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For reasons too boring to get in to, I ended up arranging a weekend field trip with a handful of my students. They drove from Vallejo, I biked from the Mission and we rendezvoused on a unusually wet and gray Saturday morning. The destination in question: Candlestick Park, ex-home of the San Francisco Giants, current home of a stray cat colony. As we poked around behind the scenes I was struck by how decrepit the place was. For example, the entire lot under section 25 is filled with junky old wooden tables. According to Wikipedia, “Candlestick is currently the only NFL stadium in which upper-deck supports obstruct sight lines from the first-deck seating.” And apparently, it’s currently the only NFL stadium with it’s own self-sustaining ecosystem. The cats are tolerated because they eat the mice. I asked our tour guide Dave what eats the cats.
“The barn owls,” he answered un-sarcastically. “They’re like this big” (chopping at his neck).
Anyway, I’m making fun of Candlestick, but it was pretty cool. Plus, the tour gave me pause to appreciate my job, which is essentially to always amuse 19-22 year olds one way or the other. That is pretty good as far as jobs go. If I were a research technician, I might not be holding a fake press conference in the 49ers home locker room.