The ‘ship
Thu Jan 08, 2009 11:59 (UTC -5)“We’re goin’ to the ‘ship! We’re goin’ to the ‘ship!”
A month ago, the #2-ranked Florida Gators football team beat #1 Alabama to win the Southeastern Conference championship. All around campus, people were celebrating: honking their car horns, taking to the streets, running around in the football stadium. Winning your conference championship is a big deal, but this was something more. By being so highly ranked and winning such a big game, we were virtually guaranteed to be picked for the national championship game, and everybody knew it, particularly this guy from my floor who, during a postgame car ride, stuck his head out the sunroof and shouted that we were going to the ‘ship while trying to elicit hoots and hollers from passersby.
Tonight, the Gators will try to win their second national championship in three years. The 2006 championship game (in January 2007) was held in Arizona, but this one will be closer to home, in Miami. I thought about entering the lottery for student tickets, but I would have automatically been charged $175 if I had won, and the tickets are non-transferable. This doesn’t sound so bad except that I had no idea how I’d get there. (I would have had to hope that other friends with cars also got tickets.) So I will remain in Gainesville, six hours away, for the game. It’s such a shame, too. I live down by Miami, and I saw Dolphin Stadium on my way back from the zoo on Monday. The Florida Gators’ and Oklahoma Sooners’ logos were hanging up on a giant banner.
If you were to come to Gainesville today, you would see that something big is about to go on. In anticipation of fans storming University Avenue like last time, the police department isn’t allowing cars to park there today. There’s a cage around the new alligator statue (which, incidentally, commemorates the 2006 championship) outside the football stadium. And my 8:30 class is canceled tomorrow even though the president of the university doesn’t want classes to be interrupted (unlike two years ago, when he was apparently more lax about it).
Oh yeah. Yesterday was my first day of classes. They don’t seem too bad yet, although we’ve hardly done anything. I have a friend I can sit with in each of my classes, and two of them are in the same room one after the other. I guess that’s the good thing about getting big into your major.
In my last post, I mused about getting a Flickr account so I could share my photos with the world. Here’s a pretty cool reason to have one: a guy allowed his one of his Flickr pictures to be used in Iron Man.
One of the great things about new things is that you can go back and discover things that are kind of like it that are really old. Here’s the oldest known lolcat, from 1905.
