current crazies?

topic posted Tue, August 24, 2004 - 5:30 AM by  Jo
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Who are the current cast of crazy characters on campus? We had the naked guy in my day. Plus the usual sproul plaza hangers-on...
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Jo
offline Jo
New York City
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  • Re: current crazies?

    Tue, August 24, 2004 - 8:27 AM
    Well, the Hate Man is back. Saw the other week for the first time in years on the re-opened (facelifted) Sproul Plaza! He was pressing arms with some innocent. I didn't especially miss him, though I always found him engagingly negative.
    • Re: current crazies?

      Fri, August 27, 2004 - 1:30 PM
      I miss the drummer guy who used to sit at Telegraph and sproul plaza (eddie?), and I also miss Rick Starr. Both left during my time in Berkeley (though I think both after I graduated in 2000)
      • Re: current crazies?

        Sat, August 28, 2004 - 5:27 PM
        Do not miss Rick Starr in the least. The drummer guy was OK - necessity was the mother of invention, after he pawned his drums but kept playing. Rick was just someone who just could not hear how awful he sounded.
        • Jo
          Jo
          offline 77

          Re: current crazies?

          Mon, August 30, 2004 - 2:35 PM
          The Hate Man!!! Hopefully still wearing a skirt :)

          We have a drummer in midtown Manhattan and he drives me totally bonkers. Perhaps the Cal one is a little easier to take.
          • Re: current crazies?

            Tue, August 31, 2004 - 12:47 PM
            Yesterday was my first day at Cal (weird being the old man on campus, but that's another story). There was an old guy with a long white beard screaming at noone in particular. He was waving his arms and walking around. Is tht the Hate Man? He wasn't wearing a skirt.
            • Re: current crazies?

              Mon, April 25, 2005 - 5:47 PM
              " Well, the Hate Man is back. "

              BACK??? what is that nonsense?? he hasnt been farther from Sproul than 6 blocks away in THIRTY YEARS.
              (maybe once).

              Jeff is still on the campus, you can hear him talk to "computer!" about his "ship" if you are lucky - sooner or later, he'll get his ship back and get off this HUD!

              most of these weirdos these days are strung out kids i have to restrain myself from beating senseless daily.

              Be sure to keep an eye out for Jenna's posted up stories of how she is king raver and everyone on the ave needs to die or pay her!!

              very funny, totally wacko signs. heheh, i have been imortalized in a few of them, apparently i "may need to be killed" heheh.



              • Re: current crazies?

                Wed, April 27, 2005 - 6:16 PM
                I hadn't seen the hate man for years either till I did a few months ago.
                • Re: current crazies?

                  Wed, April 27, 2005 - 8:33 PM
                  well he does tend to sleep a lot. a LOT like sometimes 20 hours a day.
                  and he has a spot off the street a little.

                  me and Hate go way back. i am Thorn in part because of his insistence on a "funny name" . those hate people though- annoying (hahah) they change their name every other week. i annoy them by only calling them the first name they told me, and not changing mine. after like 13 years now. heheh. hate though, he has the generic "hate man" title at least, so the current funny name means less with him.

                  oh yeah- say i hate you if you want me to trust you



                  • This is the maximum depth. Additional responses will not be threaded.

                    Re: current crazies?

                    Wed, May 4, 2005 - 2:21 PM
                    Tell us about the hate people. What are they all about?
                    • Re: current crazies?

                      Wed, May 4, 2005 - 7:23 PM
                      In a word: hate. But it's mainly one guy, the Hate Man. Supposedly a one-time NYT (WSJ?) journalist who came to the Ave, put on a dress, and went all the way native, negative - should I add a nattering nabob for good measure?
                      • Re: current crazies?

                        Thu, May 5, 2005 - 4:35 AM
                        Amor, you could not be MORE WRONG.

                        hating is caring.
                        say "i hate you" if you want me to trust you.

                        point is i care enough to tell you i hate you doing this or that, rather than watch you do something i dont like, then hold it against you later.
                        we deal with things immediately. we are totally straight with everyone.

                        i am not full on ("contact" would be the name of the philosphy)=

                        there is pushing= you want something from me, we push shoulder to shoulder until you give up or i am satisfied you want what i have badly enough. very tough to explain, easy to demonstrate.

                        point is, i draw the line there= Hate man= you can literally push him for anything he has = make no mistake, he can push for hours and hours if the stakes are high enough.
                        me , ill tell you no you cant have that.

                        REALLY= if you learned the whole philosphy and practiced ebven [art of it, it makes life very much different and BETTER. excpet eveyone else is suddenly very lame- you start realizing how much people tlka in circles to get things instead of making a demand.
                        example= "hey you got an extra cigarette"
                        how lame is that question.
                        "give me a cigarette"
                        A HA! clear, concise. i can answer yes or no and move on with my life.

