Cathy Wilson, the mother of missing Rice University student Mathew Wilson, is back in the Bay Area searching for her 21-year-old son. Bridget Melson with the Pleasanton-based Trinity Search and Recovery, which is assisting Wilson, 52, with her search said she drove Wilson down Telegraph Avenue one night earlier this week. Matthew Wilson, missing since December, has reportedly been seen there in recent weeks.

“What drama we encountered-we had some serious adrenaline pumping. A young man with Matt’s build, hair/beard color, stance, etc. walked by us and for a moment Cathy froze almost convinced it was Matt. We circled the block again and she was in such a state of panic and curiosity that she and Mike, my husband, jumped out of the car and walked up to this young man to ask if he was Matt. It was intense. His own mother thought that this could be him…” Melson told me in an email earlier this week.

It wasn’t,. The young man kept saying “I’m not Matt.” Cathy Wilson who lives in a small town in Oklahoma, was defeated but she will not give up. Her son’ s car was found in Berkeley in June and she will continue to search Berkeley this weekend for him. 

But she needs help.
Searchers will meet at 4 p.m.  Friday, Aug. 1 near U.C. Berkeley and walk the surrounding neighborhoods. They will meet again at 11 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 2. Volunteers  can  register at  <http://www.trinitysearch.org/ and receive more information and meeting places.

Interstate-80 traffic is bad enough without having to dodge a naked woman.

But that’s exactly what drivers did shortly before 6 a.m. today. A nude woman running in and out of traffic lanes on the freeway near Gilman Street on the Berkeley-Albany border caused rubbernecking and probably more than one cup of spilled coffee.

Why she was in her birthday suit remains a mystery. Berkeley Police didn’t know. Berkeley Firefighters didn’t know. Even Deputy Chief Gil Dong, who usually knows everything and answered his cell phone South of the border Wednesday, didn’t know. California Highway Patrol spokesman Sam Morgan said she was transported to Alta Bates, but he didn’t know why the woman was naked. “It’s not the first time,” he said.

Luckily, no traffic accidents were caused and the woman finally ran off the freeway into the stables at Golden Gate Fields. Seemed like as good a place as any, I guess.  

Authorities thought she might need to spend some time in a local hospital so they took her away from the horses and into custody for a medical check. And then the rest of the world went on to work, likely with coffee spots on their shirts.

Float, the East Bay’s only therapeutic floating center, which is also a venue for up-and-coming painters, photographers, mixed-media artists and sculptors, is seeking artists and war poets for its Human Remains exhibit, which will open on Sept. 11. The gallery needs artwork influenced by the Iraq war for this one-of-a-kind show. All media types are encouraged to submit work by Aug. 11.

Owner Allison Walton, who opened the gallery in 2006 in a roomy live-work loft in the Cotton Mill Studios, a former cotton mill under the freeway on the Oakland-Alameda border, said “regardless of whether you are pro-war or anti-war, you can’t help but feel the emotional impact of the artists’ work. During the opening party we will assault the eye and surround the viewer with mixed media and poetry.”

For more information, email info@thefloatcenter.com.  Float is at 1091 Calcot Place, No. 116.

The second giant corpse flower – Odoardo – at the UC Botanical Garden bloomed Tuesday night and is now stinking up the place something fierce. If you want to see and smell the bloom in the tropical house, you better hurry, the stench only lasts for about 12 hours and the blossom will be gone within 72 hours or so.

Odoardo  is the second titan arum to bloom this month. Earlier this month, Odora gave off a trademark stench (something like gym socks, rotting flesh or an overturned outhouse) for a few days before collapsing in a heap.

The latest titan arum, Odoardo was named after Odoardo Beccari, the Italian naturalist best known for discovering the titan arum. 

The UC Botanical Garden is at 200 Centennial Drive. Admission is $7 for adults, $5 for seniors and $2 for children ages 3 through 12.

Since the start of his trip last year, Swiss adventurer Louis Palmer has travelled through more than a dozen countries, including Germany, Saudi Arabia, Australia and China, showing off a zero-emission solar taxi to heads of state, environmental ministers of several countries, and officials from international organizations.

Prince Hassan of Jordan took a ride in the taxi, the solar taxi was once on display before a group of Saudi princes. It was even “inspected” by an elephant in Udaipur, India. Swiss President Michéline Calmi- Rey took a trip in the taxi while on a state visit to New Delhi.

On Monday, Palmer added Cal students to the illustrious list of people who have seen the green and clean machine. For more info. on the taxi that can travel 60 miles an hour and will visit at least 60 countries by the time it finishes its’ trip, go to http://www.solartaxi.com/mission/ Photo by Aaron Walburg.

There’s a different sort of political event happening in Berkeley this weekend.

