You Better Stand

BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is in my eyes one of the greatest things in the Bay Area. It makes travel easier and it is better for our environment. The thirty minute trip to go to San Francisco on BART is much easier than to wait in traffic and pay for the bridge toll if you drive your car. BART is so easy just to hop on and get where you need to go in the Bay Area. But now when you ride on BART you may want to stand instead of sitting in the blue clothed seats they provide. They have been doing research on the seats and they have found bacteria infested in them.

Fecal and skin-borne bacteria resistant to antibiotics were found in a seat on a train headed from Daly City to Dublin/Pleasanton. Further testing on the skin-borne bacteria showed characteristics of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the drug-resistant bacterium that causes potentially lethal infections, although Ms. Franklin cautioned that the MRSA findings were preliminary.

My idea about what they should do about the seats is make plastic seats that are easy to clean. If you make plastic seats, they would be able to wipe off the germs with a handy wipe. The trains should have paper towels and some sort of sanitizer offered to their riders so they don't have to worry about what they are sitting on. If they keep the old seats, we will have even bigger problems with more and more people standing in the trains, not wanting to sit in the germ infested area. Also at night, the cleaners of the trains could just wipe them down if they didn't want to hand out towels and sanitizer. Either way there has to be a change to the seats because these bacterias could be harmful to many of the 330,000 daily commuters.

Don't Leave Us Twitter - Love S.F.

Twitter is a very powerful website. It was what helped lead Egypt to get where it is today. Without Twitter news wouldn't be able to travel as fast and much of the world would be oblivious to it. May teens and young adults use twitter to find out their information. Not many teens or young adults read newspapers any more, but would rather use the internet to find out what is going on. With Twitter, many people tweet what they think is important to know with a link explaining what is happening and many people click on the links. I use Twitter rather than reading the newspaper or watching the news because I can find out what I want to know when I need to know. Now Twitter is thinking about moving to Silicon Valley to make it less expensive for their business. Twitter is asking for a tax break so they can stay in San Francisco where it originally started up.

“If the tax exemption does pass as currently outlined, Twitter is committed to signing a lease that will keep the company in San Francisco for six years and likely for a subsequent 10-year renewal term,” Rowghani wrote.

Twitter moving would not really affect Twitter users. It would only affect the employees and their families. Twitter is a great website and no one would want this to affect their time spent using twitter. It Twitter shuts down, it would result in a lot more users switching to Facebook which is a much more ineffective way to get information across the world. Facebook is more about talking to friends and "liking" peoples statuses. While Twitter is more about linking people to websites that can get others more informed. If Twitter moves it doesn't really have an effect on its users so this tax break isn't such a big deal. But if this were about Twitter shutting down, it would be a whole different story.

Five Teams Gone

As you have been reading on my blog, CAL is one of the major schools to be hit with sport cuts. The program has lost five of their teams, leaving people in shock and horror. Some people don't know what to do now that they don't have sports. For some people, sports is all they know. This is largely affecting the student athletes role as athletes.

The cuts are scheduled to save $4 million in the 2011-12, the university said. The decrease in teams from 29 to 24 will affect 163 of the school's more than 800 athletes, as well as 13 full-time coaches. Even with the cuts, Cal remains one of the Bowl Subdivision's broadest programs. The average number of sports in FBS is 20.

Many families are upset with the results that are happening. They have tried many things to save their sports. Many people have donated but it wasn't enough. Other sports could take some budget decreases to help out other sports. Instead of the excessive gear they give all of their players, maybe save that money for future years so things like this won't happen. The only other school that has taken hits like CAL has is Rutgers. Rutgers had to get rid of six teams after the 2006-2007 season. When the Pac-10 changes to the Pac-12 next year, Colorado and CAL will be the only schools without a baseball team.

FBS athletics programs drew a greater percentage of their revenue from student fees and their schools' general funds in 2008-09 than they had in any of the previous four years.

If schools are creating a lot of money from their programs, where is that money going? That money should stay in the athletics program and be save so crisis's like these will be avoided.

Warriors Vs Scorpions

A couple of Sundays ago I did some community service. I took the time and score for a girls game. The Warriors were playing the Scorpions. They played their game at Las Lomas High School. The day was pretty rainy but luckily I got to sit under a big tent so I didn't get wet. The game went pretty smoothly considering this is many of the girls first years. They all seem to have enjoyed themselves even though they were playing in bad conditions. Luckily most of them wore long sleeves and leggings under their skirts.

The game went heavily in favor of the Scorpions. But that is okay because even when the Warriors came off of the field they had smiling faces. In sports, it is not all about being competitive but whether you have fun. And if I say so myself these girls were having fun. Knowing that they could just play made them happy. But not everyone was happy. The Warriors were stuck with a few minor injuries. Both of these girls seemed to be okay but just needed to rest.

I feel that it is good for these girls to deal with minor injuries now, so that later they can deal with more serious ones if that happens to be the case. No one likes being injured but it tests your mental and physical strength. I know personally that I hate being injured more than anything and not being able to participate in basketball. I don't let injures stop me. No pain, no gain is always my motto.

