audi has unveiled a new competitor in the badass gt3 racing class, with the audi r8 gt3. currently referred to internally as the ‘R16’, the R8 GT3 will be available for customers to buy in the fall of 2009, with the first races planned for later the same year.

with dedicated rear wheel drive (per gt race regulations no awd), the r8 gt3, will put out more than 500hp, sent through a sequential 6spd gearbox. i don’t come close to being able to afford even the stock audi r8 (~$100k) and i imagine this will run upwards of $150k, but i can still admire and dream, can’t i?

i’ve always had seasickness problems if i’m out in choppy waters. this has always conflicted dearly with my love of the ocean and fishing. during the summer when eric and i fish every weekend, my sealegs usually get strong enough, but since we’ve both been pretty busy this summer, and only fishing once a month, i’ve been trying the different methods to prevent seasickness.

bonine and dramamine (even their “less drowsy” versions) have always done a good job at keeping me from losing my lunch, but make me so damn drowsy that it makes fishing less enjoyable and ruins the rest of my day because i’m just too damn tired to do anything. in preparation for a catalina fishing trip this weekend, i saw my doctor and got a prescription for scopolamine. A small patch that fits behind your ear, “scope” slowly releases a chemical into your skin that helps prevent the inner ear from thinking you’re off balance. you can leave it on for as long as 3 days at a time, and the best part is… no drowsiness! today i was out on the water for 11 hours and the only side effect that i experienced was dry mouth, and like eric said: “that’s why they invented beer.” for 11 hours, in the galley, on the deck and sleeping in random places, i didn’t get a hint of seasickness and now that i’m back on dry land, i’m feeling just fine, not groggy and drowsy like otc seasickness remedies.

so yeh, if you’re going on a fishing charter, whale watching expedition, cruise, or any other place where you get seasick/carsick/airsick, ask your doc about scopolamine. this is definitely going to increase the amount of places that i can fish without having to worry about getting sick.

Romania’s Sandra Izbasa and Russia’s Yelena Zamolodchikova congratulating each other after a routine well done. Poor nastia looks so jealous.

on september 27th, the sandiego association that has put on the rosarito to ensenada bike ride for almost 30 years, will host it’s final event. tourism in baja california has been way down in the year, and according to the company’s website, the last event only brought 5000 riders, which was their “financial break-even point.” while the decline in participants has been steady for the last 5 years, increased drug cartel activity in the region, coupled with new passport requirements for 2008 made for a very small event in april, leading to this final ride next month.

i had missed the last 2 events being busy with nothing in particular, but i’m pretty exicited to do it one last time. taka’s going to ride it for the 3rd time, having done it once with me on a tandem, and then another time all on her own. the ride can be pretty grueling — with some f’d up hills — but the weather and scenery is always pleasant, and the feeling of accomplishment (and beers and tacos) when you finish always make the effort and the trip worth it.

so far it’s me+taka, costin+lauren, al and ben, so if anyone else is interested in coming along, either for the ride or just to hang out, lemme know, i’m not gonna be asking about it next year.

it’s strange, because during the day, the people at galleria southbay mall are mainly trendy, rich redondo beach moms with their kids, but after work hours and on the weekends, it reminds me of the old mall in downtown long beach that only sold shoes.

this sign was on the door of the amc movie theatre inside the mall. i’m not sure if that means that weapons are ok in the rest of the mall and not the theatre, or if there was another sign on the main door that i missed and this was just a reminder.

by the way, tropic thunder was fucking hilarious.

tonight taka and i took our first dance lesson. we’d been talking about doing it for a while and taka finally found a dance studio only a couple of blocks away from where we live. we’re going to be taking classes twice a week and tonight the first dance we took on was the cha cha cha. Neither of us are much for dancing, but by the end of the 1 hour session we had the basic steps down.

it was a lot more fun than i thought it would be. half of the class were beginners and half were more intermediate, but they were all good looking and we rotated partners often. i was under-dressed. everyone else was dressed classy in slacks and dress shirt and wearing fancy dancing shoes. i was wearing my gym pants, a black wife beater and tennis shoes, but now i know to class it up next time.

our next class is swing, which i imagine will be a much more useful dance at parties and random social events. if we find we only have time to take one class, i’m assuming it will the swing, because i can’t imagine we’ll have too many opportunities to cha cha cha. we’ll see how it goes.

i remember back in 2001 or 2002 when i started to get really interested in japan, i would read the mainichi daily news website every day to keep up to date on what was happening in japan. the news wasn’t only interesting, but it made for good conversation with japanese girls and the knowledge of international news made me seem more worldly (or at least i thought so).

