Picnic Day 2004

Every year on some day in April, UC Berkeley and UC Davis have their open houses. Why they're on the same day remains a mystery, but this year we managed to go to both! At Cal Day I got some snazzy new T-shirts to flesh out my collection of UC Berkeley / Hacker Conference / Physics t-shirts and then we headed out to UC Davis for their famous Picnic Day, an event that attracts 10,000+ people and is even a local bank holiday.

This is the same event where in 1999 we found the sex+math poster, and where jake 2000 first got to meet other robots. It's also the one-year anniversary of meeting kennyjensen and dolinski. (Check out this picture of kenny and me in Switzerland!)

Now Davis is an Ag school if there ever was one, and the hilight of the Picnic Day trip was frolicking with all the various animals. In one freaky coincidence they had a goat petting zoo on one side of a room and a meat taste-testing booth on the other. Yikes! Diane and Michelle picked out a cat to adopt, and we all ogled the fistulated cow.



Picnic Day ends promptly at 4pm (eh??) and it seems that everybody pours out into the city for post-picnic-parties. Davis' answer to Game Day? There's still fun to be had over in the arboretum, where Battle of The Bands is just getting started. Here the marching bands from all of the University of California campuses and a few upstarts such as Humboldt State and that junior university across the bay and down the peninsula gather to play songs and produce general merriment — until they give up or expire.







If the Cal Band looks a little pedestrian by comparison — don't worry, they're just getting started. They have at least six hours to go!