OREGON TRAIL RAP

My boy Mike Hover is half of a comedy duo named Picard Maneuver.

Mike and I went to Film school together - in fact he helped me produce Eviction Notice back in the day. Anyway, he recently sent me a link to this Oregon Trail inspired rap music video he made. If you have 3 minutes to kill, check it out.

Mike is the slightly less creepy looking one with the glasses.

225 FOREST

Matt and I stopped by the Nike concept store down in Laguna the other day.



Basically they have a mix of Nike, Hurley and Converse stuff and upstairs you can design and print your own shirts, sneakers or boardshorts.


This big 30' tall Dalek painting is sort of the centerpiece of the store. Basically this guy Dalek used to work as a studio assistant to Takashi Murakami before "branching out" on his own a few years back with a bunch of work in a style that completely ripped Murakami off. Now he's graduated to doing a lot of these colorful flat geometric patterns - not sure which motif I like least.


Shirt printer and heat presses inside the upstairs design lab


The store had a lot of clever little decorative details. In an age where you can buy everything for dirt cheap at Wal-Mart or on Amazon, brick and mortar retailers have to innovate and offer people more of an "experience" in order to compete. Basically retailers need to work to turn their stores into destinations that stand out and are worth talking about. It's a simple concept that a puzzlingly large number of business owners tend to completely overlook.

JUXTAPOZ

Our boys at SA Studios helped put on the Juxtapoz 15th Anniversary Art Auction last weekend.



I'd have posted these pictures earlier but I spent most of last week camped out for New Moon. (Just kidding, only Matt does stuff like that)


Really nice Shawn Barber watercolor



The display was really well done; good variety of styles and pieces from quite a few big name artists. And a ton of people came out - very cool event overall.


A piece by Shepard Fairey


And, to cap the night off, they projected the fight and everyone got to watch my Uncle Manny handle his business.

SNEAKER AUCTION

UNDFTD is helping to auction DJ AM's sneaker collection on eBay.

Aside from being the world's best DJ, AM was a sneaker connoisseur. He had around 900 pairs including a bunch of rare and super hard to find stuff.

Anyway, about 150 pairs are currently up on eBay and they're adding more every day until for the next couple weeks. All proceeds go to the DJ AM Memorial Fund.


Unfortunately AM was a size 12 while Matt and I wear 10's. Actually it's probably a good thing seeing as how rare/expensive some of these shoes are.


Last year we designed the print collateral and website for an event in Long Beach that AM headlined.





Oh and speaking of shoes, these showed up in the mail the other day.


Bought them with money I won in Vegas, so thanks to the South Point Casino and 'hard six' in particular.

GALAXY

Went by the Galaxy game last Friday.


They played the Houston Dynamo it what happened to be the MLS Western Conference Finals.




A little hooliganism before the game


My boy Phillip got us tickets directly behind the Galaxy bench.


I need to get a new zoom lens


In the middle of the first half most of the lights in Home Depot Center shut off sort of abruptly. Twenty minutes later the PA announcer apologized, someone flipped the switch back on and everyone went back to playing soccer. (Yay!)

Until the second half when it happened again.


This is Beckham during the second blackout thinking to himself and wondering how he ended up playing in this Mickey Mouse soccer league in the first place. (Oh that's right - the $500 gazillion dollar contract)


Of course it's soccer so after 90 minutes of regulation, and 40 minutes of unexplained blackouts, no one had scored any goals.

When are they going to make the size of the goals bigger? When? Seriously. Just widen the goal by 2 feet on each side and see how it turns out. What's the worst that could happen - too many goals scored?

The way it is now, two of the best teams in the league cannot score a single goal within regulation. If too many goals was the biggest problem in soccer I think it'd be ok. They could always revert back to the super-boring-current version of soccer later. I wish they'd try to do something to make it watchable, even for just a week.

And people wonder why soccer isn't popular in America.


Anyway, after regulation they played two 15-minute overtime periods. No one scored in either of those so everyone decided to pack in it, go home and dismantle the MLS altogether.

Just kidding - the Galaxy won 2 - 0 in extra time. Good luck to them as they'll play for the MLS Championship next week (in what will probably end up being another thrilling 0 - 0 tie. Don't forget to set your Tivo's.)

THURSDAY

Matt and I stopped by the Apple store in La Jolla yesterday morning.



Picked up one of the new giant iMacs.



Then we headed up to Staples to catch the Lakers game. Suns came in with a good record and some minor hype but they played horribly. I like Amare but I really think we just watched the worst game of his career (2 for 15 from the field - that's 13% shooting). And he actually looked worse than those numbers.



Kobe picked apart the Suns defense all night. Bynum was a beast. Late in the fourth Farmar had the pass of his lifetime, two-handed, behind his head, no-look to a wide open Mbenga who blew the dunk. Best, or I guess worst ruined highlight I've seen in a while.