It involves five hip hop acts, one jazz band and several speakers stressing the importance of political activism among young people. Saturday’s event will be the third time Pinole activist and Jael Myrick, 23, who founded Standing To Represent Our Next Generation (STRONG) has organized rallies to get young people thinking and talking about politics.

The event Saturday is from 1 to 5 p.m. at People’s Park and will be hosted by Shamako Noble of Hip Hop Congress with performances by Ben Flowz, Pride City Purpose and The Slippery Slope among others. There will also be graffiti art on canvass, which will be auctioned off at a later event at the Greenlining Institute to raise money for STRONG’s election work this fall. There will be speeches about the need for rent control, better healthcare and how to get involved with curbing global warming. For more information, email Sergio.almonte@gmail.com.

In South Berkeley, a team of 10 young people have begun sprucing up 10 benches along the Adeline Street corridor. The group is part of a Youth Spirit Artwork project funded by several grants with support from a few Berkeley businesses. The benches are just part of the project. The students have also been decorating street barricades and traffic-turn-a-rounds with mosaics and tiles. The teens created designs for the benches as part of Youth Spirit Artwork’s urban arts training program at Berkeley Technology Academy, which involved more than 130 teens this year.

Youth Spirit Artworks involves homeless and low income Berkeley and Oakland youth, ages 16 to 25, in urban arts job training activities, including arts furniture painting and community arts activities. For information or to sponsor a bench, call Sally Hindman at 510-282-0396 or email: shindman@youthspiritartworks.org.

And lastly, eight youngsters who are charged with designing and implementing construction of the new Berkeley YMCA Teen Center have hired an architect for the project. Noll & Tam Architects, a Berkeley firm, began work with the Teen Task Force last month to plan the renovation of the PG&E service center at 2111 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in downtown Berkeley.

The building was donated by the electric company last October. The teens are getting hourly stipends thanks to a grant from Bayer HealthCare. The Teen Task Force, which includes 6 supervising adults, will also manage the physical renovation of the building after groundbreaking next summer. For more information, go to www.baymca.org.

OK, it’s not a vegan pizza but UC Berkeley has a new menu line up for the four remaining tree sitters: the ER Bar, a 2,400-calorie emergency ration food bar that sounds like it tastes like tree bark.  

With a 5-year shelf life (does that even outdo the Twinkie?), the bar contains no tropical oils, cholesterol, nuts or coconut and it can withstand temperatures up to 149 degrees. Are you hungry yet?

Pass on the pizza. Forget the French fries. Bypass the burgers. The US Coast Guard approved 3-day emergency ration food bar just could be the food to sustain you _ tree-sitter or not. 

“Following a UC police report that the protesters are depleting their previously stockpiled supplies, senior campus officials consulted with the campus medical director Dr. Brad Buchman and decided to provide each individual with the equivalent of 1,800 calories a day, an amount Dr. Buchman has determined to be sufficient to meet essential requirements,” according to a university statement.

The university had been sending up water and energy bars (we were told Clif Bars at , but can’t be sure) but sending up three of the 2,400-calorie bars per day will give each of the four tree sitters 1,800 calories a day, which is at the lower end of the recommended daily caloric intake for men. The bars also contain 100 percent of the Food and Drug Administration’s recommended vitamins and minerals, a university official tells me. They will cost the university about $8.50 a day. 

About three weeks ago, the university stopped allowing outside groups to give the tree sitters food because there is a court order baring people from living in trees or aiding and abetting tree sitters. This is not sitting well with tree sitters.

The university has cut traverse lines, removed wooden platforms and 22 days ago drove three hard-core sitters into one redwood. A fourth was able to sneak into the tree Tuesday.  

“The University remains committed to ending the occupation while doing everything possible to ensure no one is harmed as a result of this misguided effort to protect a 1923 landscaping project”, said campus spokesman Dan Mogulof. “If they don’t like the current conditions, there is an easy solution: they can come down and continue this protest in a manner that is consistent with the law, and respectful of the rights of others.”

And forgo the energy bars?

You’ve done the parade in Alameda, you’ve had your share of deviled eggs and potato salad. Now what?

Die hard artists and their fans don’t take holidays off. Tonight, like all first Friday’s of the month, is the Oakland Art Murmur (www.oaklandartmurmur.com) art walk to 19 art and cultural venues.  There are two different times to go check out the art: 6 to 9 p.m. or 7 to 10 p.m.

It’s also the last night to see an amazing three woman show at Johansson Projects, a year-old gallery at 23rd and Telegraph that was just named best gallery by the East Bay Express.(http://www.eastbayexpress.com/bestof/best_gallery/BestOfAward?oid=776795)

The show at Johansson Projects is called Portals and it features works by Jen Stark, Anna Fidler and Jana Flynn. It will be open tonight _ Independence Day_ from 5 to 9.m. The show closes Saturday.  Below is a little description of the show, but even if you don’t really understand all the art speak, it’s really neat stuff to check out. Beats the fireworks.

