If you're Catholic, then Lent has begun, and you've decided that you're going to give something up for the next forty days. If you're Mark, then it's Wednesday.

Yesterday, to celebrate Mardi Gras, I went to a picnic at People's Park in Berkeley. The picnic was organized by a local chapter of Food Not Bombs, a worldwide organization that promotes peace and social change by providing free vegetarian meals at protests and other events.

Yes, vegetarian. Welcome to Berkeley, where everything is vegetarian.

The picnic is also sponsored by The One True Church of the Great Green Frog, which organizes a Mardi Gras parade in Berkeley every year. Members of the Church (or even non-members) dress up in costume, construct floats, and march through Berkeley. The parade events began at 6 AM with a pancake breakfast, after which they paraded around the city and ended up at People's Park around 2:30 PM. After a nice lunch courtesy of Food Not Bombs, the parade was off again, ending somewhere on Sacramento Street at sundown.

Okay, so they're hippies. But they're also social activists. The ones who aren't crazy, anyway. Not all people in Berkeley fall into the hippie stereotype. Some of them, like the woman who was yelling in People's Park about peace and love and then decided to take her top off and yell about peace and love, do fall into that stereotype. But by and large, they're really nice, interesting people who want to have a good time and be as inclusive as they can.