1985: BMX, Boise, The Fun Spot, and Sha Na Na

This song features Johnny Contardo of the 50's retro group Sha Na Na.  Believe it or not, Johnny is a part of the story today.  There was a huge 1950's revival movement in the 1970's.  The 50's were the post World War II boom years of easy living, all American values of guys with crew cuts, girls in poodle skirts, the rise of rock n' roll music, and where the bad boys were the 50's greasers.  The classic greaser had his hair slicked back, usually black hair, he wore Levi's jeans, and a white T-shirt with a pack of Marlboro cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve.  The musical play Grease debuted in Chicago in 1971, and made it to Broadway in 1972.  Grease echoed back to the movie West Side Story from 1962.  In 1973 the movie American Graffiti came out, directed by the then unknown director George Lucas.  The success of American Graffiti quickly spawned the long running TV show Happy Days, also about 1950's teens, hot rods, drive-in restaurants, and Fonzie the cool greaser on his motorcycle.  In 1978, the movie Grease was a huge hit.  The 1950's revival continued into the early 1980's, with the movie The Outsiders in 1983.  Even as punk rock and New Wave were rising in popularity, the 50's revival kept going in the mainstream.  After the crazy hippies of the 1960's, the older generations of mainstream American culture were starved for the "good ol' days" of the 1950's.  The 1950's was seen as as a simpler time, before things got crazy with sex, drugs, and the hippies' acid rock.  So for us  Gen X kids of the 70's growing up, 1950's culture was everywhere in the little bit of media that existed back then.  Out of that love for all things 1950's came Sha Na Na, a 1950's revival and doo wop musical group, who got their own prime time TV show in the late 1970's, and into the early 1980's.  Sha Na Na was the band playing at the high school dance in the 1981 movie Grease.

Here I am, the complete opposite of 50's greaser cool, with a casual  balance trick on my Skyway T/A.  This was my first real BMX bike, which I bought with my high school graduation money.  I'm rockin' the 1985 Boise Fun Spot polo shirt, Vaurnets I found in a field, ridiculously short Op cord shorts, and Nike Pegasus running shoes, because I had run cross country the year before, and just liked the Nike's.  The Fun Spot was this tiny amusement park in Julia Davis Park, in downtown Boise, right across the river from Boise State University.  The Fun Spot was located between the Boise Zoo and the duck pond with the pedal boats.  There's a playground in that spot now.  I spent the winter of 1984-85 doing Robert Peterson-style balance tricks in our garage, or my bedroom.  Photo by Vaughn K.  

Before 1985, obviously, came 1984.  That year started off kind of crazy, with me being grounded for months, as a high school senior, for throwing a part at my dad's boss' house, while I was house sitting for him.  The first night I went out after that, I got a drinking ticket at a party where we all got busted before anyone even got a beer out of the keg.  I wasn't as serious of a partier as that makes me sound, and often wound up designated driver for my friends.  I graduated high school in 1984, and didn't have any money for college, so I decided to "take a year off."  

 

I was still racing BMX when I graduated from Boise High, I even won a BMX track designing contest, using my drafting skills, and helped re-design and rebuild the Fort Boise BMX track, and designed and helped the track operators build a second track between Boise, and Meridian.  Over the winter of 1983-83, I went to indoor races in Caldwell, outside of Boise.  We raced over some  wooden jumps at first, and then a guy would literally build a track in a livestock arena on the fairgrounds there, two hours before each race.  That was pretty amazing.  The jumps were small, but the racing was good.  I never made it out of the 17 novice class, because I raced intermediates most of the time, and even experts sometimes, depending who showed up.   In those days, when I was getting ready to race, guys like Darwin Hansen was a fast 13X I think, and did really well at a lot of nationals later on.  Shannon Gillette was two or three gates ahead of me, and he now works for USA BMX.  Right behind my gate was Clint Davies, the guy to try and catch in 17 Expert.  He was the fastest guy in Boise, and I raced him once in a while in 17 Open class.  He's still racing hard these days.   

While racing was fun, and there was a really solid regional BMX racing scene in the Boise area, the brand new sport of BMX freestyle, trick riding, was much more interesting to me.  I never used up all the free races I got from winning the track designing contest.  I met, and soon joined, the only trick team in Idaho, made up of Justin Bickel and Wayne Moore.  Wayne, at the ripe old age of 17, soon retired, and Justin (Jay) and I renamed it the Critical Condition Stunt Team.  Jay's mom was our promoter, and we did a handful of shows, rode in every local parade, and had the first two BMX freestyle contests in Idaho that summer.  My first BMX freestyle trophy was an old, hand me down BMX racing trophy, with a mono-shock bike on it, and brown vinyl on the sides.  Seriously. It was so ugly it was great.  Wish I still had it.

That was in 1984, the year that BMX freestyle blew up beginning its first big wave of popularity.  FREESTYLIN' magazine debuted in 1984, and the AFA held the first flatland and quarterpipe contests in Southern California.  In addition, this Mountain Dew commercial featuring Eddie Fiola, R.L. Osborn, Ron Wilkerson, and stuntman Pat Romano, aired on TV all summer long.  I'd never seen freestyle on TV before, and most people in Idaho had no idea it even existed as a sport.  

That summer I was a ride operator at this tiny amusement park, called The Fun Spot.  Even in Boise, The Fun Spot was a joke.  My friends made fun of me for working there. But it was a job, and it paid me $2.10 an hour all through the summer of 1984.  I got the job because of a guy named Doug in high school, who I met after we all got tickets at that party earlier in the year.  I worked 5 or 6 days a week, practiced freestyle tricks for a couple hours every night, and then hung out with my high school friends, none of which were into BMX.  I put $1,000 in the bank that summer, with a general plan of going off to college in 1985.  My family moved to Virginia, and left me with the three bedroom house and my mom's Ford Pinto that summer.  How big of a dork was I?  I literally had my own house, for all practical purposes, for about three months, at age 18, and the police never had a reason to show up.  I had maybe 8 friends over at a time, but no real parties.  I didn't even manage to get laid with my own house.  That's how big of a dork, and how shy I was at 18.  My dad got a high paying two year job back east, after getting laid off in Boise.  But the job ended suddenly in the fall of 1984, and my mom had to borrow my $1,000 to help them move back, and catch up the mortgage payment in Boise.  My big lesson that summer was to not save money that my mom knew existed.  Somehow a crisis would always happen that needed that money, if she knew anyone around her had money.  That was always an issue in my family.  Instead of paying me back, my mom decided I had to start paying them $100 a month in rent, but the first ten months would be free.  That's kind of how things worked in our house.

After The Fun Spot closed in August, I wound up working nights as a line cook at a Mexican restaurant called Chi-Chi's, kind of like an El Torito type place, a mainstream chain with Mexican food.  My family moved back to Boise, and life continued.  I rode my bike as much as possible when the weather was good, and partied with my high school, non-BMX friends, on the weekends.  But freestyle had become my main focus in life by late 1984.

That's me on the right, running the Ferris wheel, at The Fun Spot, in the summer of 1985.  On the ride are co-workers Kim, Michelle, and Pam.  On really busy days, like holiday weekends, I'd run into the food stand, call a local pizza place, and have them deliver me a pizza, right to the Ferris wheel.  I'm not kidding.  When the pizza arrived, people on the Ferris wheel got an extra long ride, while I wolfed down the first slice or two.  Photo by co-worker Vaughn K.

I ended 1984 by joining the Marine Reserves, because they had a program to earn money for college.  One of my friends had gone into the Marines right after graduation.  He came back for Christmas break, and talked all of us into talking to the local recruiters.  I was the only one who signed up, partly because my family was out of town for a few days after Christmas.  

