UCB and B of A

Ned sent us a link to this video today:

If you were never at UC Berkeley in the 60s, this is probably not anything that would interest you.  If the player does not come up in this video, the URL is http://archive.org/details/UC_Berkeley_outtakes.   It plays on my computer just fine, but on Walt's it is about half speed so v-e-r-y s-l-o-w.

I haven't watched the whole thing yet.  In fact, I was planning on writing this journal entry in the morning because I'm very sleepy and ready to go to my couch and see if I can sleep tonight, but when I saw bits of the video, I decided to use it for a journal entry.

The thing that is interesting about this video is that attached to the original page is a long list of identifiers to what you are seeing.  Things like:

Suits in offices talking -- professors
Male professor stands and reads book in front of fireplace
Male professor stands in front of map of North America
Male professor stands in front of atomic chart and explains
Man tends plants in nursery
Man sits behind desk...

and Fancy house (athletic?) on hill above campus -- gabled roof

The list is very long and very generic, and it shows that whoever put this together really didn't know much about campus.  The "man sitting behind desk" is university president Clark Kerr, for example, and the "fancy house (athletic?) on hill above campus..." 

...is Bowles Hall, a men's dormitory, which sits slightly to the north of the football stadium.  Of course it could be I who doesn't know anything, because for all I know it has a completely different use today, 50 years after I was on the campus.

The whole 27 minutes of film looks like it could have been taken from my collection of 8 mm movies from the same time period.  Soundless, much of it under or over exposed, jerky motion, but bringing back so many memories of movies of football games, Mike Blackford playing in the Cal band, and fun around Newman Hall, the construction of the new Newman Hall... One day we'll have to look at those movies again!

$ $ $

Remember a couple of weeks ago when my mother and I went to the notary to get a form notarized and all the complications that followed?  I don't know if I mentioned that the form was rejected because it wasn't a Medallion signature.   It also turned out that Ed needed to sign the form too.

So Ed got a new form, took it to the Bank of America in San Rafael, had his signature witnessed with a Medallion signature and sent it to me to take my mother to the Bank of America in Davis and get her signature witnessed.  Simple enough, right?

Oh, how innocent we are...

We were at the bank one hour and thirty minutes and left without the Medallion signature.  It's too complicated to go in to all the reasons, but the woman we were working with ended up calling the B of A in San Rafael (which said it never should have authorized Ed's signature and that there had been an error); my mother's financial consultant, who said he would send us papers that would explain everything, and only faxed the same papers we already had--and then hung up on the BofA rep and left his office; his assistant who said that really a simple notarized signature should work and that we should go back to the original notary and have him do again the exact same thing he already did which had been rejected; and the company that holds her trust to find out if they would accept the simple notary (they would not). None of us understands why this is so damn complicated when all we are trying to do is increase her monthly draw from $700 to enough to cover her monthly rent at Atria.

I called Ed and he's livid.  The B of A rep told me the only thing she could do was meet with BOTH Ed and my mother, with a copy of my mother's trust in hand, and open a new account for her so that the funds could be transferred to that account.  When I last heard from Ed, he was going to go and see the financial advisor and find out how this could all be simplified.  In the meantime she has no money coming into her account and will have to pay her rent by Visa (which is OK because it turns out that the double rent she was charged is actually correct and that Atria "forgot" to charge her for the first month.  They apologized profusely and say they will "try" to get the late fee subtracted.  They jolly well better subtract it!!!!

OK.  Now that my adrenalin is flowing again and I'm all worked up, I guess I'll try to go to sleep.  Maybe I should have a martini first...