Every year around this time the rumors that Comic-Con will leave San Diego for greener pastures start rumbling around town again.  Comic-Con is huge, maybe too huge for the convention center.  Comic-Con needs more parking and hotel rooms than the eighth largest city in America can offer.  Blah, blah, blah, they always come back next year though.  Inertia’s a wonderful thing.

Unfortunately that’s not the way with every big gathering though.  Las Vegas appears to have stolen the USA Rugby 7s tournament. This tournament was a part of a larger Rugby gathering that drew Cal Rugby to San Diego the last two years, giving me two enjoyable February afternoons watching the Bears beat up on OMBAC and Wyoming.

Cal sports teams come to San Diego rarely enough as it is.  I hope they’ll still find a reason to visit this far south, but I’m afraid this will just be another opportunity for the UC penny-pinchers to cut some more on the great drive to mediocrity by at least eliminating a road trip for the national powerhouse program.

Finally coming to the realization that next weekend I’m going to miss my first Crew Classic since I moved to San Diego in 2001.  I arrived too late in the year for the 2001 regatta, but made it in ’02, ’03, ’04, ’05, ’06, ’07, and ’08.  It’s not a bad thing necessarily – we’re going to be in Vegas and I’m sure we’ll have a great time.  Just a bit of sadness at missing an opportunity to hang out with the alums and cheer at a sport where Cal usually does really well.  It’s been kind of a symbolic start of spring for me (the first weekend of April)  and the local alums always host a great tent.

Having a very good Friday here.  The weather held just long enough to spend most of the day at the San Diego Rugby Invitational at the Polo Grounds.  Caught three games, two of which featured Cal, and the other being the Cal Poly – Navy matchup in the posted photo.   Great event, lots of fun and entertaining even for someone with a pretty minimal knowledge of rugby like myself.   Eye candy, naturally, and a fun time with the alums as always.

Also got to see the return of Ellen in the latest Battlestar, which was verrry interesting, even if it raised more questions than it answered at this point, and am giddy as a schoolgirl for the debut of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, which comes on in about 45 minutes.  Tonight’s about the geeking.

And yes, just to rub it in, I do have plans for Valentine’s Day tomorrow.  Dinner and whatnot.

Between lawyer work, website maintenance and whatever is wrong with my arm I’ve been a very dull boy lately. No swimming, no surfing, no photography. Not sure when I’ll return to the water, but weather permitting I’ll spend Friday cheering for Cal Rugby with some alums and my trusty camera. Same tourney as last year, but they’re scheduled for three games this year at the polo grounds, against VMI, Wyoming and Navy.

As for the rest, the arm is doing better but I’m taking things slowly, and the new photo gallery software is working nicely after the still unexplained crash of the previous site.  There’s still a lot of work moving over captions (one cut and paste at a time), but I like the new platform and think the templating in Zen Photo is certainly much easier to customize than in either of the other two packages I’ve used here.

Big Game week is upon us. The only football game that really matters, ever, will start in a few minutes when Cal and Stanford meet for the 111th Big Game at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley. We did Big Game dinner with the local alums at The Linkery on Thursday, and though Spinner had met the alums before the look on his face when it came time to perform the various drinking songs was priceless. Seeing the local matriarchs who probably graduated well before The War doing their Grrrahs (complete with bear clawing motion) was a little too much for him. Even with all that though, I won’t pretend to be much of a football fan – just a Cal fan who tolerates football as a means to financially to get us through to the sports where we win. Want the better views of the blue and gold? At least rugby, water polo, rowing and swimming are all considerate enough to visit those of us in extreme southern California.

Cal athletes took home seventeen medals from the Beijing Olympics. 

The Bears’ athletes won most of their medals in the water, from the “Water Cube” to the Shunyi Rowing-Canoeing Park to the Yingdong Natatorium. Of Cal’s medalists, only [basketball player Jason] Kidd and Cal alumna Vicky Galindo in softball did not compete in or on the water.

Interesting to note that one of Cal’s medals was also the silver for Milorad Cavic, swimming for Serbia in the 100-meter butterfly where he was edged out by that Phelps kid by 1/100th of a second.

With seventeen medals Cal placed behind only fifteen of the countries competing, and did far better than most.

Go Bears!

Doing a little alumni fanboy geeking as I saw today that Cal will be sending forty-four athletes to the Beijing Olympics representing fifteen different countries.  That’s just the latest count from 89 students and alums reported to be vying for spots on various teams around the world.  Best potential for a blue and gold sweep might be in Men’s Swimming, where Golden Bears will swim for the USA, Estonia, Brazil, Israel, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Poland, Switzerland, The Phillipines, and Thailand.  Sure would be nice to see an all-Cal final in some event, or at least a Cal trifecta in some race. 

Cal, under various different flags, took fifteen medals at the Athens games and would have been ranked eighteenth among the nations competing. 

OK, I would have been happiest if the Grateful Dead archives were going to Cal, and most despondent if they’d gone to Stanford.  At least with this option they stay within the system.  Go Slugs!

Congratulations.

Cal Professor Hass writes poems,

wins Pulitzer Prize.

Things are a bit backed up around here.  Pretty much every day I’m either hurting or I’m drowsy from the drugs that make me not hurt.  Damn tendons.  Neither option helps productivity, though the essential things are going out the door.  Desperately need a sanity swim or twelve, but then I’d be hurting worse and I don’t need that at this point. 

Settling for vicarious exercising as a stop-gap measure.  Diego runs around the dog park until he’s tired, and I get to call it exercise because I’m at the park.

Also got a lot of vicarious exercise at the Crew Classic Sunday.  There was tough competition, so Cal didn’t win as much as they normally do, but the local alums ran an amazing brunch tent.  Nice place to sit and catch up with friends and grab a snack between races.  The camera got a workout too, but I’ve been too busy to finish going through the photos and finish captioning the gallery.  Sometime soon.