see and all, but 24 uses this technique to its advantage by looking at different locales at the same time while Lee confines it to two or three different shots of the same subject. If there is any saving grace to the film, it's in the action. As long as you don't see the Hulk close-up to recognize how fake he is (the fish in Finding Nemo seem more real), it's pretty cool to see him taking bullets, evading helicopters, or jumping from mountain to mountain. But that's only 30 minutes out of a 138 minute movie. 2 stars

28 Days Later
Director Danny Boyle returns for a haunting look at our possible future. After animal rights activists release some rage-inflicted apes, its virus quickly spreads around the world. It simply takes the introduction of infected blood into the blood stream to get rage, something easily done with the inflicted being bloody and vomiting blood non-stop. 28 days later, Jim, a bike messenger, wakes up from a coma only to find the hospital and the entire city of London deserted. Church won't do any good; it's filled with dead bodies and beady-red-eyed humans inflicted with rage. He soon meets up with a few unaffected people, Selena and a father-daughter duo, and make their way toward a radio broadcast calling out for help. What they find is a small group of soldiers questioning their future in a world filled with nothing for them. Jim and his group must fight off the inflicted and the uninflicted in order to survive.

Though with flaws, Boyle returns from the disastrous "The Beach" to deliver a solid and scary thriller. His digital camera work, blurred and shaky with closeups galore a la Blair Witch, adds a level of tension to an already scary situation of zombies roaming around and soldiers being absolutely controlling. It's hard to tell what keeps these zombies going except to seek out living beings and spit blood all over them, but these encounters are few and far between in the movie as most of the first 2/3rds of the movie is characters roaming around looking for other people, a storyline that takes an hour to tell even though it could have done in half that time. But the true scary aspects of the film lie not with the red eyes of the zombies (yes, scary enough), but with the shocking reality of the situation they're in and the things humans do, such as the soldiers, in reaction to it. Boyle thus sees this as an opportunity to do something big, almost epic, with this film, evident from the wide shots of a deserted London and the unnecessary length of its climactic bloody scenes, when all that's needed is something smaller. 2.5 stars

Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd
Let's see...no Jim Carrey...no Jeff Daniels...no Farrelly Brothers...sure, make a prequel. And that's exactly what they've done in detailing Harry and Lloyd's first encounter. It was Harry's (Derek Richardson) first day of high school and his mother (Mimi Rogers?!?) gave him a map and the instruction to make a new friend. In comes Lloyd (Eric Christian Olsen) who comes crashing into him while chasing the school bus even though he lives with his father at school. They soon become best pals. Meanwhile, the principal and lunchlady (Eugene Levy and Cheri Oteri) scheme to start a special needs class to get $100,000 and buy themselves a condo in Hawaii. Of course, their first two students are Harry and Lloyd. A beautiful reporter, Jessica (Rachel Nichols), seems to have figured things out and enlists Harry and Lloyd to help.

I probably laughed twice and chuckled a few times more. Other than that, the result is a poorly made film that embarrasses its two actors with no real punchline. I guess I don't really see the humor in smearing chocolate all over a bathroom or seeing the effects of a brain freeze. It becomes more stupid than it is funny. Veteran comedians Levy and Oteri are wasted in this film, possibly literally when they signed the contract to be in the film. And the three-man script with a director with 2 films to his credit does not come close in quality to its earlier incarnation. At least Olsen and Richardson kinda look like Carrey and Daniels. Half a star.

Congrats to my cousin Tram for graduating from Oak Grove today. She'll be going to Berkeley next fall so umm, uhh, good luck to that. I'm sure she'll have as much as fun as I'm not having.

Going to graduation, it seemed a bit shorter this year. Maybe it was the smaller class. Maybe it was the inaudible speeches. Or the way they were speeding through the names. Whatever it was, I passed the time reasonably well while talking with old classmates and seeing others, including Theodore, Crystal, Gurjeet, Andrew, and other people whose names I forgot but seemed to recognize me. I think one guy's name was Chris. And maybe there was another Andrew there. There were a couple of others but I was totally clueless.

2 Fast 2 Furious
The sequel to the successful "The Fast and the Furious" found itself without its bankable star, Vin Diesel, nor its director, Rob Cohen. Instead, in comes John Singleton as director and a change in locale from Los Angeles to Miami. What results are the same things that made the first one work but not much else. Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) is out of the police force and now focused exclusively on cars. A police raid at a race strip rounds up Brian for the purpose of being part of an operation to bring down a drug operation led by Carter Verone. It is the police's belief that if Verone can be caught with drug money, he can be captured. Brian and his friend Roman (Tyrese) play the role of transporters; to bring the money down to the Florida Keys without being caught. The wild-card in the whole operation is undercover agent Monica Clemente (Eva Mendes), who may be playing both sides.

