Code Pink has been protesting in front of the Marine Corps Officer Recruitment Office in Berkeley for a solid year now. On rare occasion other groups will join them and they’ll combine to make a somewhat larger protest that will make the evening news — but in actuality Code Pink has tried to maintain a presence in front of the office every single day. Most of these day-by-day micro-protests go completely unnoticed by the media (and the public), but Code Pink is doing their best to keep the pressure on continuously (though on some days they can’t seem to muster even one protester).

Anyway, over the past year, I’ve had occasion to pass through downtown Berkeley quite a number of times, and whenever I did, I tried to snap a picture or two of whatever’s happening in front of the recruiting office. Most of the time these daily protests fell far beneath the threshold of something that would merit a full zombietime report. And so the pictures were filed away and forgotten.

Until now.

This posting will be nothing more than a melange of random snapshots of the ongoing Code Pink protests over the last several months, in no particular order, and with no particular narrative. Just a “photo dump,” as the expression goes. If you have a need for an as-yet unseen photo in your coverage of Code Pink or Berkeley or whatever, feel free to use any of these.

The message on the back of the Code Pink truck slowly evolves over time in a way that is only noticeable if you have a series of pictures extending across several months. This is what it said early in 2008…

…and this is what it said months later. Or is is the other way around?

I just can’t get enough of these hilarious Code Pink Mercedes Benz logos. To this day I can’t understand how a “peace group” can have trouble making a peace sign. Even more mystifiying: Most of the women in Code Pink have been “peace” protesters for their entire adult lives (even long before they joined Code Pink), and yet after all that time they still can’t consistently get it right.

Oh, that’s rich! How clever!

To celebrate Mother’s Day (or something along those lines), Code Pink baked a bunch of pink man-shaped sugar cookies and displayed them on a pink camouflage tarp in front of the office. The broken cookies, according to Zanne Joi, represented dead and injured soldiers.

Whenever a video camera hove into view, someone would inevitably march back and back wearing an “Impeach” sign.

Sometime in 2008 Code Pink decided to jump on the Global Warming bandwagon by declaring that “War Is Not Green!”

They used their oh-so-“green” gas-guzzling flatbed truck to stage a week-long campover directly in front of the office. Needless to say, the police were none too pleased.

At one point Code Pink had exhibited a long piece of butcher paper on which someone(s) had written an interminable rant. This is just a small section of it.

Presenting the Obamobile:

I’ve spotted this car driving all over the Bay Area, but was never able to snap a decent picture of it until now.

…that even the dogs walk around with baguettes.

On July 27, 2008, I went to the notorious “Up Your Alley” Fair in San Francisco as an investigative follow-up to last year’s report about the scandal over the Miller Beer sponsorship of the Folsom Street Fair. Since Up Your Alley is run by the same organization, I stopped by to see if anything had changed. You can see the results posted at zombietime here, if you dare:

Up Your Alley Fair 2008.

The picture shown above was about the only non-explicit image I could find to post here at zomblog.

I’ve just posted at zombietime a mini-report about two competing rallies outside a fundraiser featuring John McCain in San Francisco:

McCain in San Francisco: Fundraiser Rally, July 28, 2008.

Nothing particularly newsworthy happened, but I did capture a few interesting vignettes and memorable photos — including this one:

An “allegory” is a symbolic representation of an abstract idea, sometimes used in artworks to evoke concepts that can’t be depicted directly. Allegorical photographs, however, are extremely rare, because (unless they are posed studio photographs) one cannot arrange or construct the elements of any candid image to convey a particular philosophical notion. Yet this picture I took at the rally strikes me as a perfect example of an allegorical photo, because the accidental figures in the foreground (a Muslim woman in traditional garb, turning away sadly and leaving the scene — while a young westernized woman arrives to take her place) perfectly encapsulates the real “Bush legacy” announced on the side of the bus in the background; the idea being that the modernizing and westernization of Middle Eastern culture may be Bush’s actual long-term legacy, and not the temporary (and debatable) legacies mentioned on the bus itself. What do you think?

While cruising up Solano Avenue in Albany on Saturday, I noticed something unusual: Code Pink was having a garage sale at their Bay Area headquarters. I stopped by to have a look.

I was hoping to pick up some interesting Code Pink detritus, but (as I later found out when I looked it up online) most of the stuff for sale was not actually from Code Pink itself but rather was donated to them by others. So it was mostly just random household doodads, not revolutionary leftovers.

The only interesting artifact for sale was a poster praising Mordechai Vanunu.

Back in May of this year, I wrote about an anti-John Yoo protest at the Boalt Hall law school graduation, spearheaded by the communist group World Can’t Wait. What I didn’t include in that report is the fact that I followed World Can’t Wait to an entirely different protest immediately afterward — an “Armed Forces Day” protest in front of (where else?) the Marine Corps Recruiting Office in Berkeley.

In the spirit of recycling, the World Can’t Waiters arrayed all their torture-themed and John Yoo protest material from earlier in the day in front of the Marines office. Marines, John Yoo — hey, it’s all good. Close enough for horseshoes.

Armed Forces Day is a little-known holiday honoring all military members in the country. WCW took the opportunity to dishonor them.

The usual crew of crazies lined the sidewalk. All in all a pretty desultory affair.

But wait! Things picked up when a crew of Marines veterans arrived to counter-protest. You can see them off to the right in the picture, holding American flags.

But there were never any fireworks. A significant police presence kept everybody on their best behavior.

Members of the Marines Motorcycle Club surveyed the scene from across the street.

The moronic “tree-sit” at the Memorial Oak Grove above the U.C. Berkeley campus (in which a group of protesters are trying to stop the construction of a new sports training facility by “occupying” the trees on the site) gained notoriety last year when the the tree-sitters threw their urine and feces on police officers trying to remove them.

Well, I was combing through some old photos and found this short series of photos I took at the oak grove on September 22, 2007. Nothing special about that day — just a random day that I happened to find myself passing by the ongoing (and interminable) protest. I never used the photos, and was about to throw them away, when I noticed a couple of details about the photo above. For all the media mentions about the urine-throwing, I’d never seen an actual photograph of the urine in question. Until now, that is.

Here are some close-ups from the same photo. Notice the jugs of piss dangling from the tree.
The weaponized urine — revealed at last!

This “Wishist” (with some futile attempts at orthography: “carribeaners,” “solar pannels,” “spiget,” “penut butter”) ominously contains a request for “funnels.” You can just imagine what they’re for.

Here’s what the tree-sitters’ info table used to look like. A complete mess. (Now, nearly a year later, this part of the sidewalk has been cleared away and permanently blocked off by the police in an attempt to isolate the sitters.)

Yechhh.

A parting message.

Recently, while at an undisclosed location in northern California, I saw a seal which seemed to be in some kind of distress haul up onto shore and start crawling inland. When I went over to investigate, I saw that the seal had a gaping fresh wound behind its left flipper.

Soon it reached an area where people were sunbathing, and began to attract attention.

But instead of being scared off as seals often are, it stopped to rest directly in front of the sunbathers, as if wanting to join us. I told the other people there that it appeared to be severely injured. A discussion ensued about what to do.

Eventually someone called the park rangers, while the seal turned to give me a pleading look, as if trying to communicate that it had come up onto the beach to seek help from the humans.

But what could I do? I don’t know how to give medical attention to an injured seal. While we waited for the park ranger, the seal eventually seemed to give up hope of rescue by these strange land creatures, and sadly crawled back into the ocean. We never saw it again.