I stopped smoking weed, which I did maybe every week or two, and spent a couple of months in the delayed entry program.  Right before shipping out to boot camp, they told me they might have to talk to my friends, since I might need a security clearance in the Corps.  So I told them I had sold "speed," in high school for a couple of months.  It was crosstops and black beauties that I sold, actually ephedrine you could buy from an ad in Hustler magazine, but not in Idaho.  I didn't know that's where the pills came from at the time.  I did it when I lived out in the trailer park, and couldn't make any money.  A bottle of 5 Hour Energy is probably 20 times more powerful than what I sold.  

The Marines deliberated for a week, and dropped me from the delayed entry program.  So with that episode behind me, I kept working as a line cook and riding my bike when I could.  Life went back to work, BMX freestyle, hanging with my high school friends, and trying to get laid.  In May of 1985, I got tapped to be the manager of The Fun Spot for the summer.  Still 18-years-old, I was running the day to day operations of a little amusement park, with 12-13 employees under me.  

A photo of two girls riding the Tilt-a-Whirl at The Fun Spot in 1965.  Photo nabbed from 107.9 Lite FM website.

The Fun Spot was housed in two or three acres of Julia Davis Park.  We had six rides, kiddie cars, kiddie airplanes, a merry-go-round, a kiddie roller coaster, a Tilt-a-Whirl, and a Ferris wheel.  There was a little ticket booth in the middle of the park.  Behind the ticket booth, there was an 18 hole miniature golf course.  Across the gravel covered midway area from the ticket booth was a food stand with popcorn, sodas, cotton candy, and soft serve Italian ice.  Near that was a little garage-type building with about six second tier video games.  That was in the height of the quarter arcade video game days, but we didn't have Pac-Man, Asteroids, Centipede, Galaga, Joust, or any of the best games.  We had games like Red Baron aerial dual, and Food Fight.  

The owner of The Fun Spot was owned by a guy named Tim, who was in his mid 30's then.  His main business was a construction company, and he was the first real entrepreneurial guy I spent any time working around, a couple of years before stumbling into the BMX and then skateboard industries.  Back then, especially in a place like Boise, people all worked jobs.  Hardly anyone started their own business.  Tim started working at The Fun Spot at age 16 or 17, and bought the amusement park at age 20, with $100 loaned to him by the previous owner's wife.  The previous owner was 75 years old or so, and his wife wanted him to actually retire.  In the 15 or so year since, Tim had put young guys, from 17 to 21-years-old, in charge, as managers, every summer.  He took pride in giving us all some real world experience, actually managing a small business and several employees, when most businesses would debate hiring us in the first place.

He believed in learning by experience, and he gave all of us managers basic instructions, but let us try things when it came to managing 10-13 employees, who we were only a year or two older than usually.  Once the park was set-up for the season, Tim would show up in the morning with the cash register drawer with money for the day, and he'd take off.  From then until 8 pm or so in the evening, I was in charge.  It was an incredible trial by fire in managing a business and employees.  If you can get 16-year-old high school kids to pull weeds and mow the "back 40" section of the lawn in 85 to 92 degree weather, and keep the place operating, and deal with mad parents and issues, you could probably manage most other businesses later in life.  Tim had a pager, so I could call him in emergencies.  But The Fun Spot, the goofy little amusement park my friends made fun of, was my kingdom to run every summer day in 1985.  It was a really challenging and great experience for me as an 18-19 year old, that summer.  I once had to fire a girl I wanted to go out with.  Man that's a great way to kill a relationship before it starts.   

One day I got a call in the food stand, a guy said the National Governor's Convention was coming to Boise, and he was looking for places to take the kids of all of the governors during those days.  The Fun Spot became one of their activities.  Although I was still incredibly shy in general, I saw an opportunity.  "Have you every heard of BMX freestyle?" I asked the guy.  He hadn't.  I told him about our trick team, and wound up doing a freestyle demo for all the governors' kids, in the parking lot in front of The Fun Spot.  As expected, all the kids over about ten were not impressed with the tiny amusement park.  Most came from cities much bigger than Boise, cities that had real amusement parks.  But the kids were really stoked to see a BMX freestyle show, something none of them had seen before.  The main thing I remember is that we set up Jay's wedge ramp about two feet beside the quarterpipe, instead of at the other end of the riding area.  We were doing alley-oops and bunnyhops to fakie across the little gap, onto the wedge ramp, something we'd been doing for fun at Jay's house.  So the kids from all 50 states left pretty stoked.  That was really cool.  

At one point in mid-summer, Tim came by one evening to do some repairs.  He and I headed out to a section of fence behind the Ferris wheel.  I think someone had damaged it during the night.  As we were making repairs, he asked me what my plans were, for life in general.  At that point, I'd been into BMX for three years, which was really uncool for a 19-year-old kid anywhere, but particularly in a pretty conservative city like Boise.  Every adult made fun of me, and my love for doing tricks on "a little kid's bike."  So I was reluctant to answer.  

But Tim was pretty cool, so I told him I really wanted to pursue BMX freestyle, and try to become a pro rider some day.  I got that statement out, and held my breath, waiting for the inevitable response "You need to grow up, go to college, and get a real job."  Instead, Tim kept working on the fence, turned his head, and said, "Hey, you never know, you wouldn't be the first guy from The Fun Spot to get famous."  I was blown away.  Tim was the first adult, other than Jay's mom and dad, to take the idea of me making something out of freestyle seriously.  I didn't know what to say.  He continued, "You know that 50's band, Sha Na Na?"  "Yeah," I said.  Well Johnny from Sha Na Na used to work here years ago.  He went off to college.  He came back during the summer, and told me he met some musicians at school, and they were starting a new band, a 50's revival band.  That band was Sha Na Na.  So you never know, maybe you will go out there and make it big."  That fucking blew my mind.  We kept talking as we worked, and he told me Johnny even wore his old Fun Spot T-shirt when the band played in Boise.

The kiddie cars ride at The Fun Spot.  Photo nabbed from 107.9 Lite FM's website. 

 

We all have some kind of dreams when we're young kids, and then as teenagers and young adults.  But there's also a lot of pressure to do the "responsible thing" and "grow up," to become the kind of person that family, friends, and those around us want us to become.  Most people don't feel a strong enough drive to follow their dreams, and wind up working reasonably normal jobs, and take a fairly traditional path through life.  It's "the sensible thing to do."  

The world needs all kinds of people, and it needs lots of people to work traditional jobs.  But the world also needs the the rebels who buck the trend, follow their dreams, and do the various types of creative work, where a steady paycheck is often not a sure thing.  These people create the art, the music, the movies, the video games, the new technology, and the new businesses and industries.  I wasn't particularly creative in school, even in high school.  But I was drawn to something, doing tricks on BMX bikes, that was new, and really stupid, in most people's eyes.  But I knew it was the right path for me, it was a gut feeling.  That day at The Fun Spot, in Boise, where Tim agreed I should go ahead and give it a shot, really meant a lot to me.  

I did give it a shot.  About 15 months later, after living most of a year in San Jose, California, and publishing a zine, I wound up working for BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in Southern California.  I never became a pro rider.  But I did get sponsored for a bit, and I wrote magazine and newsletter articles, shot some photos, and made videos of BMX freestyle.  I became one of a relatively small number of BMX industry guys in the 1980's.  I saw a lot of really cool moments in BMX and skateboarding happen over the next several years.  I didn't wind up performing in a hit TV show like Johnny from Sha Na Na, but I did get to wrestle the American Gladiators as a crew guy for four seasons later on, which was pretty cool.  I never met Johnny, but I did see Sha Na Na live at the Orange County Fair a few years after Tim told me Johnny had worked at The Fun Spot.    