the mainichi daily news site was supposed to be direct translations from their japanese site. for the most part the news articles were decent, although they really liked to use puns and corny headlines. i even emailed them a couple of times complaining about it, but never got a response.

along with the regular news, they’d have a weekly article from the “waiwai” section that had some pretty raunchy articles with the sleeziest headlines. they were always about crazy things like mother-daughter prostitute teams and why japanese guys don’t like to go down on girls. anyway, i always found these pretty entertaining, but i guess everyone else didn’t feel the same way, with some feeling that the site portrayed japanese as deviant sex maniacs (ummm…) the site also apparently had some strange meta tags to drive sketchy traffic like “hentai”, “japanese girls” and “ganguro” (all meta keywords for kentomatic btw =p). after some complaints and then an internal investigation, the shit hit the fan, and people got fired.

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over the last 5 months, tnthd had been playing the entire las vegas series in order, with a new episode every weekday at 9am. so each day when i got home, i’d fire up my tivo and find the time to watch the 40+ minute show. las vegas was seriously the best t&a show on network television with some of the hottest girls i’d ever seen. i also loved how they’d always have a guest star playing some corny role. one of my favorites was in the final season when tom selleck was the owner of the montecito, and his two “poker buddies” from hawaii came out to see him… they ended up being the actors who played rick and tc on magnum p.i.

the show itself was pretty ridiculous. they were always using technology that didn’t exist, always getting robbed, always had way too many hot girls in way too little clothing, but it was always entertaining, and i really grew to love all the characters and their wacky antics. the thing that sucks is that the show isn’t going to be renewed, and the 5th season left so many questions unanswered. who crashed in the montecito jet? is delinda’s baby going to be ok? are danny and delinda going to get married? what about mike and piper? the deline’s got a divorce?! i really hope that they at least make a 2 hour special to wrap things up, ’cause i’m just not going to be right until i know the answer to these questions.

I think it was sometime back in February that I hurt my shoulder while bench pressing around 200lbs, which was really good weight for me at the time. Around that same time, I moved up to the South Bay and started going to the gym with Eric 2-3x a week. While for the longest time, I wasn’t able to lift much weight at all, it all kind of worked out, because I was able to help Eric get into a good routine and he’s made some good progress. But after seeing those recent wakeboarding pics and how much muscle mass i’d lost over the last few months, I realized i needed to step back up, and on Monday, I was finally able to do heavy weight without any pain in my shoulder at all. I pulled out 6×185, 7×185 and 8×185 on the flat bench press, and I’m sure i could’ve done more weight. So i’m pscyhed to be back in the gym and doing it up right.

Now that i’m not working against any injuries and excited about the gym again, I thought i’d start another fitness blog. I killed getbig.kentomatic.com, because aside from me being injured and not lifting heavy weight, it was only about me and my routine, and i can’t imagine that many people were interested in following it. It did have a page rank of 2, but that might just have been from the kentomatic.com link alone.

The new fitness blog is going to be a general blog about fitness, probably focused on weight lifting, but cover all areas of exercise. It’s not just going to be about me and what i’m doing, although most of the articles will be from my experience and perspective. The problem is, I need a name for it and am looking for suggestions, so comment or email me anything you can think of.

Here are some that have been mentioned to me or that i’ve come up with that i’m thinking about:
onemoremile.com
fullrep.com
perfectrep.com
lookatmymuscles.com

gimme your input!

if you saw the opening ceremony at the 2008 olympics in beijing, i’m sure you’d agree that it was one of the most amazing presentations in the history of the games. to be honest, since it was all “made in china,” i was just waiting for some of the technology to fail or for pieces of the stadium to fall apart. but to their credit, it all went off without a hitch and was impressive as hell. the synchronization of the drums, and coordination of so many performers kept me glued in my seat up until the lengthy and boring entering of the athletes segment.

something that was mentioned by the commentators during the opening ceremony presentation was that the 2008 chinese drummers were told to smile more during their performance. for some countries, seeing that many chinese performing together with such precision did seem a bit militaristic and frightening, and while those types of performers never smile, they did during the olympics to make them look less menacing to those countries who might be afraid of them.

taka, who frequently reads japanese and other asian blogs told me that for the most part, the smiling failed to serve its purpose. japanese and most other asian countries who have similar customs (where those types of performers never smile) said that seeing 2008 chinese performers drumming together in perferct synchronization, while sporting a creepy-forced smile just made it look that much more frightening and threatening to them. so much for trying to make people comfortable.