Sports highlights: College Football playoff, 2015 Supercross Season opener

A new chapter in the history of college football has been written on 1/1/2015: the first ever playoff games (semi-finals between the top 4 teams) were played and were completely opposite to my expectations: I thought Oregon vs Florida St would be a close one since Florida St was undefeated while Oregon had 1 loss in Pac-12 (showing my East Coast bias. Well, the AP voters are biased too! Look at this analysis of how teams are overrated in the AP Polls during the BCS era. Guess what was the most overrated team? Florida St!) It turned out Oregon blew out Florida St in the 2nd half. And I thought Alabama vs Ohio St would have been a blow out by the former since Ohio St has shown nothing until the Big 10 championship game (in which they blew out Wisconsin :( and leapfrogged the very strong TCU and Baylor to #4 in the ranking) And Saban has a 2-1 record against Meyer in bowl games. Indeed, Ohio St was behind as much as 15 points in the 1st half but built a lot of momentum near the end of the half, which continued in the 3rd quarter. Bama tried hard to come back but fell short. Now we are all waiting for the 1/12 championship final.

Other notable non-playoff bowl games included:

• Wisconsin over Auburn in the Outback bowl. The Badgers were almost neck-to-neck with the Tigers but Tigers got ahead by 3 late in the game. The Badgers fought hard to tie with a FG and forced OT. The Tigers missed their FG in OT and that's the ball game. We barely won it but a win is a win.
• Michigan St over Baylor in the Cotton bowl. I was watching this game instead of the Outback actually. Baylor built such a big lead in the 3rd quarter and I thought the game is over so I switched and completely missed Michigan St's 21-pt comeback in the 4th quarter.
• Houston over Pittsburgh in the Armed Force bowl. Again, Pittsburgh was so far ahead after the 3rd quarter that I missed the 3 TD (and 2 successful onside kick) by Houston in the last 4 minutes of the game! This is gotta be among the most dramatic finishes in the history of college bowl games.

Finally, the long wait (~1.5 months) for auto-racing was over on 1/3 when the 2015 Supercross season started. Ken Roczen won the first race at Anaheim just like 2014. And I thought he could unseat the then 3-time and defending champ Ryan Villopotto (who eventually won his 4th consecutive championships) Well, we know for sure Villopotto will be unseated in 2015. Why? He is leaving America for Europe to race one season there before he retires. I guess the many injuries he suffered here factored in the decision. He has won everything possible here in the States so the only challenges left would be the MXGP series in Europe. I wish him good luck there. (To be honest, if he still races here I would not be rooting for him. Look at JJ. Villopotto's move is as if JJ joined DTM or WTCC)

2014 X'mas So Cal Trip

I think it has been 3+ years since I last visited So Cal (We had a Spring break trip to Malibu/San Diego in 2011 and before that we spent the 2009 X'mas break there) This trip began at 5am on 12/24 when we started our drive. Arrived at Din Tai Fung for the obligatory Xiaolongbao (小籠包) around 11am as lunch. Next we visited Pomona for AMOCA and Cal Poly (more details later) And we had our X'mas eve seafood/brewery dinner at Brea. Then we called it a night. The whole X'mas day was dedicated to Disney (California Adventure, which the kids have not been to before) The waits were ~25-40 minutes per ride (with the help of fastpasses), which I considered not that bad. Here is my Top 4 list:

1. Toy story themed shooting game
2. Cars themed racecar ride
3. Hollywood hotel themed "dropped" elevator 
4. Mickey Ferris wheel

We decided to go easy on the boxing day and started with dim sum in the City of Industry. Then we headed to the California Science Center in downtown LA. To be honest, I don't see coherent flows of exhibits that explain related scientific theory and ideas. Still, my kids enjoyed the transportation exhibition. And I learned something new from the exhibition about ecology: the Antarctica was actually colder than the Arctic. We spent the evening at LA Live (the new buildings near the Staples Center, Laker and King's home court): first for the Grammy Museum (discounted ticket $8 each after 6pm) then the Yard house for dinner/beer.

