NCAA Conference Realignment, 2011 Edition
Texas A&M is trying to determine how they would fare in the SEC.
Texas A&M is reportedly considering jumping off the Big 12 ship and heading to the SEC.
In other news Morgan and I took Ollie to the Albany Bulb yesterday, a little peninsula into the San Francisco bay just north of Berkeley. The entire peninsula allows dogs to be off-leash, though since they also allow homeless encampments there (more on those later), I’m wondering if this is a case where leash laws simply aren’t enforced. There’s even a beach where dogs can dig in the sand, socialize, or just frolic through the water joyously. Of course in Ollie’s case, the activity was limited to sniffing a piece of wood. To each their own, I guess:
I was told by a stranger in the Bulb that this area is also one of the windiest in the bay, due to the way the wind funnels under the Golden Gate Bridge. Unfortunately for Ollie, this meant that gusts of wind periodically kicked up small low-lying clouds of sand into his mouth, which he didn’t seem to enjoy. On the other hand, the conditions make the Bulb an ideal kite-surfing spot in case I ever wanted to take up that sport:
The same stranger that told us about the wind mentioned that we should make sure to get all the way out to the end of the bulb, and informed us that there would be “weird art installations” as well as warning us to avoid the homeless encampments. With that, Ollie pooped and we took off for the end of the bulb.
The first thing I saw on the way was a shopping cart with a giant scale (the kind you would stand on in a doctor’s office) put into it. I wondered if this was a weird art installment or simply some homeless guy’s shopping cart and scale that he thought he could sell for scrap. After passing four more overturned shopping carts in short order, I decided that the latter was likely true.
- Overturned shopping carts are homeless people’s version of breadcrumbs.
The shopping cart wasn’t nearly as puzzling as this bridge, which spanned nothing in particular.
- I thought there might be a dude living under this bridge.
After the shopping carts and fake bridge we did pass a couple hobo camps, which smelled like BBQ and garbage water. You know the smell when you have a bag of nasty wet garbage and something sharp in the bottom of the back pokes a hole through the plastic and some liquid starts dribbling out the bottom and smells like a combination of the 20 types of garbage in the bag? It was like they had basted a rodent with that liquid and were cooking it, while simultaneously pooping. Somehow this put Morgan in the mood to get BBQ (we ended up at Kinder’s after this trip), though to be fair she said she didn’t smell the same thing I did. I guess I should probably also mention that the Albany Bulb is a former landfill that was re-purposed for recreation, so it’s not for certain that the homeless people were eating BBQ garbage.
Shortly after the homeless camps we came to the end of the Bulb and were surprised to see a good deal of interesting sculptures.
- This was as close as Ollie would get to this soul-devouring thing.
Some of you know that I just got back from my honeymoon in Aruba a week ago, and are probably wondering why I’m posting about a former landfill in the East Bay instead of that. Well, unlike Aruba, which seemed like it could have just been a wealthy albeit humid resort town in the US, this place made me feel like I was in another country, except for the part when you could clearly see Costco from the end of the peninsula.
- Costco is actually in the background of this picture.
Expanding on the the landfill vs. Aruba debate, even though Aruba is situated firmly in the Caribbean, it’s still much easier for me to imagine captain Jack Sparrow emerging from one of the smelly homeless camps in the Bulb than the well-manicured resort areas of Aruba. The Bulb definitely has dirty, pirate-y type themes to it.
- Background: Albany Hill. Foreground: ???
There’s actually a great deal of stuff on the back end of the Bulb, more than I’m putting here.
Does anyone else find all of these sculptures disturbing?
And one more sculpture, seeming set up to be a photo-opportunity:
Here's a happy one, he's got his arm around me. Or he's about to murder me. Your guess.
Anyway, what was this blog about? Oh yeah, NCAA conference re-alignment. Apparently University of Texas-San Antonio Head Coach Larry Coker said that UTSA is next in line for Automatic-Qualifier status if Texas A&M leaves the Big 12. Texas allegedly wants A&M’s replacement to come out of the UT system, but doesn’t want to have to travel to El Paso every season. That’s all I know.