You can call me a failure at my current point in life.  As a long term homeless guy who draws pictures with Sharpies and scrapes by for food money, that's how most people see me.  But following my heart to ride BMX bikes, when it seemed like there was no future in it, and almost everyone told me I was screwing up my life, it was definitely the right path for me.  BMX led to a whole bunch of other things I never would have done otherwise.  Who knows, maybe all the years of writing, blogging, and Sharpie art will make more sense somewhere down the line as well.  Time will tell.  I'm a BMXer at heart, until I die, even when I'm out of shape and don't have a bike.  I still see banks and ledges and curb jumps everywhere I go.  I'm also one of those few guys who got to manage a weird little amusement park in Boise in the 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, and into the 1990's.  I learned a lot at The Fun Spot, hidden away in a big park in Boise, at $2.10 to $3.15 an hour, over two summers.  I'm really glad I had that experience as well.  

Travis Pastrana goes for another World's First at age 40... right before a knee replacement

Travis Pastrana, now 40 years old, and looking at a knee replacement surgery in the next couple of weeks, decides he wants to try another World's First, a NBD (Never Been Done), on his motocross bike.  The idea is a backflip, up into a nose bonk on this high platform sitting on a scissors lift, and then a front flip out of the nose bonk, into a super-sized airbag.  Unfortunately, on the first warm-up trick to test the whole concept, he breaks his hand.  It's Travis Pastrana, and that's where things get interesting.  Just watch the video.  

There are now hundreds of thousands of people, around the world, who got into one of the action sports, or another, in the past 50 or 60 years.  All of them progressed as riders, skaters, boarders or whatever sport, at some level.  I'm pretty sure most of these hundreds of thousands of action sports people still have things in their head they want to do, wanted to do, or tried, and weren't able to accomplish, whatever their level of athletic ability.  

These activities collectively known as "action sports," called "sports" mostly as an easy way to categorize them, are all focused on personal progression.  But even among hundreds of thousands of people in the crazy action sports world, there are only a handful who sit there and think, "I wonder if I could backflip a motorcycle, then nose bonk a somewhat wobbly platform 35 feet up, and front flip into an airbag?  That's why Travis Pastrana is Travis Pastrana.  Like Mat Hoffman, Seth Enslow, and a few others, and all of their hero, Evel Knievel, he's next level.  He's actually tries shit most other really talented athletes wouldn't even think of trying.

There's a crew helping him in this video, a local crew from there, in Oklahoma, building the huge take off ramp.  Making the platform for the scissors lift, we have Nate Wessel, BMX freestyler from way back, and one of the best ramp builders in the world.  Here's Nate's section in Etnies Forward video in 2002.  Nate Wessel, in the BMX world , could do technical street riding, but he was known for going big in the 1990's and early 2000's.  So when he tells Travis to fully commit in this video, it's coming from someone who really understands about committing to a trick.  Then we have Banksy (the MX rider, not the street artist), a really good up-and-coming motocross rider, who has performed in the Nitro circus.  In this video above, the guys doing construction and roadie work are amazing riders.  That's a hell of a crew working together.  

If you've read this far, you must have watched the video by now.  Both Travis and Banksy pull off World's First tricks, and fucking insane ones, at that.  Progression keeps going.

I first heard of Travis Pastrana in 1999, when I kind of scammed a pass to the X-Games in San Francisco.  Officially, I was writing a story about the event for DIG BMX magazine in the U.K..  Unofficially, I was shooting video of the practice riding to try and get back into making BMX videos again.  I did actually write an article for DIG, but they had other guys at the contest, and my piece didn't make it to print.  And I did make another BMX video about a year later, called Animals, but wasn't able to follow it up and make more videos on a regular basis.  Life, and struggling to make a living as a taxi driver, got in the way.  

But it was that weekend on the pier in San Francisco, at one of the first Freestyle Motocross events at the X-Games, that I first heard the name Travis Pastrana.  I'd heard of Mike Metzger and Brian Deegan, and a few other freestyle motocross guys before that, but hadn't heard of the young racer turned FSMXer from back east.  During the finals of the freestyle motocross event, I climbed to the top of a scaffolding platform for the media, so I could get a wide overview of the whole FSMX area.  

Standing there with several other photographers and video people, with my dinky Sony Digital8 camcorder, a guy next to me said something like, "Make sure you get Travis' next run, he's going to jump into the bay."  I have no idea who the guy was.  I said, "Who's Travis?" and he pointed him out.  So I moved a bit, and got a view where I could see the end of the pier better, at the edge of the San Francisco Bay.  Sure enough, in his final run, the little known Travis Pastrana went charging at a berm that was only about four feet high, hit it like a jump, and launched his motorcycle off it, into the San Francisco Bay.  I got the shot, thanks to the heads up from the stranger.  I also could see the boat and the diver they had hired to pull the motorcycle back up after the trick.  I got it all on video.  

Travis ended up getting disqualified for jumping into the bay, and supposedly some environmental group got all worked up because his motorcycle might leak a bit of oil and water into the bay.  It's the fucking San Francisco Bay for God's sakes, it's a major shipping port.  There's a lot of toxic junk in that water.  But the jump never was shown on ESPN.  I planned to save the shot for some later video.  I wanted to do a BMX documentary with all my ten years footage, back then.  But the shot of Travis, along with all my other footage from my BMX days, was lost, when I lost a storage unit full of stuff in a move, in 2008.  

So that's how I, personally, first became aware of this kid named Travis Pastrana, 24 years ago, when he was about 16.  I learned two things that weekend about Travis.  1)  If you're around in person, or if he's on TV, and he's riding, watch him!  Anything cold happen.  2) If you're around in person, and Travis is riding, and you have some kind of camera in your hand, point it at him.  You never know what he might do.  That was the only time I, personally, saw Travis ride live.  But it made a hell of an impression.  I've watched many of his antics, crazy stunts, and other sports things he's done on TV since, like the rest of you.  

Now, as most of you are reading this, he's heading into knee replacement surgery, and then into recovery.  Will this backflip-nose bonk-frontflip be his last World's First?  None of us knows.  I doubt if Travis knows.  We'll see.  But that's one hell of a send, even into an airbag, for anybody.  It's really amazing he's doing a trick that nuts at all, let alone at age 40, after all the injuries he's dealt with.  

Travis has done so many crazy things in both action sports, and motorsports, and just random jackass-style stunts, that we can't remember them all.  So here's another video with a whole bunch of Travis Pastrana's craziest stunts.  Thanks Travis for pushing the limits, and motivating the rest of us to try and push a bit more in our own lives, whatever level we live at.  Heal up, man!

Christmas celebrations not happening in Bethlehem

I'm 57 years old, and this is the first time I can remember that Christmas is not being openly celebrated in Bethlehem, in Israel, where Jesus of Nazareth was born.  

I grew up Lutheran in Ohio, where church was a pretty low key, but strong an traditional part of life, as a kid.  In the decades since, Christianity has morphed into something I don't recognize now, and I don't go to any church.  But there is some higher power at work in the Universe, and Jesus was one of the great prophets of history of that force.  

During Jesus' infancy, King Herod had all the children under two years old slaughtered in the region, after hearing that a savior had been born in the area.  Jesus, obviously, escaped that slaughter.  Now over 2,000 years later, Israeli forces have killed over 8,000 Palestinian children in Gaza, along with over 12,000 adults, nearly all civilians, and more than a million people there are now homeless.  This is in addition to the killing of 1,400 people by Hamas, and over 150 Israeli soldiers killed in action.  History does not look kindly on rulers who kill thousands of children, regardless of the circumstances.  

Moses, in the desert, gave the Jewish people ten commandments.  Thousands of years later, Jesus gave his followers two commandments

...and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind, and all your strength.  The second is this, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."  There is no other commandment greater than these."  