                        i could go on but i wont. you got to say i hate you for me to trust you.

                        you got to say it, you dont got to mean it. but this way if you did grow to hate me , i could feel confident you will probably tell me rather than just stab me in the back.

                        ps- not supposedly journalist=
                        Hate man had a COLUMN in the NYtimes, for a number of years.
                        i wont post his name as he will already be giving me a ton of shit for this.

                        i have thought of doing a Hate/contact web site for years, but he is against it.

                        we aint pushing the hate thing, its only for people who come up and ask, and he is afraid of people misunderstnding and wanting to put an end to what he does.
                        REally= if everyone in the world did the hate thing, wow would we have a great planet
                        • Re: current crazies?

                          Thu, May 5, 2005 - 4:40 AM
                          " I miss the drummer guy who used to sit at Telegraph and sproul plaza (eddie?)"


                          AAAAAAAAAARGGGGGGGGGGGHHH! that crackheaded jerk was so so so annoying. i used to sit on plaze all day waiting for ihm to stop.
                          always some BS sign about needing $$ to travel and play drums. guy stole those drums from hate man every day. fought the UC to get permission to annoy us all day so he could buy CRACK.
                          where is he now??? i run in to him every so often in the tenderloin SF, i wlk there for entertainment. he is there being a total CRACKHEAD.
                          he is a mean and nasty person who smiles to your face while putting a knife in your stomach- very good at playing the "good boy".

                          RICK STARR= now him i miss. a girl i was with would have him sing "fly me to the moon" .
                          rick is jsut great.
                          he was living in board and care, and he got moved to a differnet facility, not in berkeley. i bet he's singing wherever he is
                          • Re: current crazies?

                            Thu, May 5, 2005 - 12:49 PM
                            Thorn, thanks for the elucidation of Hate-man's philosophy. Indeed I did it no justice by focusing on the one four-letter word that he took as his monicker. I always liked him as long as I was upwind of his cigarette, and found him much more engaging and provocative than many of his, um, colleagues.

                            Rick Starr - I'm glad to hear there are some people he made happy. I was not one of them. When I had the nerve once to talk back to him, he nearly slugged me. Talk about a legend in his own mind. Do not miss him one bit.
                            • Re: current crazies?

                              Thu, May 5, 2005 - 3:34 PM
                              "I always liked him as long as I was upwind of his cigarette, "

                              ha!= i get really annoyed when his BO reaches the three foot radius!

                              heheh rick starr. yeah i dont think he took put downs well at all
                            • Re: current crazies?

                              Sun, April 9, 2006 - 9:21 PM
                              rick almost punched my friend one time. but then my friend was skinnier than even rick. it was kind of funny. rick is pretty nutters if you talk to him. i heard he flipped out once his mom died, poor guy.
                              • Re: current crazies?

                                Fri, April 14, 2006 - 11:34 AM
                                I saw Rick Starr outside the 19th Street BART in Oakland last month. He didn't have his radio and mike and looked a lot more haggard than I've ever seen him. So, he's still aorund. I was kinda surprised to see him because it's been so long.
                        • don
                          don
                          offline 0

                          Re: current crazies?

                          Sun, January 14, 2007 - 10:06 PM
                          Hey thorn, sounds like you know the guy real well, I lived in berkeley between like 77-80's and miss all those guys, I don't know if Eddie is the beligerent guy or the guy who used to hold the bass during the drum sproul plaza drum jams, how about the guy with the glasses and the bycycle, in the mural that was next to People's Park, there is a picture of a brown colored dog, (if that mural is stil there) that was my dog,
                          we used to jam at La Vals, and also a jazz club in Oakland, I think it was Eli's Mile High Club, with Wiley, Kate, Katey, Timmer, Steve strauss, bill Wilson, Finger's Finder, and etc. I am coming to Berkeley soon and wondering how much it has changed.
                      • Re: current crazies?

                        Sat, November 17, 2007 - 8:47 PM
                        Looks like someone made a movie of hate man. I saw him interviewed on T.V. once, in like a documentary. They interviewed his mom, who basically said that he suffers from mental illness. He did work for the NYT. There was a pic of him as a young man in the documentary..


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    Re: current crazies?

    Sat, April 15, 2006 - 11:11 AM
    I'm pretty new to the campus, so I don't necessarily know the current crazies from the ones that are carrying a legacy. There's usually the "happy happy happy" guy that stands on a bucket at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph talking about Armageddon and the war in Iraq. There's Stony, who's not really crazy as much as he just yells really fucking loudly.

