Monday, November 6, 2006

Garlic Ice Cream
EDIT: If you ever visited the Crappy Club for Jerks, but haven't been able to get into it for a while, it's because the site has moved: Here's the site now.

Also be sure to visit Group Sounds, which has recently been resurrected!!

This weekend I went on a fun road trip to San Jose to see the USC/Stanford game (well, the game was in Palo Alto, of course, but my dad and I stayed in a San Jose hotel). Good times were had by all. I don't have the time right now to go into everything in an ultra-detailed manner (yay for tests!!), but that is why bullet points were invented.

- My dad had wanted to leave early, but we had to leave later because I had the feeling that if I missed even one History of Asian Art class, then I wouldn't be able to catch up and the world would explode. "But why not simply borrow notes from another person?" you may ask. You simple-minded fool. Not only would I have to transcribe all of the notes, but I would also have to look up all of the pictures in the book, and that is work I'm just too lazy to do.

- The car ride was about five and a half hours, and I'd say about two-thirds of that involved us driving past either farmland or barren deserts that looked as though Harry Truman had just dropped an A-Bomb on them. Living in a decently-sized town for so long, you almost forget how dry and ugly a lot of California would be were it not for our traditional, time-honored policy of yoinking water from the Colorado River. The deserts do make for SOME nice scenery though; there was this one area of large, rounded hills set against an amazingly blue sky that just had this surreal look to it, like Vincent Van Gogh had done a landscape of Tatooine. The bright golden grass swaying in the wind in front of the hills was cool too.

- Back to the agriculture: California is well known for growing just about every type of fruit and vegetable conceivable to man. You could scarcely go a few miles without passing some farm or farming town. The most notable of these farming towns, for me, is Gilroy, which proudly proclaims itself as "the garlic capital of the world." And, really, I've not run into any place that is likely to challenge that claim any time soon. Literally the entire area is choked with the smell of garlic; the scent is very strong even passing by the town on the freeway. I doubt that Gilroy even needs city limit signs - you just need to take a few sniffs and it immediately dawns upon you, "Oh, I must be in Gilroy."

As I have learned through further research, Gilroy is rather eccentric about its garlic. They have an annual garlic festival each year, where you can secure such delicacies as garlic ice cream. Yum. I also suspect that anyone who farms and doesn't grow garlic is severely ostracized by the community. My evidence? We passed by a farmer whose main wares were garlic and cherries. Who grows those two together? I can only hope that these two were kept apart via a vicious brand of segregation that even Strom Thurmond would balk at. I like garlic, and I like cherries, but damn it, I do not want my cherries to even have a hint of garlic in them. We must not allow these plants to mix. Ever.

- Aside from that stuff, most of the ride to San Jose was uneventful, with the exception of one thing at the end. The Los Angeles County sports radio had fizzled out long ago, so my dad an I were forced to listen to the local sports radio as we inched ever closer to San Jose. I don't remember what radio station he was on, but one of the radio hosts sounded exactly like Truman Capote. Seriously, Philip Seymour Hoffman could have taken a few tips from this guy. It was so bizarre hearing him rant in this amazingly high, lispy voice about how the Golden State Warriors haven't had a great shooter since Chris Mullin. I can still hear the guy in my head right now, haha.

- The hotel we stayed at was nice. Weird thing though: In the middle of the night, I swear it sounded like someone was rummaging through the drawers in our room. I have no evidence that this actually occurred, other than the noise of the drawer handles keeping me awake for about a half hour. I even looked around and found no trace of anyone having been in our room at all. But I have my suspicions.

- Stanford is MASSIVE. You always hear about how large these private schools are, but you can never really know until you actually walk around on them yourself. Cal Poly Pomona is decently sized, but it's essentially a drop in the bucket compared to Stanford. Right now I am almost certain that we built the CLA building due to some form of college campus penis envy. My hypothesis is strengthened due to the fact that we can't stop jabbering about how the building was featured in such films as Gattaca and Impostor.

- The actual game itself was a lot of fun. USC pretty much beat the crap out of Stanford the whole time. Everything that could have went wrong for them actually did, which has been the norm for them this season. I felt sorry for them, because I actually do like Stanford a lot. But the game was fun and exciting the whole way through, so whatever. Stanford had to be sacrificed so that I could have a good time at the game.

- In an unfortunate turn of events, however, we did not see the annual battle between the USC and Stanford marching bands. Those battles are a big reason why I look forward to USC/Stanford games more than most, because they're such a fun, tongue-in-cheek affair. The whole thing is basically both bands being smarmy pricks and mocking the crap out of each other. It's so great lol. Without that battle, I felt an intense, overwhelming urge to sprint to the restroom, as per usual during halftime.

- "Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)" is approximately 22.7% less annoying as an instrumental song than it is with vocals.

- College football players apparently get their own pizzas after games. The urge to steal a pizza was great but quickly suppressed due to each football player being about twice my size.

- I think that it must be roadkill season at the moment; I cannot recall ever seeing as many dead animals on the road as I did during this road trip.

- On the way home we passed by Pismo Beach, but we did not get all of the clams we could eat. I suspect that we took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

- Also near there were a ton of trailer parks and small homes packed together so tightly that I wonder if they ever go outside at all. Hmm. You know, I would push that train of thought further, but I think that I'll end this post here so that I can contemplate the irony of me wondering whether someone goes outside.
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