Mark 12:30-31  RSV

Merry Christmas to all my readers who celebrate Christmas, around the world.  Pray for those who can't have a Merry Christmas, wherever they may be.  

Two thousand years later, we still haven't learned that lesson.  For the record, for anyone wondering, I spent much of my 20's trying to make sense of religion and spirituality.  During that time, I read the New Testament of the Bible, start to finish, 3 or 4 times.  I read the books of the Old Testament, start to finish, up through Jonah or Micah.  I didn't read the last few books of the Old Testament.  I've read the four gospels, the book of Proverbs, the book of Isaiah, start to finish, two or more times each.  I've read the Catholic pseudo-epigraphs.  I've read all the books of the Gnostic gospels, early Christian writings left out of the Bible, the most famous being The Gospel of Thomas.  I've read the psychic Edgar Cayce's The Story of Jesus.   I'm also a big fan of Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth interview with Bill Moyers, all six hours of it, which looks at religions from around the world throughout history.  My personal beliefs are based on what I've learned from all of that, and plenty of other reading and searching, over many years.  I don't care what your beliefs are, and I don't want to argue about religion with you.  

$10,000 investment challenge paper trade- Post #2- after 10 days - up 11% so far

 Isn't it funny how cryptos, completely digital money, all have a logo of an actual coin?  Weird when you think about it.  A picture of a coin with the logo of something that doesn't physically exist.  Ethereum.

Disclaimer

OK, it's 10 days after I picked the things I would invest in, if I had $10,000.  So this is a paper trade experiment, where I'm pretending to invest in these, and I'll sell a bit and buy something else, as I would if actually investing, if I see the need.  I'm tracking them, and I'll track them over the next year or two, and see how these pan out.  They were all cryptos, I wouldn't invest in anything else right now, and I figured overly high fees of 5% for each transaction.  When I picked these, I was looking out 1 to 2 years, generally.  Some of these I might "sell" and take profits, which I will mostly likely invest into other cryptos.  That was the idea.  

Here's the original post from December 11, 2023, explaining the idea.

I'm planning to write a blog post every month, to see how my paper trades are going.  I wasn't expecting much of anything already, but I saw crypto has bumped up, as the bond market soars and interest rates plummet (usually a sign of a looming recession).  

For the initial post, I picked 8 cryptos, and "invested" between $250 and $2,000 in each, on December 11, 2023, and recorded the prices on that day.  I'm looking forward to January 8th, the first potential announcement date of the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF, which is one big event coming up for Bitcoin.  Anyhow, after ten days, 6 went up, 2 went down.

So the initial investment was $9,500 into crypto, (with $500 in estimated gas fees), on December 11.  

Here's the list, the amount of each purchased, today's price for each, and current value today.

Bitcoin- .02399 BTC- $43,595 = $1,045.84

Ethereum- ,4518 ETH- $2,226 = $1,005.71

Apecoin- 1,234.56 APE- $1.62 = $2,024.68

Avalanche- 56.931 AVAX- $35.13 = $2,603.41

Solana- 14.357 SOL- $92.65 = $1,330.18

ThorChain- 172.413 RUNE- $5.33 = $ 918.96

Polkadot- 74.962 DOT- $8.23 = $616.94

Polygon- 595.238 MATIC- $.80 = $476.19

Sandbox- 490.196 SAND - $.54 =264.71

Decentraland- 510.204 MANA - $.52 = $265.31

$9,500 "invested" on 12/11/2023 in total crypto (+5% estimated gas fees, $500)

Total value of crypto after 10 days- 12/21/2023- $10,551.93   Up 11.07% in ten days.  Not bad.  

See original $10,000 Investment challenge post for initial prices "paid" in this paper trade experiment.

The Last DJ... Jim Ladd has died

"The Last DJ," by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, played live on the David Letterman Show.  This song was inspired by Los Angeles radio DJ Jim Ladd, who really was the last of the old time radio disc jockeys.  Those deejays were the ones created a experience on the radio, rather than just playing the records the suits upstairs wanted them to play, to promote the latest hyped song.  Jim Ladd died a couple of days ago, on December 16th, at age 75.  He was truly the last of the great FM DJs in Los Angeles, who played the songs he wanted to play, doing what he called "free form radio."  He's best known for careers working at KMET and KLOS radio in Los Angeles, and for the last 12 years has been on Sirius XM, with a show called Deep Tracks.

The years between August 2003 and November 2007 are all jammed together in my mind.  I was driving a taxi in the Huntington Beach area during that time, working 70 to 110 hours a week.  A lot of really weird stuff happened in and around my taxi, but I can't even remember what year those events happened.  I worked 7 days a week most of that time, lived in my taxi, and never got enough sleep, that whole era is kind of a blur.  

I would work until the bar close rush was over each night, usually about 3:00 am.  Then I'd go to one of several parking lots, where I slept in my taxi, in the driver's seat, until about 8:00 am.  I'd wake up, go get a couple donuts at a donut shop, and the go park in the taxi line at the Huntington Beach Hyatt, near the beach.  I'd try to get a couple of more hours of sleep, a half an hour at a time, by the time most of the hotel guests checked out at 11:00 am.  

I'd work in the cab from 8:30 am until 3:00 am Tuesday through Saturday, week after week.  On Sundays I would work from about 7:00 am until 2:00 pm, then get a cheap motel room for the night.  I'd buy a cheap pizza, and spend three or four hours watching TV in the room, and just forget about everything.  I'd usually fall asleep in the early afternoon, and wake up about 1:30 am, right before bar close.  My body was geared to being awake then.  I'd watch a little TV, then go back to sleep.  I'd wake up again at 4:30 or 5:00 am, throw some dirty clothes on, and go run two or three Monday morning airport rides in the taxi.  Mondays were slow, and that $25 to $40 made early in the morning really helped.  I'd go back to my room, get a shower, and just hang out, watching TV, until 11:00 am, milking every hour I had the motel room.  Then I'd work on Monday, from 11:00 am until 3:00 am Tuesday morning.  That's what it took to survive as a taxi driver in those years, when the taxi industry was dying, due to the new technology of computer dispatching.  

I paid $550 to $600 every week in taxi lease, and spent $300 to $350 each week for gas.  After paying those two things, every week, I usually made about $250 to $300 for myself.  I spent most of it on food, and the motel room for one night.  Every single night, for several years, I drove drunk people home safely from wherever they were partying, focusing on Main Street in Huntington Beach, and the whole H.B./Newport Beach/Costa Mesa area.  The job took me all over, depending where rides went.  I'd drive people up to L.A. sometimes, or down to San Clemente, even deep into Camp Pendleton Marine base a couple of times.  As I said, a lot of crazy stuff happens when you deal with drunk people every night, and I'd drive all over Southern California.  

There were several things that helped me get by, day to day.  I didn't drink or do any drugs, we got random tested for both.  I drowned by depression and sorrows in food, mostly.  Pizza, Chinese food, and late night Del Taco meals were my favorites.  Some taxi drivers chain smoked instead.  There's a reason the average lifespan of a taxi driver was only 53 years back then.  It was a pretty fucked up lifestyle, but had a weird freedom to it, since it wasn't an actual job.  Taxi drivers existed in the gray area between jobs and small businesses.  We were gig workers before that term existed.

One of the things that helped me survive day after day was music.  I just had a standard car radio, and for a lot of those nights from 2003 to 2007, I had my radio tuned to KLOS in the evenings, to a show by disc jockey Jim Ladd.  He was the last of the old time FM DJ's, the guys who would pull out and play obscure album tracks, play music I'd never heard, or hadn't heard for years.  Many nights he would have a theme going, like "Songs with women's names in them," or songs about this theme or that.  People would call in with suggestions.  Jim would talk, like a human, in between songs, and he would tie the songs he played together, playing records in a order that had some sense to it, where it just seemed to flow.  There was a mood, a vibe, to the music he played.  

