Sunday Shout-Out picks out the week’s stories that simply slipped our minds.

Last volleyball home game today at 12:30 p.m. and it’s free to all students. Plus: autographs! [Bear Bytes]

The hypothetical Mayor’s Urban Driving Competition: the most dangerous game? [NY Times]

A shitton of books for various Cal classes. But you won’t find any C++ books here. [UCB LJ]

Phillip Garrido apologizes “to every human being.” Somehow we don’t think this quite makes up for anything. [SFist]

Bears win a home game against the ranked Arizona Wildcats with a little circumstantial help [Daily Cal], [ESPN]

Image Source: Shirin Ghaffary, Daily Cal [ASIB]
Earlier: Bad News Bay-ers

The new location doesn’t appear to have been officially confirmed, although there has been talk of a move to the intersection of Dwight & San Pablo Avenues. We can only hope that this move will go well and the store will reopen in its full labyrinthine glory at its new location.

However, we can’t help noticing certain similarities between this move and the throes of closing-reopening agony Cody’s Books went through last year before finally succumbing to its wounds. Not that the trend is altogether surprising—given that the current economic downturn seems to be compounding the bookstore-annihilating forces already wielded by Amazon.com.

Image Source: 0olong under Creative Commons
Black Oak Books Moves [Berkeley Daily Planet]

The “luscious” Taschen books make for great coffee table decor, though that doesn’t mean that they’re not informative (they are! and pretty!). They tend to cover topics like art, film, architecture, history, film, photography, pop culture and fashion–just to name a few.

Here’s hoping that the store has “The Big Penis Book” in stock!

Where: Pegasus Books at Shattuck and Durant avenues
When: until May 5
Cost: cheaper than normal

Image Source: RT/Smokes under Creative Commons
Pegasus Fine Books [Website]
via UCB LJ

Being cheap bastards must come with Daily Cal territory. Today the paper highlighted some deals around campus for all your arts and entertainment purposes. The general gist?
* Blake’s, Shattuck Down Low, 924 Gilman and SF’s Bottom of the Hill for some live music
* United Artists’ Flashback Features for old flicks
* Half-Price Books for–you guessed it–books
* Oh hai, don’t forget the local Chinatowns either

Or you could, you know, download stuff semi- not really legally of the Intarwebz. Just saying.

Image Source: Cayusa under Creative Commons
For A Few Dollars Less [Daily Cal]

The place’s all decked out in bling now–massive chandeliers, granite counter-tops, marble floors you could check your reflection in. Those who would know say that it’s a huge change; the library wasn’t exactly a classy looking lady before the makeover, but now its polish extends to include a gold-leafed dome and that sparkling clean marble flooring. We don’t know what it was like before the university splurged millions of dollars on the remodeling, but we imagine a dark, dreary place where slavering packs of feral grad students roamed unchecked and blood-curdling shrieks emitted from the pages of books when you chanced to crack them open.

(Funnily enough, the library does call itself the proud owner of 40,000 fragments of Egyptian papyrus documents and a two-century old French book bound in human skin.)

The collection’s still in the midst of its 11-week move, and normal hours don’t resume until Jan. 20, but the library’s Mark Twain exhibit will open to the public on Dec. 1. It’s going to be an exhibit about Mark Twain’s leisurely pursuits and how they made him write the things he did and do the things he wanted. Like invent adjustable garment straps. True story.

Image Source: Aloys5268 under Wikimedia Commons
Bancroft Move News [Bancroft Library]
UC’s Bancroft Library celebrating Mark Twain [SF Chron]
After three years of renovation, Bancroft Library returns to UC Berkeley [San Jose Mercury News]

If you want the best deal in textbooks, you need to go online. Sure, you have to pay for shipping and you won’t necessarily get your books on time, but that’s why you can return your “loaners” back to Ned’s or the student store. Don’t be a clueless freshmen–get in the know!

Whether it’s Come Get Used, Amazon or Half that you prefer, we’ve got one better: Big Words. Big Words prowls those other sites and reports back to you on the best deals on the Web. It even tells you all the secret deals, like typing in “BIOLOGY” to get $10 off a $100+ order on Ned’s Web site.

Sometimes buying off a friend doesn’t pan out (and that’s really where you get the best deals). Enter the Web. Ooh. Shiny.

Image: Aloys5268 under Wikimedia Commons
Big Words [Web site]
via Lifehacker
Earlier: Make a Cheap Book Rack

You can make a book rack out of a cheap wire hanger–yes, a wire hanger. Basically, you’re turning a triangle into a rectangle with a few well placed bends.