    Then there's the guy I saw a few weeks ago who drove a van around advertising that Stephen King had killed John Lennon, who I later saw on campus preaching some weird anti-Jew thing that, again, involved John Lennon. I think there's a crazy shortage in Berkeley, frankly.
    • Re: current crazies?

      Sat, April 15, 2006 - 1:25 PM
      Steven Lightfoot is back? That makes 25+ yrs he's been at it with his Stephen King conspiracy BS. Must be a trust-fund lunatic.

      Stony is a ranter, but he does have some cred as a performance artist. A hardworking one, at that. Besides Tues. at Dwinelle, he must also appear at SFSU, and I'm not sure where else...public access TV?
      • Re: current crazies?

        Sun, April 16, 2006 - 2:31 PM
        I thought lightfoot was from/back in Santa Cruz?

        huh. I guess he gets around.
        • Re: current crazies?

          Sun, April 16, 2006 - 7:47 PM
          I had the impression San Diego was his home base, but it could have been the San in my eyes.
          • Re: current crazies?

            Wed, May 3, 2006 - 5:13 PM
            The man mentioned earlier with the long white beard and waving is the "Happy Happy Guy" He's a regular. He is a little old (and cute) chinese man who stands on an overturned white bucket yelling "Happy Happyee HAppeeeee" to get your attention. He wears a sandwich board with political crap on it.

            There is the political ranting guy by Dwinelle, just after Sather gate. I don't know if he has a special nickname or anything. Hes pretty entertaining to watch.

            I've never seen hate man...but then again I spend most of my time in Kroeber.

            Cheers!
            • Re: current crazies?

              Wed, May 3, 2006 - 9:51 PM
              >There is the political ranting guy by Dwinelle, just after Sather gate. I don't know if he has a special nickname or anything. Hes pretty >entertaining to watch.

              Stoney Burke is his name. He even has a web site! stoneyspeaks.com/
  • Jo
    Jo
    offline 77

    RIP Naked Guy

    Mon, May 29, 2006 - 7:08 AM
    Wow, died in jail.
    msnbc.msn.com/id/11100863/

    SAN JOSE, Calif. - The former college student known as the “Naked Guy,” who gained notoriety in the early 1990s for attending class in the buff, has died in jail, authorities said.

    Andrew Martinez, 33, whose stripped-down strolls at the University of California, Berkeley, got him expelled and prompted the city to adopt a strict anti-nudity ordinance, was found unconscious Thursday in a Santa Clara County jail, said jail spokesman Mark Cursi.

    Officials are investigating the death as an apparent suicide.

    He had been in custody since Jan. 10 on charges of battery and assault with a deadly weapon, authorities said.

    In 1992, Martinez organized a “Nude-In” protest at the university. He said he was trying to make a point about free expression.

    The message caught on, and nude spottings spiked on campus. Martinez, who landed on national talk shows, was expelled the next year after the university banned nudity.
  • Re: current crazies?

    Sun, February 25, 2007 - 8:18 AM
    What happened to the Y'shua Guy? And that former math grad student who always used to debate with him in front of the fountain?

    I'm glad Rick Starr is gone. He verbally harassed me and once assaulted one of my friends on the bus. I made the mistake once in my German class of suggesting we make a comedy skit about him, and it turned out one of my classmates considered him his friend! A few months later when Rick Starr was charged with disturbing the peace there was a picture of my classmate in the courtroom while he was on trial. After that I believe he got a gig at the North Side Laval's for a while.

    And does anyone remember the shuffling woman, who turned out to actually be a man? It was around 92-93. Everyone saw her shuffling all over town with a bandana over her face for 3 or 4 months, and then suddenly one day one of my friends called me up and told me he had seen the shuffling woman in pants and it was obvious she was really a man! He had this tshirt next to where he was sitting that said "Don't forget the women" in Spanish.
  • Re: current crazies?

    Sat, November 17, 2007 - 8:27 PM
    Let's not forget Pastor Chuck..the buff dude with the mullet that preached on top of a chair to an often hostile audience, or the silent, "paul on the pillar" who stood on an upturned 50 gallon drum, or of hate boy...who followed hate man with his shopping cart, and took cues from the naked guy, and walked around naked.
  • Re: current crazies? (The Return Of Rick Starr)

    Sun, November 8, 2009 - 9:46 AM
    Rick Starr can be found singing 4 mornings a week in Oakland @ 20th St & Franklin!! :-)

    That’s right folks!! You can watch the legend perform in person in Downtown Oakland 4 days a week (Tuesday is shaving day) at the corner of 20th and Franklin . Rick performs from around 8-9 A.M. each Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

    rick-starr.stagebeam.com

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