Jim Ladd, those weeknights on KLOS in the 2000's, played rock music the way it was meant to be played.  For him, and for many DJ's decades earlier, as FM radio rose to prominence side by side with rock n' roll, playing music on the radio was an interactive art form.  He called it Free Form Radio.  Every time he was on air, it was different.  Sometimes it was rocking hard and upbeat.  Sometimes it was music with deep lyrics, or paying homage to nurses or truck drivers or some kind of working person.  Other days it would get dark and moody.  Jim Ladd truly loved music, and he made listening to the radio an event, and that's why he inspired Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers to write the song, "The Last DJ," in homage to the art of being a great rock n' roll DJ.  Jim went on to work on Sirius XM, probably the only place he could do what he did, farther into the 21st century.  

One night in my taxi, in downtown Huntington Beach, I picked up a guy in a leather jacket.  He got in, and in a strong, New York/New Jersey accent, told me he was going to Whittier.  That was a big ride, so I was stoked at first.  But there was a vibe to this guy.  A bad vibe.  His leather jacket was straight cut on the bottom, not waist length, and not down below the knees, it hung to his hips.  It was the jacket of someone from the East Coast.  He also sounded Italian in background.  

A couple of minutes after I started driving, he began yelling, "Are you talking to me?"  Are you talking to me?!"  Yes, the same line Robert Deniro made famous in Taxi Driver, and with similar intensity, but a different tone.  My head snapped around, I wasn't sure if he was on his phone, or yelling at me.  The picture came together for me, this guy was a real world Goodfella.  A gangster.  As in Mafia-style gangster, the real deal.  And I was taking a half hour drive with him.  I'm pretty sure he threatened whomever was on the phone.  Luckily for me, he fell asleep before I got to the 405 freeway, several miles inland, on the other side of Huntington Beach.  

I wasn't exactly sure how to get to Whittier, so I was flipping through the Thomas Guide map book as I drove on the freeway.  I got on the 605 freeway, heading inland.  As I drove, Jim Ladd's show played in the background, it was a dark, melancholy night on his show.  Slow, oozing guitars, one song after another.  I took a wrong exit off the 605, realized it, and prayed the gangster wouldn't wake up before I got back on the 605.  I didn't want that guy accusing me of taking him the long route, as many taxi drivers did to people, to milk the passengers for more money.  

He didn't.  But he woke up right after, as Jim Ladd played a positively haunting version of "Amazing Grace."  The gangster woke up with a start, and got animated, as Italians from New Jersey do, and joked darkly about me not taking him the long way.  but he was pretty blitzed, and he passed back out again.  Jim Ladd played another, dark, soulful version of "Amazing Grace," and then another.  I thought to myself, "Oh my God, I'm about to get robbed and shot, and die in my taxi, and there's a fucking soundtrack playing as it happens."  I seriously felt like I was in a movie, in the tense part right before someone gets killed, with the soundtrack playing on the radio.  Jim Ladd was playing the perfect soundtrack to the end of my life, live on the radio.  That was so cool.  But I was scared shitless at the same time.  

The dark, haunting music kept playing, as I got off the freeway, and headed into Whittier.  The gangster woke up, found a piece of paper, read it, and gave me an address.  It was a dark quiet night, without much traffic.  The taxi death movie soundtrack kept playing, as I pulled over into a small parking lot to look the address up in the Thomas Guide.  The nap had sobered the guy up, and now he was in a pretty good mood.  But with a hard edge, a "don't fuck with me taxi driver" vibe.  I rolled up to the address, seriously half expecting him to get out and pull a gun.  Instead he said, "pull down that alley."  That's a huge red flag to a taxi driver, you never want a passenger to have you drive down a dark alley.  That's where taxi driver's get robbed and murdered.  Taxi driving was the #1 one job for getting murdered at the time.  But I was there, I'd rolled with it all until that point.  The meter was over $50.  I pulled slowly down a completely dark alley between two houses.  

As I passed the house on the right, a single, naked light bulb came into view.  There was a small house behind the first one.  The lonely light bulb lit a small brick porch.  "Stop here," my passenger said.  I stopped.  He got out of the right rear door, and closed it.  He walked slowly around the back of the taxi. I had the driver's window all the way down.  He leaned down and looked in, "What's on the meter?"  I told him the fare, sitting there, in the dark, in an alley, in a city I didn't know at all.  The music had lightened just a bit, but Jim Ladd's hour of dark melancholy continued.  The guy broke off a couple of twenties and and enough extra for the fare and a decent tip, and handed it to me.  "Thanks taxi driver," he said, and turned and walked towards the door, lit by the single, uncovered light bulb.  

I breathed out, and headed on down the alley, which I could just barely see opened out on the next street.  Still alive, I cranked up the most memorable set of songs I ever heard Jim Ladd play on KLOS, and drove back to Huntington Beach.  The mood of the songs lightened up naturally, as it should have.  I went right back to work.  Another night, another crazy taxi driver story, another drive slowly down Main Street in Huntington Beach, looking for the next fare, and the next adventure in my cab.  

I imagine there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people, who have stories like mine, of some show Jim Ladd DJ'd.  The night his music melded with the goings on of their life, in a way that seemed uncanny.  There are probably a lot of people who remember a an evening Jim played the soundtrack of their life, live on the radio.  That's the magic of Free Form Radio.  It blends together, and we can project our lives into the music as it plays on and on.  

A toast to The Last DJ.  Rest In Peace Jim Ladd, and thank you for sharing your gift, and for making radio something special, long after nearly everyone else had given up on it.  

I listened to the entire The Last DJ album by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, while writing this post.  I'm listening to to the most amazing version of Aretha Franklin singing "Amazing Grace," as I finish.  Music is the best thing human beings have come up with, and reason enough for our entire existence to have happened.  Amen.    

Jim Ladd on "The Last DJ."

Here's an actual YouTube playlist by Jim Ladd, which I listened to while proofreading this post.  

Epic mini ramp/bowl skate session at Woodward West

This is a recent warm-up jam session at a mini ramp bowl at Woodward West, in Tehachapi, CA.  A bunch of pro skaters, the only one I can identify is Andy Anderson, one of my favorite skaters to watch these days.  He's the only one with a helmet on.  But they all rip.  This is a really rough cut of the raw footage of the jam session, and the whole thing is off the chain.  If you like mini ramp skating, check it out.

For those not aware, to the best of my knowledge, the first skateboard mini ramp was invented in 1987, in Costa Mesa, California.  A few blocks from the Vision Skateboards main building, on Towne Street, Paul Schmitt (aka Professor Schmitt of Schmitt Stix, New Deal, etc.) and a few skaters rented a house, and built a 9 foot high halfpipe in the backyard.  But the neighbors complained, and city officials came. They said that, to appease some obscure building code, the skaters had to cut the ramp down to six feet tall.  Originally it was either an 8 foot transition ramp with a foot of vert, or a 9 foot transition.  When they chopped the top of the ramp off, they had an 8 or 9 foot transition cut off at 6 feet.  The mini ramp was born, and it became known as the Towne Street ramp.  Skaters from all over sessioned there at times, and realized there was a whole new genre' of tricks, mostly lip tricks, that you could do on a mini ramp.  The idea of backyard mini ramps started to spread.  At the Vision Skate Escape /NSA season finals in late 1988, Vision took the idea of the back to back vert ramps from the Powell-Peralta Bones 3 video, the Animal Chin ramp, and built a double ramp, with a vert and mini back to back. That was a first for a skateboard contest.  

