Travels with Tina: Rice is quite nice!

Rice University: A campus so beautiful that even a blind man randomly pointing a camera in any direction could come up with a picture that belongs in a promotional brochure.

Longtime fans of this site probably remember a time when Travels with Tina was primarily a vehicle for mockery. Remember when we said that Waco should get "Katrina-d off the map"? Remember when we encouraged Texas Tech students to commit suicide? Remember when we insulted Santa Claus and made Charles Whitman jokes after our trip to Austin?

Of course you do. But if you're expecting the same sort of vitriol and loathing to be directed at Rice, you're going to be disappointed. Because Rice is actually a very kick-ass place.

I don't yet want to talk about (or hear about, or think about, etc.) the game itself. Instead, I'll just share some general impressions of our hosts.

When class is not in session, this building serves as the backdrop for intramural jousting competitions.

Don't misunderstand... I have a deep and undying love for Wooten Hall and the nuclear fallout shelter/government surplus concrete aesthetic design that seems to have inspired the look of much of the North Texas campus. And I know we have more than our fair share of fancy buildings.

I love my school and I'm proud to have gone to North Texas. But I'm honest enough to admit that Rice has utility sheds that are almost as fancy as our Environmental Science building.

Swanky.

These three giant slabs of rock sculpture collectively form an exhibit called "45, 90, 180" Erected in 1984 as a tribute to George and Alice Brown, it was a donated to Rice by the Brown family. It sits outside the mechanical laboratory and adjacent to the Abercrombie lab.

I took notes. Because now when I die, I want my family to put giant slabs of stone in the heart of the North Texas campus in memory of my contributions to the school. I don't know anything about George and Alice Brown, but I doubt they ever cracked any internet dick jokes in support of Rice.

Who deserves such an honor more- me or them?

Another impressive building...

...and another...

...and another.

I've visited a lot of schools all over the country, and Rice is by far the most amazing campus I've ever seen. Walking around, I felt like I ought to have a tennis sweater tied around my neck.

This isn't a selective photo gallery, either. We spent a total of 25 minutes walking part of the way up one street and then back down the next block over. These are just some of the pictures I was able to take of buildings and statues within a 5-8 minute walk of the stadium.

A statue of William Marsh "Uncle Ben" Rice looks over a courtyard.

And a relief sculpture for some sort of Masonic/Illuminati secret prophecy adorns one of the labs.

Even the manhole covers are fancy.

And the only thing that threw me into a jealous rage: All of the Rice squirrels are actually squirrel-colored.

Rice students get their game faces (and torsos and arms) painted. TY would be proud.

Student turnout at the game was pretty small, but then again total student enrollment is less than 5,200. Meanwhile, Rice Stadium is built to seat over 70,000 fans. Both end zones are covered with tarps and the upper decks are not currently intended for seating, but the place still felt empty. The stadium itself is an old design that still works nicely (it's like a midpoint between Floyd Casey stadium at Baylor and DKR-Memorial at UT-Austin), but it's way too big for a school as small as Rice. Any North Texas fans who are agitating for a 40,000+ seat initial build and upper decks on our proposed new stadium should watch a game here. It should be all the proof anyone needs that a full stadium is far superior to a large one of the same quality as a sports venue.

Enough about architecture and statues... This is supposed to be a sports-oriented website. On that front, Rice may have a lot of things going for it, but one thing they don't have is a history of football success. At least, not much, and not lately. Aside from a New Orleans Bowl berth in 2005, their most recent bowl appearance was in 1961. Their stadium's ring of honor consists of Buddy Dial, Weldon Humble, Dickey Maegle, Jess Neely, Bill Wallace, and James "Froggy" Williams.

Jess Neely was born in 1898 and died more than 25 years ago. Bill Wallace has been dead for 15 years. Weldon Humble has been dead for 10. Buddy Dial is dead, too.

In fact, the only member of Rice's ring of honor that I can confirm is still breathing is Dickey Maegle, still going strong at just 74 years young. I can't find whether "Froggy" Williams is dead or not, but if he is alive, he's more than 80 years old.

So if you're the Rice Athletics Department, what do you do when you have no recent history of success to promote in your stadium?

You celebrate bookworm athletes from 50 years ago, of course!

And that's not all... Rice is also the only stadium I've ever visited where banners proudly display and recognize the achievements of:

Rhodes Scholars and Pulitzer Prize winners!

No sarcasm- That's an awesome way to play to your school's strengths and distract from one of the few weak spots. Bravo, Rice Athletics.

But before you let the praise get to your heads, let me ask you this: How many of your fancy pants Rhodes Scholars and Pulitzer winners have ever endorsed a popular brand of soda pop?

Suck on that, Nobel Prize-winning chemists Richard Smalley and Robert Curl!

Actually, to be fair... While Mean Joe may have been a Coca Cola spokesman, he was never a Coca Cola company president like Rice alum Charles Duncan, Jr. So even when it comes to Coke, Rice has scoreboard on us.

But don't think that everyone that comes out of Rice is making the world a better place. Rice is also the alma mater of Candace Bushnell, the woman responsible for Sex and the City.

And Rice was never the academic home of Meat Loaf. North Texas was. It was our school of music that made possible the epic "Paradise by the Dashboard Light," the greatest operatic eight-and-a-half minute long song about teenagers having sex in parked cars (with special guest vocals by Yankees announcer Phil Rizzuto) in the history of recorded music.