“Johansson Projects presents Portals, an art exhibition that ventures into unknown, mystical apertures through spiritually charged, innovative paper creations. Offbeat, and at times explosive, Portals ignites the senses and impels the mind to investigate the dynamics of the divine.

Prompted by the inconspicuous possibilities of natural forces, Miami-based Jen Stark produces intricately hand-cut paper explosions with simply an X-acto knife, glue and an eye for evolving repetition. Stark’s remarkable ability to transform something as simple as paper into a harmonic and magical sculpture of pulsating color demonstrates her aptness at recognizing the potential in the undetected. Stark has gained the attention of several publications including Wired, Wallpaper, Ready-Made and Preen and has been named a 2008 recipient of the prestigious South Florida Cultural Consortium’s Visual and Media Artists Fellowship.

LA artist, Anna Fidler peels back the curtain from our earthly surroundings and steals us glimpses of washy, liquid landscapes indeterminable yet parallel to our own. Figures huddled together in electric-hued palates conjure fantasies of spirit rituals and mystical incantations. A polymath musician and video-maker as well as painter, Fidler received her MFA from Portland State University in 2005 and has since exhibited in Tokyo, Japan and across the United States before showing at Johansson Projects.

Carl Jung meets landscape in artist Jana Flynn. Through the use of collage, paint, thread and tea leaves, Flynn intermingles spiritual and philosophical ideologies to create miniature abstractions of vast panoramic settings as though geological backdrops to a lucid dream. Flynn’s organic approach lends viewers an introspective look into her world that generates both a feeling of boundlessness as well as gravity. A San Francisco native, Flynn lives in New York where she is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Parsons The New School.

So as it turns out, the missing Rice University student’s car that was found in West Berkeley last month was cluttered with books and notes on how to assume a new identity.  And we thought he was hiding in the tree grove at Cal.

“There was literature in the vehicle which discusses how somebody would go about pursuing a new identification or persona,” Berkley police spokesman Officer Andrew Frankel told the Houston Chronicle, which has been following every move int he case. “His prints were on everything.”

There was also a book in the car on how to live on the cheap in San Francisco.

Police discovered the 2004 silver Dodge Neon, belonging to 21-year-old Rice student Matthew J. Wilson, on the 1200 block of Allston Way in mid-June and believe it was sitting there for about a month. The car did not appear to have been dumped and had clothes and a backpack belonging to Wilson inside.

But riight away people started to speculate: could Wilson be one of the protesters that has been living in a tree grove at the UC Berkeley for 18-months?

Police now say no and have turned the car over to the family as it’s no longer considered evidence.

Still, the computer science major from Haworth, Okla. remains missing.

He was last seen on  Dec. 14, when police say he withdrew $400 from a Houston ATM. About an hour later, he took out an additional $100 from an ATM.

He then returned to his off-campus apartment that he shared with a roommate and washed some dishes. About 11 p.m., the roommate said Wilson came into the apartment with what sounded like plastic grocery bags, according to a timeline posted on the Web site findmattwilson.org.

Shortly before midnight, Wilson used a debit card to fill his Dodge neon with gas. The card was not used again.

He has not been seen since.

Rice is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to Wilson.

The UC Berkeley Botanical Garden will stay open until 6 p.m. on Wednesday so you can all get a giant whiff of the massive corpse flower, which has a trademark stench that has been described as smelling like gym socks, rotting flesh or an overturned outhouse. Do I have your attention? The Titan arum, affectionately named Odora by garden staff, began issuing its trademark stench before the garden opened Monday. 

“Odora is a great name for it because it’s so odoriferous,” said garden spokeswoman Janet Williams, adding that this plant’s foul smell seems even more powerful than that of its two predecessors at the garden, Titania the Titan last year and Trudy the Titan in 2005.

The rare Titan arum blossom can last up to 72 hours before collapsing. As of Tuesday morning, the blossom was still open but the garden staff was expecting it to close within the next 24 hours. Odora is not as stinky as Monday but still a stinkaroo. She’s also a big one/

When a first flower bud was identified on June 18 it was about about 28 inches tall.

Odora has now bloomed to 44 inches and can  be seen (and smelled) at the Tropical House where visitors can also see a normal typical giant leaf and last year’s 4 ft. tall fruiting stalk with ripe fruit produced from pollination of Titania (Odora’s cousin) last August. 

Along with its rather unusual odor, the titan arum has other unusual characteristics. Sometimes the plant can grow up to  2 inches every 24 hours.

Don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself.

The UC Botanical Garden is at 200 Centennial Drive. Admission is $7 for adults, $5 for seniors and $2 for children ages 3 through 12.