49giantsharks

I am a Cal football fan who goes by the name of Matthew Scott LaBar, or 49giantsharks on the internet. You will see that I like to talk about myself.

This page is a bit of a relic, which I believe I wrote in 2006. My how things are different.

My Name

My name is nothing special; my parents just happened to like Matthew, while LaBar is Anglicized La Barré, apparently French for "the bar." I 51% like Matthew better than Matt, although I address myself as both. I respond to my last name better because from seventh grade through the end of high school everyone called me LaBar. My regnal name would either be Mattheus I in honor of the Fourth (or Fifth) Commandment or Victor IV, primarily in honor Sancti Papæ Victoris I (note the pronunciation is as Wictor).

Sports

You may have noticed that I first considered myself a Cal football game. As far as you're concerned, my birthday is October 10, 1987, when I first attended a game, a 23-23 tie against Arizona at the age of 3 months. Nothing will ever come between me and Cal football.
I like most other sports too. Cal basketball and rugby (the most dominant team against equal competition in the history of sports) come second and third, as well as the San Francisco 49ers, the San José Sharks and the San Francisco Giants (although the A's are my #2 baseball team, I hate the Raiders). I can't stand the NBA, and I like to watch softball when Cal's in the WCWS. I also like Oklahoma's women's basketball team because their star players were my year at my high school (I hardly knew them, but to be #1 for a month in a sport at the high school level is really good).

School

I went to the public Frank C. Havens Elementary School in Piedmont for my first six years of school. Having a tendency to fight and general annoy kids and teachers, my parents decided to send my to a private middle school. I wanted to go to Head Royce (and maybe still wish I had gone there), but instead had the misfortune of attending Redwood Day School after the Jayhawks said I wasn't good enough for them. At RDS I developed a severe hate for school and became a slacker like you wouldn't believe who only passed because he could remember everything the teachers had said during tests. I came back to the Piedmont school system for high school and attended Piedmont High School, which I enjoyed, but I still slacked off. My slackage decreased until my senior year when I received my best report card ever my final semester. After Cal said I wasn't good enough for them, I came to Long Beach State mostly because the mascot is the 49er.
In 11th grade I developed an interest in math, and so came to college as a math major. My senior year I developed an interest in English philology, and so I decided to double major.
My future plans are to get a Ph.D. in math, but if I get into Cal's English program but not their math program, I'll be getting a Ph.D. in English (but considering their English program is #1 in the country, that's a little tough). Afterwards, I hope to become a professor at Cal, and as of now my primary interests are complex analysis first and partial differential equations second.

Interests

Aside from being 77.3% Catholic and 22.7% Protestant, my first and final love is football. I also enjoy math and English philology, and other academic interests include physics, Latin, Christian theology, and history. I have also semi-invented a field called "sports theory," which maybe I'll talk about sometime. Other things include the history of sports, Minesweeper and application of math to Minesweeper, FreeCell and juggling. I also do some creative writing, some of which can be found at [1]. I hope to learn Latin then Spanish then Italian (in that order and yes I want to be fluent in Latin), but for now I'm monolingual. After taking an Arthurian literature class last semester, I've become a King Arthur nerd, particularly the Vulgate Cycle which I hope to read in its entirety.

Wikipedia

You would think that after these ramblings about myself that I have contributed a lot, but I've hardly done anything. I've edited some football and King Arthur articles, and a few scattered others. I might rewrite the Idylls of the King article, though. When I learn to speak Latin, however, I will probably do tons on the Latin Vicipædia and maybe forget the English one forever.