San Diego, CA

Nick Canepa: 12-team playoff gives SDSU, others more hope — and whiners less to carp about

Published

2 years ago

August 31, 2024

Nick Canepa: 12-team playoff gives SDSU, others more hope — and whiners less to carp about

Sez Me …

This is it. We have begun the year of the 12-team College Football Playoff. I’ve been waiting for it since I saw Hopalong Cassady hopping around in the mud the last time it rained on the Rose Bowl.

A good thing. It’s how it should be. No what-ifs. The room for the left-outs to bitch has been reduced in square feet from the Pentagon to a matchbox.

College football’s national champions used to come complete with “mythical” scribbled on their toe tags.

What did that mean? The titlist was a guess. Assumed.

And, while we never should assume, it was the only way to determine the champ from 1869 — when Rutgers and Princeton tied — to 2014, when the College Football Playoff was born.

Worst of all, it wasn’t won on the field. National titles were determined by the polls, filled out by sportswriters and coaches.

The journalists who cover college football do great work, but by the very nature of their work, it’s impossible for them to see all the teams play.

Coaches? They watch film of the teams they’re playing next. Many of them leave poll voting to their school’s Sports Information Director.

The Final 12 also will be decided by a CFP poll first released in November. Maybe the committee missed a few times when the tournament was made up of four, but it’s not screwing up the 12. Anyone complaining about not making it now simply didn’t play well enough and gets no sympathy. As it is, the five power conference winners get automatic entry, the top four byes.

Of course, the new format isn’t going to dismiss the usual powers. But NIL and the transfer portal have created chaos in college football, which is a funky stew right now. With so many new and unfamiliar faces, it could take awhile for some of the strong boys to show all of their muscle.

But now teams with two losses are going to get tickets, and as with the NCAA Tournament in basketball, there’s going to be more room for upstarts and upsets. I can’t see this new format hurting San Diego State. The Aztecs getting to the old format was nearly impossible. It was nearly impossible for most schools.

The winner will deserve it now. Leave the myth crap to Edith Hamilton. …

I didn’t see much greatness opening weekend. Georgia didn’t impress much and Ohio State, with 85 future draft choices, didn’t — vs. Akron. …

Utah QB Cameron Rising will be back for his seventh season, tying the record set by Faber College’s John Blutarsky. …

The Holiday Bowl will play in Snapdragon, but I loved it in Petco, where it was unique, and its surroundings superior for fun seekers to those in Mission Valley. Tourists don’t flock to Costco, Ikea and Lowe’s, although Costco does have samples and Ikea Swedish meatballs. …

Deion Sanders believes he has the press cornered, refusing to take questions from Denver Post columnist Sean Keeler. Not smart. I’ll be a columnist on this paper 40 years this month, and I’ve never cared if a player, coach, owner, GM, manager or politician shut me out. Columnists get by with their own quotes. …

I’d tell him: “Thank you, Deion.” …

But, tell you what, Deion’s son, Shedeur — who doubles as Colorado’s quarterback — is going to play in the NFL. So, instead of not talking to the press, he can just say trite things. …

Shedeur has First Overall Pick written all over him. …

He has magic to him. Simply a great arm and vision, with a monster football IQ. …

And Travis Hunter, Colorado’s two-way stud, is the best pure football player in America. Just think. He just played 100 snaps — at altitude. …

Back in the 1980s, Padres boss Ballard Smith called to tell me he was never speaking to me again. “I told him, “Ballard, I spent the first 30-plus years of my life not talking to you; I can do 30-plus more.” …

Several months later, I ran into Ballard, and he said: “Where’ve you been? I haven’t talked to you in awhile.” …

Say, when Padres General Manager Jack McKeon basically made himself Padres manager, I wrote a column saying being both GM and skipper is a mistake. Jack didn’t speak to me for two years. I got by. And I was right. …

I know people are idiots, but those claiming the Padres are better off without Fernando Tatis Jr. couldn’t spell “a” if you spotted them the “a.” …

Most people used to avoid saying something stupid. …

If Jackson Merrill isn’t NL Rookie Of The Year, he’s Most Important Rookie Of The Year. And that’s more important. …

Jurickson Profar must dream about bunting. Wake up! …

Luis Arraez is a terrific hitter. But he’s a DH. To paraphrase my late colleague and friend Scott Stewart, he plays defense with a glove on one hand and a map in the other. …

When asked if he were doctoring the baseball with a foreign substance, Don Sutton said: “That’s not true. Vaseline is manufactured right here in the United States.” …

The Colts have released a third of their 2024 draft class — fifth, sixth and seventh-round choices. At the time, GM Chris Ballard said: “We couldn’t believe they were still on the board.” …

