The LA Times visits Cal and the farm

A couple of articles appeared in the LA Times travel section today.

In fact, if you think the presidential race is the only enduring blue-red rivalry that will come to some resolution this month, think again. This year's Big Game, the 111th since Berkeley (blue and gold) and Stanford (red and white) started squaring off on a football field in 1892, is Nov. 22 at Berkeley. (And, I'm told, we shouldn't call it "the big game." It's just Big Game, like Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Bird.)

Cal students warm up for it by lighting a huge bonfire and doing a war dance. The Stanford kids psych up by, um, staging a wicked musical theater production called "Gaieties." Say what you like about that...[the author then goes off on some irrelevant statistics on the series record]

and...

So what do we call this place? Cal? Berkeley? Cal Berkeley? UC Berkeley? This question hung above 10 of us -- nine visitors and one student tour guide, all gathered at a busy campus that simmered on an autumn weekday morning with undergraduate enthusiasm, intellectual fermentation and political skirmishing.

"You can pretty much call us whatever you want," guide Jenn Lerner told us. "As long as it's not Stanford."

Amen to that.