In my 1990 self-produced BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990, I had footage at what I thought were the first three mini ramps ever in a BMX video.  I shot footage at the H-Ramp (2:05) in Santa Ana, CA, pro freestyle skaters Primo and Diane Desiderio's ramp (19:43) north of San Diego, CA, and Mouse's Ramp (38:05), the Bad Boys Club clothing art director, near San Diego.  Going through a bunch of videos earlier this year, I learned that someone else (Eddie Roman's 2-Hip Ride Like a Man, or maybe the Dirt Bros. Video, I can't remember), also had a little bit of mini ramp footage in their video, a couple of months earlier.  

By about 1989-1990, more mini ramps were popping up, like the Blockhead Ramp, a mini bowl outside of San Diego, and there were mini ramp sections at the huge Powell-Peralta skate zone, built for their skaters, in Santa Barbara, CA.  From those, as they showed up in videos, the backyard mini ramp idea spread around the U.S. and the world.  So there's a little bit of the history of mini ramps in the bike and skate world.     

Four BMX photos that I got published in magazines in the 1980's

Dave Voelker, blasting ten feet out of the rickety, 8 foot high, AFA Socko quarterpipe in 1987.  This photo ran in BMX Action, not sure what issue, in 1987. Dave was always one of the most fun riders to watch ride, in contests or just screwing around outside.  His riding blew my mind many times.  #steveemigphotos 

This wasn't a traditional contest, it was a Guinness Book of World Records contest.  Brian Blyther won the high air part, with a 10' 2" air, setting the first official world record high air.  Everyone new it was close with Voelker's high air, but the judges gave Brian the win.  But with my Pentax ME Super, which was pretty much idiot proof, I snapped this shot from across the way showing that Dave Voelker at what looks to be about 10' 2".  Dave rode his whole career for GT, touring the U.S. and the world promoting GT and Dyno bikes, and freestyle itself, for 25 years or so.  He was always one of the guys going the biggest, and one of the most exciting riders to watch.

There are two ways to great photos.  You can shoot photos of something great.  Or you can shoot great technical photos of something.  Ideally, a good photographer continually improves their the technical skills, so they can, when the opportunity presents itself, shoot a technically great photo of something great.  Then, in more controlled circumstances, they can shoot incredibly good technical photos of something that may not be great in of itself, but the quality of the photo makes it an amazing shot.  Some of the most historic photos are those taken by average photographers that happened to be at the right place at the right time to capture a historic moment.  

Technology always scared me, I never did learn how to use a light meter, for example.  So I've always tried to take pretty good shots of things that are interesting by their nature.  I got interested in shooting photos during a couple of weeks when we studied photography in 9th grade physics class.  I was living in New Mexico at the time, and had a little, old, 126 box camera.  I started trying taking cool photos with that.  I remember shooting photos of a tortoise that wandered through our yard, next to a model car.  I hand made a little road sign that said, "Nuclear Test Site 2 miles."  The tortoise, in the photos was bigger than a car, a nuclear mutant.  Those weren't very good, but it got me started trying to take interesting photos.  At some point I upgraded to a Kodak 110 Instamatic, the vacation snapshot camera almost everyone owned in the 1970's and early 1980's.  That's when I started looking through big photo books at the mall, and trying to take better photos, when I was about 14, as a kid in New Mexico, with the simplest of cameras.

Also snapped with my Pentax ME Super, this is Dave Vanderspek bombing down the Palm Springs Tramway road on his GPV in 1987.  This photo ran in BMX Action, FREESTYLIN', and Homeboy magazines.  Andy, Lew, and Gork were big fans of Vander.

This was the first really big Gravity Powered Vehicle, or GPV race, in the summer of 1987.  Unreel Productions shot video of the event, at 5:08 in this clip.  GPVing was the little side sport to BMX and freestyle.  It was first started by BMX guys, bombing down local hills on bikes with no pedals or chains, built from the spare bike parts in the garage.  A few different groups got into GPV's.  By this race, fairings had entered the picture, giving a huge advantage on this long, steep, relatively straight road outside of Palm Springs.  But NorCal BMX legend, and Curb Dogs head guy, Dave Vanderspek went with the helmet, leathers, and his supertuck body technique.  

I'll be honest, this photo was pure luck.  It was only the second roll of film where I tried to shoot panning shots.  With my Pentax, and its stock 50 mm lens, I could set the frame speed I wanted (1/15th or 1/30th of a second here, I forget), and it would automatically set the F-stop for the lighting conditions.  At this event, BMX racer Tommy Brackens actually passed the video camera motorcycle, in a turn, and the motorcycle was doing 85 mph.  Pat Wallace, the cameraman facing backwards on that motorcycle, told me this himself.  These guys were hauling ass.  

But I shot this photo within 100 yards of the starting line, and Vander was maybe doing 20 mph at this point.  But the helmet came out sharp, and the panning worked well, and gave the impression of the real speeds the GPV racers were hitting that day.  This photo ran in BMX Action, FREESTYLIN', and Wizard Publications two shot magazine, Homeboy.  I had three or four photos, on the roll of 36, that came out about as good as this shot.  Those guys loved this shot, since it was Dave Vanderspek, and used it in all three magazines, months after I'd been laid off there.  Even BMX Plus! photographer John Ker complimented me on this photo, and John is a seriously technical photographer who has shot thousands of photos.  If he says, "Great photo," that's a serious compliment in the BMX world.

Eddie Fiola (front), and Chris Lashua, practicing synchro wedge ramp stalls, while taking a break from doing shows at the World's Expo in Vancouver, over the summer of 1986.  #steveemigphotos 

I shot this photo in the little town square area of Whistler, British Columbia.  At the time, they were just starting to promote the idea of mountain bikers riding trails at ski resorts during the summer.  Honestly, that seemed like a stupid idea to me, at the time.  There were hardly any mountain bikers, even up in the mountains, in 1986.  The sport hadn't really taken off then.  Obviously, I was wrong, and now things like this happen right there in the center of Whistler, where this and the next photo were snapped.  

I flew up to Boise, Idaho, then rode up to this contest in the summer of 1986 with former freestyle teammate Justin Bickel, and his parents.  They were my "freestyle family" for the first year and a half that I got seriously into BMX freestyle.  This was a great week of riding fun, where I met a bunch of Canadian freestylers, Rob Dodds and Rob Thring, among them.  The BMX Worlds were being held in Whistler that weekend, and they held an amateur freestyle contest as well.  The BMX Worlds were kind of a joke then, and most racers stayed in the States to race ABA points races that weekend.  The only pros in Whistler were Stu Thompsen and Greg Hill, as I remember.  

Us freestylers just sessioned all day, and half of the night that whole week.  The Canadians taught Justin and me to play "Touchdown," which is bascially hockey-like slams on a BMX bike.  We'd all ride around and run into reach other, trying to get the other guys to touch a foot, or their whole body, on the ground.  The last guy still on the pedals was the winner.  There were some pretty solid slams happening during that.  It's a whole different kind of bike riding, Canadian-style, eh..  

Out of nowhere, the GT/Brittania motorhome rolled into Whistler one day.  Out popped Eddie Fiola and East coast pro, Chris Lashua.  They hung out for two or three days, before heading back to Vancouver, where they were doing shows.  I snapped the photo above, and the one below, while Eddie and Chris were riding, practicing and just goofing around.  Both of these photos ran in the summer tour article in the December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine, while I was working there.  They had no photos of Chris Lashua, so I showed them mine from earlier that summer, and these two made the cut.  

Eddie Fiola rose to prominence at the very beginning of BMX freestyle as the first King of the Skateparks.  He toured with GT for years, and then got into doing stunts in the TV and film industries.  For years now he's worked as a stunt coordinator.  But he still rides freestyle regularly.  