I must admit, I couldn't sit through the first one in just one sitting. I missed it in theatres. Watched roughly the first half on DVD and the other on some free preview from Starz. Here, ignoring the awful plot, the racing scenes and the added comic relief by Tyrese makes this one at least watchable at the way through. But the material that the actors must work through treats them and their cars as just eye candy. The entire plot point of transporting the money seems to be completely unnecessary since with all the insiders he has in the police department and the security he has, it seems Verone could have taken the money himself instead of bringing in middlemen. The customs agents are complete idiots right from the start with their assumption that Brian and Roman were speeding off instead of doing their job. And the big climax of hundreds of cars overwhelming the police force could have been scaled down a bit. In a word and a number, it was 2 ridiculous. But when you do step into a theatre to see it, you're in for a fun ride. 2 stars

It's pretty troubling that a little girl was kidnapped on Friday. This really wouldn't be news here since kidnappings seem to be happening all the time with all the nationwide manhunts and the numerous amber alerts that people slow down and read, plaguing my commute home whenever I have a commute home. But this one hit nearby, down Monterey Highway at Tennant near the 85 overpass. While we should be all thankful that she was found in East Palo Alto Sunday night, the question remains, who would do such a thing as to stalk this poor girl and kidnap her in broad daylight, attacking the mother and brother in the process? There's no motive, no ransom note, and no explanation as to why the kidnapper let the girl go free, which leads to another thing.

Police are crediting Sunday's release of footage from a video surveillance camera that captured the kidnapper speeding down the street for this sudden re-appearance of the girl. Being safe should be applauded. Locking doors and closing windows, that's the extent my house goes through. But cameras at a neighbor's house? These aren't mansions they're living at. They're just regular single family homes and there are security cameras filming the place? That may be going overboard, but the grainy picture captured of a fuzzy car with illegible license plates and the sounds of a struggle easily confused with birds chirping prevented a family from further anguish.

In a perfect world, drivers like me would be appreciated for their carefulness. It's a shame we don't live in such a world and the resulting mixture of awful drivers results in accidents like the one I had last week. It wasn't much. My car wasn't damaged at all. She got a pretty heavy dent. So it's like this. It's the OG parking lot, teachers lot so supposedly safer, picking up little sister from school. I've parked in a space waiting for her. She comes out with a friend and gets in the car. Slowly, I start to back out. No cars from my vantage point except for a car backing out about 10 spaces farther down. Seeing as how I've backed out just enough, I begin to brake, look ahead, and change to D. Suddenly, BUMP. What happened? The car across from me had speedily backed out and in the time my car was braking from its reverse, it had hit her car in the side rear. Since my rear bumper hit her side, there wasn't any damage on my car. I park back in and get out and start yelling that I had the right of way. I was all the way out. Didn't you see me??? But she seems to take it in stride as if nothing happened. I later find out she's been in two accidents before. So, as a seasoned veteran, she proclaims no one was at fault and waits to exchange insurance info. She says it's a small dent relative to the car and since her brother works at a body shop, she wouldn't report it to the insurance. A mother who was a witness also said not to report it, she being a veteran of 5 accidents as a teenager. Right then, I'm shocked at what kind of drivers I'm surrounded by. Once it's done, she speeds off, late for work and I go on my way.

Finding Nemo
The 5th Pixar Animated Studios Film shows that they have perfected the art of the high quality cartoon only Disney in its glory days could achieve. Here, Marlin, a clownfish voiced by Albert Brooks, is trying to start over after his wife and hundreds of eggs were taken away from him through the circle of life. What was left was one single egg, which Marlin promptly named Nemo, his wife's favorite name. Nemo grows up to be a fearless fish, willing to explore the unknown, but is held back by his overprotective father. At school, Nemo hangs around a bunch of other sea life who goes off on their own to the edges of a reef near Australia. There, Nemo finds himself alone and gets taken by a scuba diver/dentist to be a gift for his niece, who killed the last fish she was given. Marlin makes it his mission to find Nemo anyway he can. Along the way, he meets Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) a fish with a memory loss condition. Together, they take a journey through the ocean, encountering sharks, jellyfish, and sea turtles on their way to Sydney. Meanwhile, Nemo makes friends with the other fish in the aquarium to plot their way out of the tank and towards the nearby ocean.

There are two things every cartoon needs to be successful. One is an exotic location filled with exotic characters that can't be achieved through live action. The other is crossover appeal between adults and children alike. Finding Nemo is a perfect example of these. The visual presentation is excellent. There were some underwater shots where I was convinced that I was looking at someone filming with a camera only to realize it was totally animated. The level of detail seen on screen makes it seem like it might as well have been shot with a camera.

The story itself is simple enough so that kids can follow and adults won't be bored by it since we can all relate to the relationship between father and son. Word of caution to the littlest of kids who may find some scenes frightening. Older kids may not be frightened, but they'll probably be annoyed by the screaming and crying that may follow.

The people providing the voices to the sea life bring passion to their characters, especially the main pair of Brooks and DeGeneres as well as Willem Dafoe, who as Gill, has a similar handicap Nemo has with their defective fins. It's this basic premise to entertain and wonder that gives Finding Nemo the praise it deserves. 4 stars