I walked into jujitsu yesterday wearing my UCLA jacket. The first thing the instructor did upon seeing me was turn to another student next to him and say, “I keep forgetting to bring in a handicap parking placard for her.”

I would love to argue that, but I can’t, considering I’m aware of certain people I was very close to in college abusing handicap placards back then, who still does it to this day. =P

Apparently the USC Cheerleaders have been on the news giving the top 5 reasons why USC will beat UCLA on Saturday, the best one in my opinion being “Because we play the entire game, not just the final 4 minutes.” UCLA’s Cheerleaders gave 5 reasons why we’d win them, but the only one I know about is “Your men wear skirts,” which I suppose is a comeback to what they said about how we’re pansies in powder blue.

P.S. As an afterthought, I thought I’d give a bit of background to readers who are not local to Southern California, or familiar with university sports rivalries. UCLA (my alma mater) is the cross-town rival of the private university USC. UCLA’s mascot is the Bruin bear; USC’s is the Trojan. Thus, all the jokes about Trojan condoms (“A Bruin is forever, but a Trojan is only good once.”), and about their armor resembling a skirt. And a few years ago, a story hit the news that some doctors local to UCLA would significantly lessen the standard for declaring students physically handicapped before giving them a handicap parking placard — for a fee — which some students abuse to park in the very hard-to-park Westwood area. My favorite rivalry item is a burgundy T-shirt with a yellow square in the middle, and in the square is a yellow profile of a trojan. It looks exactly like the typical USC shirt with USC colors, except if you look closely at the letters on top of the square, instead of saying “USC” it says “SUC.” Oh, the reference to UCLA playing the last 4 minutes is due to the fact that we have pretty bad defense, and in the games this year, we’d let the other team score on us until a hail-Mary type comeback in the end when we’d turn the game around and win based on offense alone. Our colors are blue and gold, but in the early days of UCLA when newspaper photographs were black and white, UCLA’s athletic department realized powder blue photographed better in b&w, so they made their uniforms powder blue, altho to this day our official colors are still a sort of royal blue and gold.