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The day I was scheduled to leave Berkeley, Joanne and I nipped down to the the marina, where the Berkeley Kite Festival was going down. Didn't know about it until we were trying to get on the freeway to get to Alex Fabrikant's wedding, and saw a strange tentacled beast flying above us.
Was particularly impressed with the "Berkeley Kite Wranglers," who have the giant kites that fly on the giant trash bag principle with various ports in the back to let air out. I saw one of them try to take one of these down, which was sort of depressing, like watching hunters bring down big game. The open up a couple ports and it just sort of collapses to the ground.
A big deal at the festival is apparently the Hamamatsu master kite builders and fliers, who make rectangular kites out of bamboo and paper. I dunno. Looked like an intricate rectangle to me, with a character or corporate logo on the back. But the really impressive thing was that the kites looked like they were flying a couple hundred feet away from their multi-person handling teams. Interestingly the line is slack when the kite is flying; perhaps it actually spends most of its time floating on thermals.