I’m wondering if I’ll ever get used to the NFL’s new kickoff alignment. Seems unprofessional and video gamey. …

Brittany Mahomes, wife of Patrick, says she doesn’t give an “F” word about what people think of her publicly endorsing Donald Trump. Doesn’t appear she can be like her husband and block out a bad play. …

Babe Ruth’s “called shot” jersey has sold at auction for $24.2 million. It tripled in value after George Costanza dumped strawberries all over it. …

Steph Curry will make $62.57 million this season. The entire Oakland A’s payroll is $62.59 million. The Athletics brass made sure Curry wasn’t making more than their entire team. …

Amazon Wonderly — and I wonder what that is — wants the Kelce brothers podcast and is paying them $100 million over three years for the rights. Amazon apparently has found out too late that Taylor Swift isn’t a part of it. …

Kansas City signed former Patriots starting QB Bailey Zappe. The Chiefs are like the Dodgers, so if Zappe is forced to play, he’s MVP. …

The heat index in Iran the other day hit a world record 180 degrees, breaking the mark set just a day earlier while the Padres were playing in St. Louis. …

Colorado sportsbooks took $320 million worth of bets in July — $9 million on table tennis. The state gets 4.4 percent of the winnings. California, with around 35 million more residents? Nothing. …

Walden Pond is being endangered by development. I didn’t know it was in San Diego. Let me guess: High-rise condos with no parking, an access road smooth as railroad tracks, and a $25 million bike lane around the shore. …

“Women and men simply are not the same. They’re just not.” — Katherine Hepburn

Originally Published: August 31, 2024 at 3:00 p.m.

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San Diego, CA

San Diego Zoo Safari Park’s Elephant Valley: Get closer to elephants

Published

7 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

San Diego Zoo Safari Park’s Elephant Valley: Get closer to elephants

Todd Martens
| Los Angeles Times

San Diego — Before we see elephants at Elephant Valley in the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, we come face to face with destruction, only the wreckage is beautiful. A long, winding path takes guests around and under felled trees. Aged gray tree hunks form arches, for instance, over bridges that tower over clay-colored paths with hoof prints.

The design is meant to reorient us, to take us on a trail walked not by humans but traversed and carved by elephants, a creature still misunderstood, vilified and hunted for its cataclysmic-like ability to reshape land, and sometimes communities.

“It starts,” says Kristi Burtis, vice president of wildlife care for the Safari Park, “by telling the story that elephants are ecosystem engineers.”

Elephant Valley will open March 5 as the newest experience at the Escondido park, its aim to bring guests closer than ever to the zoo’s eight elephants, which range in age from 7 to 36, while more heavily focusing on conservation. The centerpiece of the 13-acre-plus parkland is a curved bridge overlooking a savanna, allowing elephants to walk under guests. But there are also nooks such as a cave that, while not previewed at a recent media event, will allow visitors to view elephants on their level.

In a shift from, say, the Safari Park’s popular tram tour, there are no fences and visible enclosures. Captive elephants remain a sometimes controversial topic, and the zoo’s herd is a mix of rescues and births, but the goal was to create a space where humans are at once removed and don’t impede on the relative free-roaming ability of the animals by keeping guests largely elevated. As an example of just how close people can get to the herd, there was a moment of levity at the event when one of the elephants began flinging what was believed to be a mixture of dirt and feces up onto the bridge.

“Our guests are going to be able to see the hairs on an elephant,” Burtis says. “They can see their eyes. They can see the eyelashes. They can see how muscular their trunks are. It’s really going to be a different experience.”

Elephant Valley, complete with a multistory lodge with open-air restaurants and bars, boasts a natural design that isn’t influenced by the elephant’s African home so much as it is in conversation with it. The goal isn’t to displace us, but to import communal artistry — Kenyan wood and beadwork can be found in the pathways, resting spaces and more — as a show of admiration rather than imitation.

“We’re not going to pretend that we’re taking people to Africa,” says Fri Forjindam, now a creative executive with Universal’s theme parks but previously a lead designer on Elephant Valley via her role as a chief development officer at Mycotoo, a Pasadena-based experiential design firm.

“That is a slippery slope of theming that can go wrong really fast,” she adds. “How do we recognize where we are right now, which is near San Diego? How do we populate this plane with plants that are indigenous to the region? The story of coexistence is important. We’re not extracting from Africa, we’re learning. We’re not extracting from elephants, we’re sharing information.”

But designing a space that is elephant-first yet also built for humans presented multiple challenges, especially when the collaborating teams were aiming to construct multiple narratives around the animals. Since meetings about Elephant Valley began around 2019, the staff worked to touch on themes related to migration and conservation. And there was also a desire to personalize the elephants.

