Knott's Scary Farm!

Hey! Hopefully you're experiencing the awesome feeling that follows THE LAST FINAL OF THE SEMESTER! W00t w00t! I know y'all are dying to start the break, so I'll keep this post short. ^__^

So first off, let me start this off by saying that I scare easily. And I mean REALLY EASILY. My own reflection can catch me off guard at times...well, that's a bit of an overexaggeration but you catch my drift right? BUT! Despite my tendency to get scared easily, I definitely had a blast at Knott's Scary Farm with all my nikkei homies (those who weren't there physically were there in spirit, right?).

Despite the long lines and crowded haunted houses (which definitely made it harder for us to get scared) the hours we spent at the park were definitely super fun thinking up ways to scare the scary people if they tried to scare us.

So what was the best way to avoid getting scared? By using our Trojan Pride of course! At first I didn't think that telling them to FIGHT ON (fight on sign included of course) would work, but it did...surprisingly. We even managed to get some of the scary people to flash the fight on sign back at us! Just as a side note, we first tried the Yogurtland cheer (yogurt yogurt land land!) but to our disappointment, that didn't seem to do the trick.


So for all of you who didn't come with us because you scare easily I encourage you to come out next year. If you don't wanna get scared, chant FIGHT ON with us and show off your Trojan pride because that's sure to keep the scary monsters away. ^__^ I mean, if the girl who gets scared by her own reflection did fine, I'm sure y'all would!

And if y'all haven't read Craig's article yet, read it. It's hilarious as usual.

Have a wonderful winter break! See you all next semesterrr!

Car Rally 2008!

[Before we get to the article itself, I just want to apologize to our regular readers out there for taking so long to update this. In short...sorry Sean.]

As a basketball player in 8^th grade, my coach always drilled into us that victory was the product of working hard, playing smart, putting forth the maximum effort, and working together as a team. I never thought about it much at the time, but looking back on it, I can say that he was absolutely right on all counts. But since then, I’ve also realized that there are some extreme situations when winning requires a little more…like 4 guys, 2 clarinets, a camera, and the adult section of a Little Tokyo video shop. (This one time, at band camp…)

It was a cool Friday night on October 10^th, 2008, a perfect setting for what has come to be known as the pinnacle of competition, the sport of royalty, or simply “THE GAME” (never, under any circumstances, written in lower case). That’s right folks, it was time for one of USC Nikkei’s most popular and enduring events: Car Rally. Car Rally is a photo scavenger hunt in which teams journey through Los Angeles as they try to complete as many photo challenges (and thereby score as many points) as they can within the allotted time. With free Meltdown tickets and a lifetime of bragging rights on the line, this year’s competition was sure to be intense. We would start at USC and have 2 hours to complete challenges around campus, in Westwood, Beverly Hills, Sawtelle, Hollywood, and in Little Tokyo, where we would meet up to end the competition and have dinner. With that, Daniel (aka Shimmy), Evan, Gavin, and I formed team “Sexy Clarinets” (more on that later) and set out to try and win this thing.

The competition started at around 6:30 on a Friday night, so we decided to do all of the challenges around USC first in hopes that traffic would die down in the meantime. We posed with Tommy Trojan, chilled with DPS, played air-Taiko at the Senshin Buddhist Temple, and studied at the Gakusei Kai house among others. One of the challenges awarded 1 point for every person in the photo wearing USC-branded clothes, so in true rule-bending fashion, we took a picture with the USC-clad marching band that was playing at the women’s volleyball game that night and insisted that the judges give us points for each and every one of them (sorry judges, but we had to do it).

We gambled that a lot of groups would waste lots of time driving and getting stuck in traffic, so with an hour left, we decided to head directly to Little Tokyo to complete the challenges there. In Little Tokyo, we balled at the rec-center site, arrested Shimmy at the Koban, and went zero-G at the Ellison Onizuka monument. Little Tokyo is also where we pulled off a stunt that earned us our team name, a boatload of points, and some serious Trojan Marching Band (TMB) street cred. One of the photo challenges called for us to take a picture in the adult section of a Little Tokyo video store, but with 2 TMB clarinet players on the team, we decided that we could up the ante a little. We headed over to the shop (and for some reason, we all knew which one to go to) and after getting the OK from the confused but cool cashier, I filmed Evan, Shimmy, and Gavin proudly playing the USC Fight Song in the middle of the store. (I know, I know, we're awesome.)

When it was all said and done, it turned out that our intuition was right since all of the other groups burned a lot of their time getting stuck in traffic. Even so, the other teams all had great stories about getting Diddy Riese cookies in Westwood, window shopping on Rodeo Dr., visiting the Flynt building in Beverly Hills, or even just rocking out to K-pop on the car ride over. As it turned out, a sound strategy, a little luck, and an awesome video store clerk were enough to propel the Sexy Clarinets to victory. And just so you know, the title of “Car Rally 2008 Champion” puts us somewhere between Brad Pitt and the Pope on the celebrity scale. Ok, maybe not, but did either of those guys play the fight song in a Little Tokyo porn shop? Didn’t think so.