Come on, Rick Villarreal. We know you're reading this... Call the printer and have a banner made up to commemorate "Paradise by the Dashboard Light". If Rice could claim any piece of that song, I'm sure they'd already have one hanging in their stadium.

Anyway... While Rice may have to seethe forever over our Meat Loaf monopoly, there's another larger than life figure that they can console themselves with instead:

TEXAS DOUCHE.

The Douche factor at Rice was lower than at most other sporting events and venues. But this should be taken with a grain of salt, because the majority of fans on the Rice side of the stadium weren't wearing team or athlete branded merchandise of any type.

When you consider the segment of the Rice fan population wearing branded apparel, the relative ratio of Douches is almost identical to that of other schools. And if anyone from either school would like a copy of my field observation notes and linear regression analyses so they can forward my findings in nomination to the Nobel Prize committee, just email me and I'll pass them along.

Also in the house: the increasingly common Kentucky football Douche...

...and the still quite rare Steve Francis Douche (featuring Hispanic gang tattoos).

Doucheland Uber Alles!!

It's not often we can spot and chronicle a Team Deutschland Douche. Thank you, Rice University, for serving as the incubator for this non-native species of Douche.

I didn't remember to look for Bluetooth-equipped fans, but I did notice the snazzy uniforms of the Green Brigade.

Looking good, Green Brigade.

The band gave a fantastic halftime performance that has been thoroughly praised and celebrated by North Texas and Rice fans alike. But perhaps their greatest show of the night took place with three minutes left in the game.

TY is a rabid anti-Wave advocate, but I think that even he would have enjoyed the show that the Green Brigade put on for those of us who managed to tough it out until the end. They did a series of nontraditional Wave interpretations... Inside out, outside in, front to back, diagonal, motion detector slow... It was a very elaborate and well rehearsed piece of performance art that went on for several minutes. And it was pretty much the only thing we had to cheer about during the last 3 quarters of the game. The Rice fans who hadn't seen anything like it before were amazed.

So apparently... Rice students may graduate with a world renowned education, but one thing they don't learn is how to do funny routines based on the Wave.

The Marching Owl Band in action

The M.O.B. was something of a disappointment. The musicianship was surprisingly poor, though this probably had something to do with high school students that were playing with the band. It was part of a special event, but I didn't bother to write or record any notes when the occasion was explained on the P.A.

Still... While I love sex jokes and I laughed at their parting shot at the value of a North Texas degree in Music ("be sure and tip your server"), the halftime show was just bizarre and confusing. It started as a joke about the mortgage crisis and bailout, which apparently had something to do oil companies playing with us like puppets. Later, someone started running in circles while wearing a poorly constructed locomotive costume that started peeling off in pieces. After that, half a dozen people dressed as vampires took center stage and started biting people.

I'm not making any of this up.

The whole production reminded me of the students in a high school gifted English class that get wayyy too excited over performing skits about Beowulf or somesuch.

I don't mean to sound surly... It's not that they weren't entertaining. It's just that based on their reputation, I was expecting a lot more than what I saw. Maybe it was a bad day for them.

I offer this advice, as both a North Texas graduate and a musician with three weeks of middle school training on the plastic recorder: More dick jokes and insult comedy, less arts and crafts.

The final scoreboard. Proof that I sat through every last second of this game.

Still, the sort of people who insist their band is superior are usually trying to console themselves because their team didn't win. So any Rice fans can probably feel free to ignore what may just be sour grapes on my part.

The fans in the stands and all the people around campus were amazingly polite and friendly. We sat on the Rice side to avoid staring into the sun all day, and everyone around us was chatting pleasantly with us and generally being great hosts. In fact, in the entire time I was there, I only encountered one fan who wasn't completely gracious.

After the game was over, we walked around to the visitor's side exit. Along the way, we were walking almost side-by-side with a slightly intoxicated Rice fan who made mildly insulting (but generally harmless) comments towards every Mean Green fan that passed him by.

We ignored him, and so did three or four other packs of North Texas supporters. But on the last group he encountered before the exit, one Mean Green fan took umbrage at the comments and squared off, insisting that the Rice fan come back and repeat whatever stupid comment he had made. I don't know the Mean Green fan, but I took it upon myself to step in and try to diffuse the situation with some humor. And to put myself between the two of them so the drunk Rice fan could just walk away, which (to his credit) is exactly what he did.

With the Rice fan gone, I turned to leave... And the Mean Green fan decided to lash out one last time, shouting to all of Houston: "I hope you enjoy your next hurricane".

Let it not be said that we at North Texas can't stay classy in shameful defeat. It's just that some of us don't bother. If anyone that heard that was among the many area residents still without power that night, I'm sorry on behalf of the rest of our fans.

Give a hoot, don't pollute! (or run up the score too badly!)

One last tidbit to share; one of our growing traditions is to take photos of my brother with as many enemy mascots as possible. As you can see, Woodsy (or whatever the Rice mascot calls itself) is mocking our Talon signal.

I think this means that legally, the budding Rice-North Texas rivalry has just been elevated to Texas-Oklahoma status.

See you in Denton, Rice. I swear, our team can do better next time.