“Where can we also highlight each of the elephants by name, so they aren’t just this huge herd of random gray creatures?” Forjindam says. “You see that in the lodge.”

That lodge, the Mkutano House — a phrase that means “gathering” in Swahili — should provide opportunities for guests to linger, although zoo representatives say reservations are recommended for those who wish to dine in the space (there will also be a walk-up, to-go window). Menus have yet to be released, but the ground floor of the structure, boasting hut-like roofing designed to blend into the environment, features close views of the elephant grazing pool as well as an indoor space with a centerpiece tree beneath constellation-like lighting to mimic sunrises and sunsets.

Throughout there are animal wood carvings and beadwork, the latter often hung from sculptures made of tree branches. The ceiling, outfitted with colorful, cloth tapestries designed to move with the wind, aims to create less friction between indoor and outdoor environments.

There are, of course, research and educational goals of the space as well. The Safari Park works, for instance, with the Northern Rangelands Trust and Loisaba Conservancy in Kenya, with an emphasis on studying human-elephant conflict and finding no-kill resolutions. Nonprofits and conservation groups estimate that there are today around 415,000 elephants in Africa, and the African savanna elephant is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Studies of the zoo’s young elephants is shared with the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in the hopes of delivering care to elephant youth to prevent orphanage. Additionally, the Safari Park has done extensive examination into the endotheliotropic herpes virus. “The data that we collect from elephants here, you can’t simply get from elephants in the wild,” Burtis says.

One of the two entrances to Elephant Valley is outfitted with bee boxes; bees are known to be a natural elephant deterrent and can help in preventing the animals from disrupting crops or communities. To encourage more natural behavior, the plane is outfitted with timed feeders in an attempt to encourage movement throughout the acreage and establish a level of real-life unpredictability in hunting for resources. Water areas have been redesigned with ramps and steps to make it easier for the elephants to navigate.

With Elephant Valley, Forjindam says the goal was to allow visitors to “observe safely in luxury — whatever that is — but not from a position of power, more as a cohabitor of the Earth, with as much natural elements as possible. It’s not to impose dominance. Ultimately, it needed to feel natural. It couldn’t feel like a man-made structure, which is an antiquated approach to any sort of safari experience where animals are the product, a prize. In this experience, this is the elephant’s home.”

And the resulting feel of Elephant Valley is that we, the paying customers, are simply their house guests.

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San Diego, CA

Man fatally struck by hit-and-run vehicle in San Diego

Published

19 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

Man fatally struck by hit-and-run vehicle in San Diego

A man in the Mission Bay Park community of San Diego was fatally struck Sunday morning by a hit-and run vehicle, authorities said.

The victim was also struck by a second vehicle and that motorist stayed at the scene to cooperate with officers, the San Diego Police Department reported.

The initial crash occurred at about 2:20 a.m. Sunday in the area of West Mission Bay and Sea World drives.

The pedestrian was in the southbound lanes of the 2000 block of West Mission Bay Drive when he was struck by a silver vehicle also in the southbound lanes. That vehicle fled the scene, continuing southbound, police said.

A 28-year-old man driving his vehicle southbound ran over the downed pedestrian.

“That driver remained at the scene and is not DUI,” according to a police statement. “The pedestrian was pronounced deceased at the scene.”

Anyone with information regarding the initial crash was urged to call Crime Stoppers at 888-580-8477.

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San Diego, CA

Here are the 9 San Diego County communities that set or tied heat records

Published

1 day ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

Here are the 9 San Diego County communities that set or tied heat records

San Diego County is known for having wet, cold weather in February. But it had numerous hot spells this year. And when the month ended on Saturday a high pressure system produced heat that broke or tied temperature records in nine communities from the desert to the sea, the National Weather Service said.

The most notable temperature occurred in Borrego Springs, which reached 99, five degrees higher than the previous record for Feb. 28, set in 1986. The 99 reading is also the highest temperature ever recorded in Borrego in February.

Escondido reached 95, tying a record set in 1901.

El Cajon reached 92, three degrees higher than the record set in 2009.

Ramona topped out at 88, five degrees higher than the record set in 2009.

Alpine hit 88, four degrees higher the record set in 1986.

Campo reached 87, four degrees higher than the record set in 1999.

Vista hit 86, four degrees higher than the record set in 2020.

Chula Vista reached 84, one degree higher than the record set in 2020.

Lake Cuyamaca rose to 76, four degrees higher than the record set in 1986.

Forecasters say the weather is not likely to broadly produce new highs on Sunday. Cooler air is moving to the coast, and on Monday, San Diego’s high will only reach 67, a degree above normal.

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