Black Coat, White Shoes, Black Hat, Cadillac...

Heard this on the way to work today. Cannot get this song out of my head...

Sweet Nasty

My buddy Johnny Low (salt of the Earth, that guy) moved to Arizona a couple years ago and has found himself a good group of guys to make Rock with. They are called Sweet Nasty and they just made a pretty impressive music video. Take a look at their site and click on "Video". It's a really well done video, but I do have to say it would have been much better if they had more shots of JLow.

Whassup Suckas?!

Going Back to Cali

Sorry, y'all. It's been a long time since the last post. Just busy w/ other stuff I guess. Anyways, we went to LA for a long weekend a couple weeks ago. Stayed w/ my super-hip uncle Stephen. He and Tim were very gracious hosts and drove us all over the place. I actually saw more of LA in those 4 days than I probably did in the whole year that I lived there.

The weather was unseasonably stormy for our stay. It rained almost every day, but we had a great time anyways. Kathleen and I even went running in the rain one day. The clouds did make for some very nice sunsets, tho. Here is the view from Stephen's porch looking out on Los Feliz.

We saw my friends from Seattle - Nancy and Julia. They took us to a great restaraunt bar called the Velvet Martini (or something like that).

Also we got to hang w/ Kathleen's college friend Megan, who showed us around Pasadena.

We went to Santa Monica beach, but it was too windy to hang out on the sand.

Then we went to Venice Beach. Did you know that Venice, CA actually has canals?

And we did all sorts of other touristy things like going to the Sunset strip and Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive. The Prada store was actually one of the most interesting places we visited. Very cool design and architecture.

MUTO

I wish I would make amazing stuff like this.



The website is here.

Is This Real Life?

This little guy is coming down off of his first trip. Trip to the dentist, that is. Something tells me he might enjoys some heavier stuff when he gets to college.

Helio Gracie

This morning Helio Gracie died at age 95. He was the creator of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ).



It's pretty amazing to think that this guy was the founder of a martial art style. Most martial arts are so old that nobody could really identify who started it. He was a 10th degree red belt (which is higher than a black belt).

We had a moment of silence at class tonight in honor of the Grand Master and "bowed out" to a picture of him on the wall. Our instructor Brian told a story about Helio from when he was training with the Gracies. He recalled how all the other instructors, which they called Professors, had their own private offices with a private locker for them to change at, but Helio had his locker in the main locker room with all the students. When they break for lunch, everyone would hang up their gi and their belt on their locker door (to dry out I imagine). So you'd see all these white and blue belts hanging all down the line, but there in the midst of them all was the red belt of the Grand Master. Pretty cool.