“How to Have Fun and Not Die” should really be required reading for every incoming Freshman at Berkeley. Forget “The Omnivore’s Dilemma:” most of us are vegetarian anyway, and if we’re not we probably have some eloquently rehearsed spiel involving the words “natural” and “protein deficiency.” I mean, really, doesn’t the title just about sum up the goal of nearly every weekend in Berkeley?

Dedicated to spreading the word (and we mean really dedicated, the man has given a lecture almost every other day since May), Eddie Einbinder came to Berkeley Tuesday to give us the talk that D.A.R.E. never dared to:

• He begins by explaining his beverage of choice: “excuse the fact that I’m drinking a beer up here, I lost my water.” Fun fact: you can live longer drinking only beer than only water. So if the earthquake hits, run for the frats.
• He assures us that a “empirical research” was involved in the making of this book. So obviously he’s trustworthy.
• “Most kids get their information about drugs from their drug dealers, their friends in the cafeteria and some sketchy people on the internet. Why is their no reliable source of drug information out there?” Amen.
• Prescription drugs have officially replaced weed as drug of choice amongst college kids. Hard to tell in Berkeley: half the school’s high and the other half’s popping their little brother’s Adderall in the main stacks.
• Speaking of, stop snorting Adderall guys, snorting’s not natural. You’ve been eating things and inhaling forever, but mommy never asked you to snort your Vitamin tablets.
• The most dangerous combination of drugs? Ecstasy and Viagra. “Don’t mix two substances that both encourage and enable you to use your d*ck for four hours … you laugh but there’s a story that ends with gangrene.”
• Apparently there’s a small and curious group of people who prefer acid eye drops to the standard tabs. Right, like you don’t already see enough.
• “No one ever tried a cigarette and was like, I’m high, this is awesome, I want to do this immediately again. People get addicted to smoking for bullsh*t reasons.”
• As a general rule when doing drugs: “Don’t do sh*t that you wouldn’t do if you were unconscious.”
• He once got pulled over in Pennsylvania for “drunk walking,” and had his licence revoked for 90 days.
• “Here’s the bottom line: any drug information’s really worth sh*t because everyone’s chemical makeup is different. Really all of this should suggest how sketchy all of this really is.”

Someone raises their hand and asks, “What makes you qualified to write this book? Like, it just seems like you haven’t really done that many drugs. Why do you care this much?” Which of course leads him to defensively log every year of his life and the corresponding drug that went along with it.

We heard mutterings of “I could have given that lecture,” and “he didn’t tell us about the fun combinations” on our way out.

Image Source: funkandjazz under Creative Commons
How to Have Fun and Not Die [Site]

The “let’s turn science-y stuff into a form of entertainment that people will actually want to watch in their free time” approach has been successful in the past with shows like Bill Nye the Science Guy, the Magic School Bus and Carl Sagan’s series “The Cosmos.”

So it’s no surprise that the latest video from the campus musical group the Sounds of Science has become an instant YouTube hit. Since their last video, “The Nano Song,” they’ve really stepped it up on special effects, lyrics and editing. Lawrence Lab even blows up in the video.

Only one problem: “The Safety Song” isn’t actually that safe: a radioactive fluid is cleaned up with a paper towel (no puppet evacuation, tisk tisk) and safety glasses are worn instead of safety goggles. So LBL’s asking for a few revisions before they use it as part of their safety demo.

The Safety Song [YouTube]
Students Turn Sounds of Science Into YouTube Hit [Daily Cal]

Why are we so passively tolerant of our fellow citizen’s shenanigans?

Picture some undergrad who has long hair and hasn’t shaved in weeks, playing badly on his guitar “Stairway to Heaven* somewhere on campus, creating nothing but grating noise because every note it out of tune, and distracting everyone who’s just trying to get to class and pass their midterms.

Why do we tolerate such behavior? It’s clearly detrimental to public health, and disrupts the general harmony of society. Maybe we believe too much in individual freedom. Maybe it’s time to reign back in some of these freedoms.

To which another witty LiveJournal-er responded:

Picture some undergrad who is sitting in front of his or her computer on the internetz, bitching about someone who is completely harmless.

Why do we tolerate such behavior? Maybe we believe too much in individual freedom. Maybe it’s time to reign back in some of these freedoms.

You did kinda set yourself up for that one, hippie_patrol, that’s like asking why there’s fish in water. But of course, calling someone a troll is like calling them a hipster: the ones who truly one are one are the ones who love to point out how annoying they are.

Image Source: alexkon under Creative Commons
Berkeley LiveJournal [Site]

You know what would really help solve this budget crisis: just getting rid of the professors. Don’t get something? Just press the “I don’t understand” button on your chair. [New York Times]

There’s a lot of Shakespeare going on in Berkeley, folks. Check out the BareStage production of “Othello” or The Globe Theatre’s production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” at Zellerbach. The Clog has seen both and we can vouch that both are excellent. [Cal Performances]

If, for some reason, you have the mid-fall urge to go ice skating, then too bad. Just kidding—you can head over to the Embarcadero rink or the Safeway Rink in Union Square in SF to get your skate on. [7x7]

Earlier: Twitter Bitterness Never Gets Old

Our favorite colorful campus character has to be “Bible Man” (we just made that up), found near the steps of Sproul reading Bible passages in a soothing monotone. We like him because his tranquil voice makes him easy to tune out, unlike the confrontational tirades of Yoshua or the “F*ck You Technology” dude.