Chris Lashua with a small ramp flipper, a front wheel 180 while hanging the back wheel over the top of the ramp.  Whistler, BC, summer of 1986.  #steveemigphotos

Chris ran the GT/Mountain Dew trick team on the East Coast for years in the 1980's.  He went on to perform for both Ringling Bros. Circus, and then was a performer for Cirque du Soleil for many years, performing in the German Wheel.  After that, he started a business building equipment for circuses.  Several years ago, he and some friends founded Cirque Mechanics, which he runs and performs in still.  

I had a couple of more photos published in the magazines, I think.  After working for BMX Action and FREESTYLIN', I wound up contributing a photo or two, or an article or two, to all six BMX magazines of the 1980's, including BMX Plus! and Super BMX, and both of their freestyle magazines, as well as one issue of Homeboy.  For most of 1987, I shot all the photos for the AFA newsletter, as well, but few copies of those have survived, so those photos are gone, except for one of Eddie Fiola I've seen on the web and social media.  

I never became a great technical photographer, I still struggle with pretty basic technology, of all kinds, in the days when everyone shoots photos nearly every day.  But I still love shooting photos, I have a pretty good eye, and get some cool shots now and then.  I'm stoked I got a handful of photos published back in the 1980's, especially because I became a video guy, and shot a lot more video than still photos.  I still see myself as some kid from Idaho who somehow stumbled into the BMX industry, and wound up seeing a lot of amazing stuff happen in the early days of BMX freestyle.  I caught a little bit of that on film and video, along the way.

The $10,000 paper trade investment challenge- Where I would invest $10 grand right now

Mark Yusko, founder of Morgan Creek Capital, is a longtime Bitcoin and crypto enthusiast, and a venture capitalist, looking to invest in the top emerging technologies and businesses today.  In this clip from June, he's answering questions about the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF application, and crypto and Web 3 in general.  He's a really knowledgeable person on crypto, finance, and emerging technologies in the WEB 3 world.  Mike Ippolito of Blockworks Macro does a podcast every Saturday morning with Mark, which I recommend if you're interested in crypto.  Here's their last On the Margin podcast from this past Saturday. 

Disclaimer

In this CNBC news segment above, from June 22, 2023, they speak about the fact that global finance behemoth, BlackRock, had just applied to create a Bitcoin spot price ETF (exchange traded fund).  BlackRock has more recently also applied for an Ethereum spot price ETF, as well.  What would crypto ETF's do?  They would allow large, institutional investors, the people who manage trillions of dollars of global investment funds, to get exposure to Bitcoin and Ethereum, without actually buying crypto itself.  The ETF's would allow investors to make or lose money as Bitcoin and Ethereum go up and down in price, and also be able to trade the ETF's as easy as they can trade stocks. Major funds have rules as to what they're allowed to invest in, and all crypto, even Bitcoin, is definitely not on the list.  

If  BlackRock, or others, are allowed to open up these ETF's, it will undoubtedly draw many tens of billions of dollars into the crypto sphere, raising the importance, and value, of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and crypto,  in the traditional finance world, in general.  In short, the general belief is that this will be another factor driving up the price of Bitcoin, and other major cryptos tend to rise as Bitcoin rises in price, at least for a while.  BlackRock has started hundreds of ETF's, and only had one turned down.  So the expectation is that their Bitcoin ETF, and perhaps some other ETF's proposed by other companies, will get the official approval as soon as January 8, 2024.   If the ETF is not approved in January,  the next potential approval date is around March 12-14, 2024.  

In addition, the next Bitcoin halving, something that happens to Bitcoin every four years, is due in April of 2024.  These are two major reasons, in addition to increased overall adoption of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptos worldwide, why the next big crypto bull market cycle seems to have begun.  Bitcoin was at $29,913 per Bitcoin at the time of this news segment above,  June 22, 2023.  Today, December 11, 2023, it's at $41,935.  Bitcoin is up over 153% since the low in December of 2022.  By comparison, the S&P 500 stock index is up 21.8%  since its December 2022 low.  

Yesterday, getting sick of missing out the opportunities I've been watching happen in crypto, I tried to sign up for a crypto account.  But I wasn't able to fully open it, I don't completely meet the criteria.  I make very little money, but even getting $30 or $40 every once in a while into a crypto coin with potential would be cool.  So today I'm really fucking pissed off that I can't get an account so I can at least buy a tiny bit of crypto and teak advantage of what looks like a generational opportunity.  

Lying half awake this morning, still pretty pissed, I realized that I could do a blog post, and "paper trade" the cryptos that seem most interesting to me, while I try to get the account issues worked out.  For anyone who isn't familiar with the term, "paper trading" is just pretending to trade something, like stocks, commodities, or crypto. You write is down on paper (or maybe a phone or tablet, these days), and follow the pretend trades, to see how they would work out.  Basically, it's practice trading, you write down, "Today I "bought" this amount of Bitcoin at this price," for example.  Then, you watch how it plays out, and say, "On this date, I" sold" my Bitcoin for this much."  It's a free way to learn about markets and trading dynamics, test out your knowledge and strategies, without losing money.  Again, this post is paper trading, an intellectual exercise to test my ideas (since I can't get a crypto account at the moment, and don't have $10K anyways).  This should not be taken as financial advice.  This exercise and blog post are for entertainment and educational purposes only, check out the Disclaimer linked above for more details. 

So here's my starting point question.  

Where would I invest $10,000 right now, if I had it to invest?

Here's my picks, all crypto, figuring a 5% fee to make each trade, on the morning of December 11, 2023.

$1,000 into Bitcoin-  @ $41,678 - that would be .02399 BTC

                                         $50 transaction fee.

$1,000 into Ethereum- @ $2,213 - that would be  .4518 ETH

                                          $50 transaction fee

$2,000 into Apecoin- @ $1.62 - that would be 1,234.56 APE

                                           $100 transaction fee

$2,000 into Avalanche- @ $35.13 - that would be 56.931 AVAX

                                            $100 transaction fee

$1,000 into Solana- @ $69.65 - that would be 14.357 SOL

                                             $50 transaction fee

$1,000 into ThorChain- @ $5.80 - that would be 172.413 RUNE

                                              $50 transaction fee

$500 into Polkadot- @ $6.67 - that would be 74.962 DOT

                                               $25 transaction fee

$500 into Polygon- @ $.84 - that would be 595.238 MATIC

                                               $25 transaction fee

$250 into The Sandbox- @ $.51 - that would be 490.196 SAND

                                               $12.50 transaction fee

$250 into Decentraland- @ $.49 - that would be 510.204 MANA

                                                $12.50 transaction fee

That's where I would invest $10,000 right now, if I had ten grand, and a crypto account.  According to Google, fees on the Coinbase crypto exchange range from .05% to 4.5%, so I rounded up to an even 5%, over that amount slightly, to make it easier to figure.  

If I had $10,000 right now, I WOULD NOT put money into stocks, gold, silver, or real estate.  OK, you couldn't buy much real estate for $10K, but I think it's got a ways to drop anyhow.  Late 2024 or more likely 2025 will be the time to look for deals in residential real estate.  I think stocks are running out of steam, as the global recession/depression that's building takes hold, and consumers in the U.S., and worldwide, run out of money.  So I expect stocks to head down into a bear market soon.  Gold just had a drop, then a good run, and now is hovering around $2,000 per ounce.  But I think it's done for a while, as is silver, as we head into several months of disinflation or actual deflation, in early 2024.  Crypto is the game in the investing world, as I see it, for the next 6 months to a year, and probably 18 to maybe 24 months.  