Since we stayed at the nice Le Meridien in Santa Monica, the perfect activity was walking around the beach and the pier after breakfast on 12/27. Then we headed east to visit the "famous" Bergamot Station with many galleries (#12 out of 37 Santa Monica attractions from TripAdvisor, and frequently mentioned by the Visual Art newsletter). Next stop was UCLA. Then further east to Beverley Hills via Santa Monica Blvd and drove through many luxurious houses near North Rodeo Drive. Of course I needed to go to Sunset Strip on the way to Hollywood for some hair metal vibe but the only things that served as reminders of the glorious days of metal were some big guitar sculptures (one of them was inside a bank!) Then we showed the kids the stars and hand prints outside Chinese Theater on Hollywood Blvd and viewed the big hillside Hollywood sign from the mall there! We ended the night with more Chinese food in San Gabriel before leaving on 12/28. We drove down briefly to Venice Beach that morning. Then picked up our friend from LA Union Station. She took us to lunch at Farmers Market/The Grove at Fairfax and 3rd before driving for 8 hour back home ("holiday traffic" delay at the usual spots on I-5)

More on the food we had:

• TAPS Fish House and Brewery: we felt like having some seafood since we were close to the coast and craft beer is always good, anytime and anywhere. 
• Ralph Brennan's Jazz Kitchen: it's a really popular restaurant at Disney downtown so we got a 4:45 reservation, which was actually perfect after 8 hours in a theme park. I had turducken (was traditionally for Thanksgiving which I missed because of my HK trip) but the highlights was the chocolate bread pudding souffles. And the New Orleans jazz was nice too. 
• Yard house: it's among one of the places that I saw most beer on tap ever. I got an IPA flight which had a good variety. 
• Vega Paradise: our first choice that evening was actually Cantonese style food but the place was packed. It's San Gabriel so there are plenty of other choices. It's good to take a break from meat some times.
• Dogtown Coffee vs Donut King: that's the two places we got breakfast from in Santa Monica. The former featured organic local coffee (which we didn't get but had a breakfast burrito instead) while the latter had more than donut and healthier than its name suggested: it had breakfast croissants and bagels too. 
• 800 Degree Pizza: this is near UCLA and its thin crust got 2 thumbs up from my daughter.
• Brazilian BBQ: this is something I wanted to try for a long long time and finally tried it as the Farmer's Market thanks to my friend's recommendation. It has lots of choices for meat including lamb leg, garlic chicken, garlic beef, sausages to name a few. 

It wouldn't be a complete trip without some museum visits:

• American Museum of Ceramic Art: this is another place introduced to me by the Visual Art newsletter. Ceramic art is an area I would like to focus on and glad to know there are museums dedicated to it. The building used to belong to a bank and a car dealer (as you could still tell from the heavy vault door and the tiles on the floor) but now converted to a museum with artist studios. We were given a tour to the latter. The 2 current exhibitions were American artist Chris Gustin's work and pieces from the Mettlach area in Germany. Gustin's teaware were particularly interesting to me.  
• Grammy Museum: Grammy is of course the most well-known award in the music industry. This is a very cozy 4-floor museum that features themes and artifacts from the award-winning musicians, like the late great blues guitar virtuoso SRV and the king of pop Michael Jackson. I could see it's hard to cover the many musical genres emerged since the beginning of the 20th century but I was happy that one corner was dedicated to the jazz specialty label Blue Note while my daughter enjoyed the Taylor Swift exhibition.
• Fowler Museum: this one and Hammer are both part of UCLA and both admission free. This one is about world culture. I particularly enjoyed "Round Trip" which was shown along 4 corridors that formed a square inside the building and was about 2 American traveled around the world using the newly invented bicycle with 2 equal-sized wheels (which replaced the old big-front-small-back-wheel type) and Kodak camera. The title wording also played on the fact that the pictures taken with the new Kodak camera were round in shape.
• Hammer Museum: it has a small collection of impressionist masters which were gems from that era. However, my favorite was the mythical Salome by Gustave Moreau.
• Dodgers Stadium: last and least ('coz it's enemy territories, which we have been to quite a few in this trip, e.g. the home stadium of Anaheim Angels, the home ice of Anaheim Ducks) this is not exactly a museum but its retired number plaza had quite a few players that deserve a lot of respect, including the racial barrier breaking Jackie Robinson, the great pitchers Sandy Koufax and Don Sutton.