We always figured he was reading passages out of Deuteronomy or Genesis, but we’d never actually stopped to listen to him. Turns out the open Bible’s just for looks. He’s talking about religion, kinda, but mostly he’s just talking. Here’re some excerpts:

• “There’s an obsession in America with sex, chocolate, Big Macs, big bucks, rock and roll … let the good times roll.”
• “Michael Jackson will rise again!”
• “Girls, when a guy tells you he loves you and he doesn’t care about sex, he’s probably a sex addict.”
• “Jesus never once made a mistake. Never.”
• “SATAN WAS THE FIRST CHILD MOLESTER!”
• “There’s only two nations today: the nation of saved and not.”
• “God is a good God. He gave us potatoes and he gave us grease to make french fries.”
• “Are you having a good sex life? Well God created sex and he created you. Sex is good.”
• “Only God can make a banana.”

Intrigued, we asked him a few questions about himself:

• His real name is Edmond Richards, as we found out from his official-looking bus pass laminated and hanging around his neck.
• He was sent to Berkeley by God to save students. He was sent to other campuses as well, including USC.
• He talks to God a lot … while walking down the street, while brushing his teeth and in his dreams.
• He speaks some Mandarin.
• He was born in Cuba.
• He was saved by a campus speaker like him back in the ’70s.

So next time you see him, we suggest you tune in for a bit. The guy’s full of epic quotes.

Image Source: Ruby Lee
Earlier: Instructor Edition

But male bats know. Just like with us homo sapiens (at least in porn), it’s common courtesy to go down, or up, as it may be with bats (how would that work hanging upside down?) before having sex, according to a new study in the journal PLoS ONE.

But unlike with us, it’s not all about pleasure. Oral sex in fruit bats may increase the chances of fertilization, kill bacteria on the penis or protect both parties from sexually transmitted diseases. We bet last last one would get a lot more girls to give head if it was true of humans as well.

It also helps the male last longer: “A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male’s penis during copulation and the duration of copulation.”

Here’s the part where we try to work this into a Halloween theme. So this information is pretty creepy right? And we talked about bats. Well, we tried.

Image Source: Kyle Kesselring under Creative Commons
NSFW Science: Fruit Bat Fellatio [BoingBoing]
Earlier: Germans Offer to Pay More Taxes

It’s that time of year again: the holiday where people dress up in ridiculous costumes, hand out free food and stuff themselves. We’re talking about Chipotle Free Burrito Day of course.

“Come in on Halloween dressed like a Chipotle burrito, taco, bowl or salad and we’ll complete your costume with a FREE BURRITO. Saturday, October 31, 2009 6pm- closing.”

It’s not as humiliating as it sounds. Don’t waste a whole roll of tin foil pinning your arms to your sides or dragging out your taco costume from when you were a kid and trying to squeeze yourself into it. Just get a piece of foil from the trashcan outside, where people are bound to leave their costumes/trash and get in line before the rest of Berkeley does.

As veteran Chipotle Day participants, get there right when the promotion starts, because not even Chipotle is worth waiting in that long of a line for. And that’s a bold statement.

Image Source: jasoneppink under Creative Commons
Chipotle Free Burrito Day! [lalate news]

The film claimed to be about Measure G, passed in 2006 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent in the city by 2050. According to the pamphlet handed out at the showing: “This film intended to follow Berkeley leadership from City Hall to the grass roots as they blaze a path to success, and set an example for the nation.” The only part of that statement that we could really agree with is the word “blaze.”

The film’s goal, as you can probably guess from the title, portrayed Berkeley as a city of theatrics: a circus of crazy characters, ridiculous political figures and overzealous hippies fighting for causes that the rest of the country wouldn’t bat an eye at.

It followed Lee Kechley as she dug through dumpsters and passionately explained how Berkeley stole the idea of curbside recycling from her. It showed Shirley Dean bickering with her husband in her home and RunningWolf’s cry for attention campaign for Mayor and of course the altercations between the BPD and the sitters of the infamous tree sit. Oh yeah, and they talked about Measure G, we think …

Becky O’ Malley, Executive Editor of the Daily Planet, who spoke multiple times in the film, said: “I thought it was funny, kind of like a cartoon.” The film was many things: a criticism of Berkeley culture, a visual seizure or just very confusing (random interspliced title cards like “There are dead birds”), but a cartoon was not one of them.

That said, the film was definitely Berkeley, we’ll give him that.

Power Trip – Theatrically Berkeley [YouTube]
Earlier: Documentary Reps People of da Wood

He’s coming to promote his first nonfiction work, Eating Animals, a book about why people shouldn’t eat animals. It really seems to be a theme in Berkeley this year. Seriously, when’s Ingrid Newkirk gonna come and speak?

The book has already won the favor of Oprah and converted Natalie Portman to veganism. Portman explains how Foer takes a stab at Pollan:

He posits that consideration, as promoted by Michael Pollan in The Ominvore’s Dilemma, which has more to do with being polite to your tablemates than to your own ideals, would be absurd if applied to any other belief (e.g., I don’t believe in rape, but if it’s what it takes to please my dinner hosts, then so be it).

Just goes to show: even when you’re preaching to the choir, they’ll still criticize your sermon.

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer [YouTube]
Acclaimed novelist Jonathan Safran Foer book signing at the Multicultural Center on November 6 [ASUC]
Natalie Portman: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals Turned Me Vegan [HuffingtonPost]

Ulrike Malmendier of UC Berkeley and Stefan Nagel of Stanford looked at the investment propensity of “Depression babies” and found that they were more than a little hesitant to do their shopping at the stock market. As it turns out, the mental trauma of financial shocks are long-lasting, especially for those who endure them in their formative years (18-25).

According to their research:

… individuals growing up during recessions tend to believe that success in life depends more on luck than on effort, support more government redistribution, but are less confident in public institutions.

So long after the recession has receded, it’ll still leave a bad taste in your mouth (probably the stench of metal left from all that penny pinching).

Will Recession Forever Scar Young Investors? [Wall Street Journal]
Image Source: waɪ.tiː under Creative Commons