1. Start with the legs of the wire hanger’s triangle. Bend midway through each leg.

2. Pull down on the base to stretch it out. Straighten out the sides and bend two new corners into the base.

3. Fold the wire hanger in half (think hamburger, not hot dog), making sure to leave enough room at the bend to hold your book.

All that’s left is to hammer in a nail and hang your rack. Voila! You’re a cheap, er, economical college student.

Image Source: Superziper
DIY Wire Hanger Book or Magazine Rack [Lifehacker]
Earlier: Cook More Than Just Ramen

When she was alive, Joyce Columbia Berner loved books so much that she married them. No, really, she pretty much did–Berner had such an affinity for written stories that she eventually changed her last name to “Book.” She died with the name of Joyce Columbia Book last year, and that was that. Berkeley lost one of its many eccentric souls.

Today, however, the name Joyce Columbia Book resurfaces after a recent revelation. When Book died, she left a great amount of money to the Berkeley Public Library–$77,000, to be exact.

Does this mean there will be more copies of bestsellers like “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” to share? We’ll find out soon. For more interesting anecdotes on Book’s life and passionate love for reading, check out the East Bay Express. The woman apparently loved the BPL’s north branch, and preferred to read “mysteries with cats in them.”

So, in honor of Ms. Book, the Clog presents a few summer reading recommendations:

* “Cat’s Eyewitness” by Rita Mae Brown and Sneaky Pie Brown
This thrilling supernatural mystery not only involves felines, but is also written by a woman and her cat.

* “Bookmarked to Die” by Jo Dereske
A woman enters a midlife crisis, two people in her therapy group die and her cat, Boy Cat Zukas, disappears. Tragic and intriguing, no?

* “Cattery Row” by Clea Simon
Why read the obligatory John Steinbeck novel when you can solve a mystery involving the theft of expensive showcats?

Image Source: Aloys5268 under Wikimedia Commons
Book-loving Benefactor Named Book Leaves Fortune to Berkeley Libraries [East Bay Express]

If you compare a 2007 survey on Cal reading tastes to similar surveys administered in 1997 and 1987, what can you infer about Berkeley students? Perhaps we should be afraid–very afraid. In the past 20 years, student preferences strayed away from poignant classics like “The Fountainhead” and “The Color Purple,” to lucrative bestsellers like “Harry Potter” and the “Da Vinci Code.” Alright, we admit it–we read and loved both bestsellers–but what does it mean that the most elite public education institution in the world prefers contemporary fluff over literary heavyweights? Could it be a sign of the apocalypse?

Perhaps, but it could also be that “(t)he 1987 survey, like the ‘97 version, was conducted simply by distributing sheets of paper to freshman English classes,” while the most recent one was a “web-based summer/fall 2007 Survey of New Students (SoNS)” from 2,875 freshmen in every major.

Obviously, that explanation isn’t as fun.

Take a look at a 20 years’ change in student reading preferences, extracted from a survey brought to you by Distinguished Teacher Award recipient and College Writing lecturer, Steve Tollefson, and make your own silly assumptions.

Top reads of UC Berkeley undergrads

1987 (ties indicated)

1. The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
2. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
3. Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
4. It (Stephen King)
5. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S. Thompson)
6. Black Boy (Richard Wright)
Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean Auel)
If Tomorrow Comes (Sidney Sheldon)
Less than Zero (Brett Easton Ellis)
Native Son (Richard Wright)

1997 (ties indicated)

1. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
2. A Hundred Secret Senses (Amy Tan)
Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
3. The Firm (John Grisham)
The Kitchen God’s Wife (Amy Tan)
4. How Stella Got Her Groove Back (Terry McMillan)
Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan)
5. 1984 (George Orwell)
The Bible
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austin)
The Lost World (Michael Crichton)
The Brothers Karamozov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

2007 (tie indicated)

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J.K. Rowling)
2. title unspecified (J.K. Rowling)
3. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
4. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
5. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (J.K. Rowling)
6. 1984 (George Orwell)
7. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
8. A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini)
9. Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling)

Image Source: chotda under Creative Commons
A snapshot of student reading habits over two decades [NewsCenter]

1. “The Best and the Brightest” by David Halberstam
2. “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
3. “The Trial” by Franz Kafka
4. “The Peloponnesian War” by Thucydides
5. “The Selected Stories of Li Xun”

And the kicker,

 An Important Book you haven’t gotten around to reading: Any excellent new book that helps assess the challenges of global climate change … even if it’s by Al Gore.

A Life In Books [Newsweek]