POKER STORIES

Every time Gabe watches poker he comes back with all these lame stories.

I don't think he realizes that no one wants to hear stories about poker. But he gets so excited and he's always rambling on about "how this guy flipped over this card, then this other guy had another card, and then another guy had some other cards..."

He thinks that these poker stories are interesting but to people outside of his little poker universe, they're really not.

In fact I found this video the other day - this is exactly what I feel like when Gabe talks to me about poker.

Jokes.com
Nick Swardson - Kids Love Pokemon
comedians.comedycentral.com
Joke of the Day Stand-Up Comedy Free Online Games

WSOP FINAL TABLE

Snuck out to Vegas over the weekend to catch the World Series of Poker Final Table.


A ton of people showed up to see Phil Ivey play. We ended up coming at a good time and only had to wait about 45 minutes to get seated.


Ended up in the de facto Kevin Schaffel cheering section. To recap, this is the final table of the 6,000+ entrant Main Event tournament held in July. The 9 players left took a 3 month break and then came back for 1 weekend to play for the $8.5 million dollar first place prize. Every one of the 9 were guaranteed at least $1.3 million.

As you can imagine, since the stakes are so ridiculous, everyone plays super conservatively. Every player folds almost every hand. I started to doze off when all of the sudden Schaffel went all-in pre-flop against this guy named Eric Buchman. Schaffel flipped over pocket Aces and everyone around me when nuts. Buchman had pocket Kings and was a huge statistical underdog. Unfortunately Buchman pulled off the miracle of his lifetime and turned quad Kings to send Schaffel home in 9th place.

For a guy who just took a 1 in a million bad beat that cost him potentially millions of dollars, Schaffel seemed to take it pretty well.


Ran into Doyle Brunson on the way out.


They had a huge sports silent auction in the Rio lobby. I had won a small fortune in craps the night before so I had to resist the temptation to blow it all on these Autographed All Star Edition Nike Kobe II's.


Stopped by Caesars.


Neil Leifer was promoting his Taschen photo book so they had some of his prints up all over the poker room including this famous shot of Ali.


Cool noodle restaurant inside Caesars.




But nothing beats the $2 South Point Graveyard Special.

37SIGNALS

Found a great Inc. article about Jason Fried, one of the founders of 37signals.

The article details Fried's unconventional schedule which I found interesting since I work one that's even more obscure than his. I always get more work done in the middle of the night, from about midnight until 5AM, than any other time of day. During the day I take all the calls, e-mails, meetings and conference calls. I try to triage and respond to all the "immediate" client needs throughout the day, but it's damn near impossible to do much of the creative work during "normal" business hours.

As Jason Fried sums it up:
"We rarely have meetings. I hate them. They're a huge waste of time, and they're costly. It's not one hour; it's 10, because you pulled 10 people away from their real work. Plus, they chop your day into small bits, so you have only 20 minutes of free time here or 45 minutes there. Creative people need unstructured time to get in the zone. You can't do that in 20 minutes."

I don't think anyone I know really understands my schedule, but this quote seems to capture the underlying principle of why I'm always on my computer at 3AM. The middle of the night is the only large block of uninterrupted time where certain things can get done properly.

I'm not up working every night, but that is still when the majority of our creative work gets accomplished. It started in college because I was freelancing at night and sleeping through attending classes during the day. Even a couple years ago it wasn't as big a deal, I'd work at night and I could get away with sleeping in late because we only had a couple of clients. Unfortunately that no longer flies. On nights when I go to sleep around 5:30AM, I'm up by about 10 and there are voicemails and e-mails waiting.

I remember a time when Matt and I would play golf in the afternoons because some days we would run out of work to do before it got dark - seems absurd now but it really wasn't too far back. Some days I think "Thank God we found more work" and other days I think "I wish we could be playing golf right now."

Anyway, 37signals started as a web design firm and now they're a leading web-based software company. Their most recent project is called Haystack, an online directory of web design agencies and look who has their own listing.

KRINK MINI

Pictures of Craig "KR" Costello's Krinked out Mini Cooper started popping up online this week.



Yep, the dude behind this year's best laptop sleeve was hired by BMW to go out to Germany and drip his signature ink all over one of their tiny cars.







Sure his style is really simple and everyone who doesn't know any better sees his stuff and says "So what? Drips? I could do that." But then again there's a reason why Craig is out traveling the world doing product collaborations with Nike and Levi's and selling his own line of art supplies while everybody else sits at home watching Dancing With the Stars on Tivo.


As some of you know, Matt has a very similar look applied to his car - but rather than specialty paint markers, his comes from leaving his car parked underneath the power lines in front of his house.