Grin and Bear It

Well, it is midnight and I am only on page 12 of the notes I am writing to present as a talk in the Southern California String Seminar tomorrow at 9:15am. Don’t try this at home – prepare talks early, ok?

Where is the seminar being held? UCLA! What University am I from? USC! What event happens tomorrow besides my (hopefully not too terrible) talk? The big USC vs UCLA head to head in College Football. If USC wins, they go to the championship game, apparently. Yay.

So the usual articles about the cross town rivalry between the two institutions have shown up this week in print and on National radio and TV. There are two amusing (and interesting) ones that I looked at – one in LA Weekly (about academic performance, faculty recruitment, student acheivement, and much more – illustration above from it, by Deanna Staffo), and one in the LA Times (mostly about nightlife). Have a look. There are dozens of others -just type USC into the LA Times search engine for example. You learn things about both universities as well from those two, so it is not without some point. For example, our young ones clearly go to cooler bars, for a start, as you can see from the pictures in the LA Times article.

(Strange that the articles do not mention the cooperation and general fun had when their high energy physics groups get together to discuss topics in string theory and other physics. Very odd omission indeed.)

I would say a lot more about the articles, but time is not on my side, so I will instead leave you with a blog post I wrote (“Drag the Bear”) on December 2nd last year, upon encountering something strange on campus:

The other title for this post was going to be “Stranger in a Strange Land”, but I’ll save that for a rainy day.

You’re not going to believe this. So I was coming into the building a short while ago, and saw in the distance someone getting into the elevator and I noticed something curious so quickened my pace a touch to make sure I could get into the elevator to get a closer look.

Sure enough, it was as I suspected. She was normal-looking (by USC standards, of course; “all the children are above average”, to quote Garrison Keillor) and did not appear to be afflicted by a madness of any sort that I can see (not that there’s anything wrong with that), except for the fact that she was walking a small pet on a leash, and the pet was a stuffed animal!

I considered this for a second or two and then thought:

(1) This is no more odd than the half-barefoot/half-roller-blade guy. (JoAnne threatened to blog about him)
(2) Hey, alternative lifestyles, cvj! Go with the flow.

So I decided to ask in a friendly way (as one would do with someone with a live pet) “So what’s his or her name?”. I expected her to calmly tell me fluffy’s name and then my floor would come up, and I would chalk it up to experience. After all, there is a trend that the fashion-conscious young female Hollywood stars (same age as her) have of carrying around those tiny mice-called-dogs as pets, and this ball of wool is probably just as smart, so why not?

Well, she looked at me as though I was nuts and said: “It does not have a name, it’s a Bruin”. I looked at it again and saw that it was a little stuffed bear with “UCLA” written on its chest. It was all filthy from being dragged around all day on this leash. Ah. See earlier post.

Silly me.

-cvj

If you’re planning to watch…. enjoy the game!

-cvj