CHESSNOID

Last night Showtime put on an excellent mma show. They showed 5 fights and they were all pretty good. Jake Shields was the most impressive fighter to me and the MMA poster girl Gina Carano won with her first submission. Nick Diaz won a split decision but he seemed like he just smoked a joint before the fight because he was kind of lackluster. He should of won this by submission in the first round. You can find the fights on youtube, or if you register at the site Pro-Elite, you can watch them their for free. Pro-Elite just recently bought out King of the Cage which is actually a pretty big MMA organization. I have a few of their earlier DVDs they put out. I believe good quality MMA shows being put on free or subscription TV without the crazy $50 PPV fees will actually continue to put pressure on those types of organizations like the UFC. I will keep my fingers crossed.

I belong to MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog which are great sites to promote your own blog and meet and learn from more experienced bloggers, but lately I have been getting semi-spam messages on the new upstart BlogRush from other community members. I guess it is just a little annoying when you get multiple messages from different bloggers promoting it in that manner. I really don’t know if it works yet, but I did sign up and even put a plug in my last post about it. Hopefully, it does work and that the spams about it dies off fast.

I drive a little sporty Toyota Yaris and have owned it for about 6 months now. I am extremely happy with it. It gets over 40 miles per gallon with my conservative driving. I am surprised that I haven’t put that many miles on it. It is still below the 3,000 mile mark which means I have only put about 500 miles a month. That is extremely low to what I used to drive when I commuted from the inland empire to orange county on the worse rated freeway in the United States the 91 freeway. My regular commute back then was 45 miles one way. With no traffic like on a Sunday, it would be a 45 mile drive. During the week, the drive would extend from 1 hour up to 2 hours one way. Now that is a lot of wasted time and a whole lot of pollution made by idling cars. I am happy to say my current commute is 4 miles and takes 5-7 minutes depending on how many traffic lights I hit.

Bravo TV aired the last show on Flipping Out and showed Jeff with continued success on real estate flipping. It was more of a sit down interview of where he was and where he is heading to. I think he watched the shows and realized he was a jerk at times. He apologized for that and blamed the extra stress in his life for flipping out at times. We also learn that Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen Degeneres enjoy his show too. He responded “yes, the Lesbians love me.”   Jeff is a quirky guy and I know he will continue to be successful even in this tougher market. He actually isn’t your typical flipper that you see on the other reality shows where they try not to spend money to improve the property, but expect to get double what they paid for it 6 months later. This was happening before, but now that the market has cooled or even busted, that isn’t happening anymore.

When I visited my mom today, we drove around her neighborhood and picked up some of those real estate flyers in front of people’s homes for sale. The average price a year ago was $650,000-$700,000, so when she saw the flyers with these houses priced at $499,000, she thought that was cheap. She doesn’t follow the market like I do, so I told her based on what I read, the worse is yet to come and the prices will continue to fall.