CAL Rugby Lives On

What would you do if you knew you might lose something you loved to do? Some might cry, while others might have anger. Others would try to do everything in their power to stop it from happening. At CAL, some sports players didn't have an option. Some may lose everything they love due to some financial issues. Rugby being one of them. Rugby, in the past 30 years, has won 25 national titles and is the reigning national champion. So why would they cut such an excellent program? Not to mention that they are also scholar athletes. It is not easy to play at such a high level of sports and to keep good grades. But these young adults do it anyways. They have the drive and passion to be the best at whatever they do.

With all that, why was rugby demoted? “It started as a financial question,” Barbour told Berkeleyside, “but it became more than a financial decision.” Asked whether she was referring to Title IX, Barbour said: “It’s Title IX  and a range of other factors that came into it.”

Luckily, CAL's rugby team didn't get cut. I have a friend who is a freshman that plays rugby for CAL and I would hate to hear that he couldn't play. Plus a program that has so much success shouldn't be able to just get put up there to go down in the dumps. CAL has dominated at rugby and will for quite some time. Hopefully more sport cuts won't come up like this so they won't have to be worried about losing such a great program.

Play Day

Last Sunday I went to Treasure Island for a girls lacrosse "play day". There were tons of teams with a variety of ages. They only bad part was that it was pouring. We got their around eight in the morning and left around two in the afternoon. My day was filled with keeping score and the time. It was fun to watch these girls play considering it was some of their first times playing.

 The picture to the left shows me waiting in the pouring rain to start my day. It wasn't very fun being soaking wet but it was worth it. Lucky i had prepared and brought a rain jacket. I feel sort of bad for the girls that had to play in the rain because some of them slipped and fell into the mud. I would not have been a happy camper if I had slipped but the girls just got right back up and continued to play. It was fun to see the girls enjoy themselves all day, not caring whether they won or lost but rather that they got to play.

Also what was cool about that day was that after we got to see CAL play Sonoma State. These girls were much better than the little girls but that is obviously because they are much older. The game was fun to watch other than that it was a blow out. CAL won by over ten goals and it wasn't even fair to Sonoma. But Somona didn't care they kept playing hard and got even more excited than CAL when they scored. After all I would call it a pretty successful day and it was fun to get out and help the younger girls.

Mental Health Break

Marcel the Shell. I thought it was pretty cute.

Sport Cuts

This video is sort of old but still relates perfectly. You can see the different reactions in the student population on how the budget affects everyone. Yes, education should come first but it is fun to play sports. They should have taken away money from the football team and the basketball team like one of the people said to make it fair to other sports. I know from talking to friends that play college basketball that they get a ton of gear which wasn't paid by a penny out of their pockets. Maybe they could limit what they give players and save money for other sports to be able to play. It's still very sad to see these sports go. CAL is the only NCAA school without a baseball team in the near future. How could such a prestigious school not have a baseball team? It's just so unfair to me on how the decisions were made and how little they tried to save the schools. These student athletes must keep their heads high knowing that they have bright futures ahead. They know they can achieve whatever they want because sports has taught them to push their selves to the full potential that they know they have. The budget cuts are just a minor set back of what these athletes will achieve.

The Unknown People

Uncontacted Amazon Tribe: First ever aerial footage from Survival International on Vimeo.

In this video it shows a tribe in the Amazon that has never been found before. My environmental science teacher showed us this video because another teacher sent it to her. She didn't go into much detail other than they have been recently discovered so I watched it on my own and thought it was pretty interesting. They want to use this land in the Amazon for the timber and for farming. These people have never seen others that aren't like them. It is wrong for us to be invading on their territory that they have been living on for quite some time. The selfish reasons to go in their and kick them out isn't good enough to get rid of them like that. These people obviously have never seen an airplane let alone know what a cell phone is. I personally think that we should leave them alone and let them find out that there is a real world out there. It is kind of weird to think that these people don't know that there are more people out in the world because we have developed some much as people. You could tell that these people were scared of the airplane because they had only men out and they were holding their weapons. I hope that these people don't loose their land and everything turns out for the best for them.

Gas prices too high

Gas keeps rising and rising. No one is going to stop their day to day activities because of it. But what we really need is for them to stop. Not because of the prices but because of the environment. This very high rise in gas price should be a shift in everyone's mindset to go green. We need to invest more into gas efficient cars and even more into electric cars.

California's average gas price jumped 50 cents in the last month to hit $3.91 on Tuesday, according to an update from AAA of Northern California. That tops even Hawaii, which usually has America's priciest gas. The Aloha State currently pays $3.90 for regular.

As you can tell by the chart the prices are rising fast and who knows when they will stop. My guess is that these prices have raised 50 cents in the past month is due to the revolts in the Middle East. It's crazy to think that just because a couple nations are having political problems that they would affect us all the way over here. I don't want the prices to keep rising. If the prices of gas keep going up, I would second guess driving everywhere because it is just so expensive. I remember the days when I could get gas for under three dollars but now it's pushing four dollars its just ridiculous. Maybe the rise in gas prices will make people second guess how much they drive. It's unfair to the people that have to drive long trips everyday to work because they have no choice but to drive. Maybe this rise will promote green technology and a more environmentally positive outlook. We only have one world so lets trash the place.