Crypto dropped, overall, last night, most coins by a few percent.  That was pissing me off even more, since I couldn't get the account to fully activate.  They were backing off in a little correction due to some news from some senators trying to put a lid on crypto.  

These crypto picks are not me swinging for the bleachers, hoping for 50X or 100X, homerun shots.  I think Bitcoin and Eth will trend solidly upward, overall, for the next year or more, but won't go nuts.  Maybe 1X to 3X each in 12 to 18 months.  Maybe.  This would almost certainly be a better return than nearly other investments, but not huge growth for the crypto world.  

Solana, Avalanche, and THORChain have been on a tear recently, but since we are so early in this bull market, I think they have room to run.  These would be the ones I'd look to first to take some profits, if they keep soaring for a while.  In this paper trading experiment, if I decide to "take profits" from any of these trades, that's when I might put money into more risky coins, just like I'd do if actually trading for real money.  

Apecoin is the crypto for the Yuga Labs, the Otherside/Bored Ape Yacht Club metaverse.  When I first heard about NFT's, and started learning about them in 2021, the Bored Apes were my favorites, by far.  I loved the art and those weird ape characters.  As I learned more about the team at Yuga Labs, I really liked what I saw.  The whole Bored Ape/Otherside game metaverse has been largely forgotten now, but I think they'll be back at some point, and Apecoin will pump up some.  They are hardcore gamers at heart, and Otherside is a game metaverse that people can own pieces of, and explore like MMORP games.  I think they'll be back in the news at some point in 2024 and then Apecoin will pop up 

Polkadot and Polygon are two of the major cryptos from the last cycle, and I don't think these have seen  the potential gains of this cycle.  They seem like solid bets for some growth, as I research more obscure cryptos and see what's farther down the list, with higher potential for major growth.  These would be two more I'd look at to take some profits if they go on a good run, and then invest those profits in more speculative coins.  

The Sandbox and Decentraland are the two other main metaverses that have been left for dead by investors.  These are moonshots, but their coins are super cheap, and something, virtual environments that can be explored and interacted with, actually exist.  That's more than you can say for most cryptos.  I think there's a chance we may see some renewed interest in these metaverses as things pick up, NFT's get cool again, and crypto prices get ridiculous, sometime next year.  I could be totally wrong.  We'll see.  

So those are my picks for where I would invest $10,000, right now, on December 11, 2023.  I'll do a monthly look at these picks, and maybe post more often on this paper trade experiment, if I decide to make some changes.  Again, this is a "paper trade" exercise to see how my picks would play out, since I don't have any real money to invest, and can't even get a crypto account at the moment.  I do not own any of these cryptos (except that I had $5-$10 in BTC and Eth in my old account, that I can't access anymore).  If you have any comments or thoughts, let me know on Facebook, or Twitter (still not calling it X).    

As I laid there early this morning, thinking about crypto and life in general, I decided the tiny amounts of money I make would be better spent right now by doing some writing project ideas I've had.  My art sales have faded dramatically over the last few months.  I think there's more potential to make a living again in writing, and I'll work on some of those ideas, working in that direction, over the winter.  I'll watch this crypto paper investment project, and see how things play out, and maybe I can jump into crypto before this next bull cycle winds down.  

Other investments today, as a reference to see how crypto performs in the future, by comparison:

Precious metals-

Gold- $1,982 per troy ounce

Silver- $22.82 per troy ounce

Platinum- $914 per troy ounce

Palladium- $962 per troy ounce

(spot prices from Gold-Eagle.com)

Stock indices today- 

Dow Jones Industrial Average- 36,404

Nasdaq 100- 14,432

S&P 500- 4,622

Russell 2000- 1,833

 (closing prices today- 12/11/2023)

The Magnificent 7 Stocks (the real growth in the stock market in 2023)

Nvidia- $466.27

Alphabet (Google)- $133.29

Amazon- $145.89

Apple- $193.18

Meta Platforms (Facebook)- $325.28

Microsoft- $371.30

Tesla- $239.74

(closing prices today- 12/11/2023)

Blog post with clip of Jim Cramer telling everyone NOT to invest in The Magnificent 7 stocks, December 28,2022.  

 

Prices, and percentage that The Magnificent 7 stocks are up since Cramer told people not to buy them last year, on December 28, 2022, (just under a year ago).

Nvidia- $140.36  Up 232%

Alphabet (Google)- $86.02  Up 55%

Amazon- $81.82  Up 78%

Apple- $126.04  Up 53%

Meta Platforms (Facebook)- $115.62  Up 181%

Microsoft- $234.53  Up 58%

Tesla- $112.71  Up 113%

Bitcoin is up 153% over the same time period.  The difference is that Bitcoin will most likely go up more than 100% in the next year, and those stocks definitely won't.

Skater's Quarterly Video Magazine #2- A skate video I edited in 1990 that you never heard of

I edited this video in 1990, shortly after quitting my job as a video guy at Vision Skateboards.  NSI video was a small surf/skate/snowboard video distributor, back in the days when there were several small distributors. Small operators like NSI would buy the various surf and skate videos coming out, then they would sell the VHS videos to surf shops, skateboard shops, snowboard shops, and mom and pop video stores around the U.S., and some other parts of the world.  The Skater's Quarterly videos were mostly compilations of other company's videos, with a little bit of original footage, and some short interviews.  This was years before 411 Video Magazine for skaters, or Props video magazine, for BMXers, came out.  411 debuted in 1993, and Props debuted in 1994. 

I think this video came out in early November of 1990, in time to sell a ton of them during the holiday season.  This is the first action sports video magazine video series the I know of, coming out about three years before 411 Video Magazine in skateboarding, and four years before Props Video Magazine in BMX.  Gerard at NSI had already produced Skater's Quarterly #1, several months before I started to work for him.  This video doesn't have the production quality, and it doesn't have the in depth interviews of 411 or Props.  But it was also aimed more at just average skater kids around the country, not the hardcore skaters.  

What it does have is a lot of good, solid, 1990 era skateboarding.  We used chunks of other people's videos, mostly from NSA contests, as I'll describe below.  Plus we used a bit of my own footage, of the wedding of pro skater John Lucero, and his wife Heathyr.  Yes, I asked their permission to use it in this video.  Heathyr was the women's clothing designer for Vision Street Wear, she created things like what you see the models in this video wearing, during the skateboard part.  They're mostly decked out in VSW women's clothes, the black and white pieces are VSW stuff.  So I worked with Heathyr on several fashion shoots at Vision, shooting video, and she asked me to shoot video of the wedding, when she married John Lucero.  John was was just getting ready to start Black Label Skateboards then.  It was the coolest wedding I have ever been to, and the Cadillac Tramps and the Vandals played at the reception.  How many weddings have a slam pit on the dance floor.  Not enough.  So that's were that footage came from.  

Now let's get into the skating.  In 1990, vert still ruled, and street was still a little offshoot, just coming up, and not taken too seriously by the major skateboard companies yet, those being Powell-Peralta, Vision, and Santa Cruz.  They all had street skaters on the team, but vert was the thing that sold big numbers of boards in 1990.  But not for much longer.  Skating went into a lull in the early 1990's, but not to the extent that BMX did.  The 1980's was skateboarding's third wave of popularity, and the second for BMX racing, and the first wave for BMX freestyle.  Each wave, the sports grew, and there was more of a base when the waved crashed, and they rebuilt from a higher level each time.  

In the Mount Trashmore segment of this Skater's Quarterly #2, that little kid skating the vert ramp is Danny Way.  For real.  Danny was about 16 then, several years younger than the seasoned pros on the deck.  Some of the older guys were really fucking with him, there's a shot where a guy drops in right behind Danny, and then throws him off when Danny goes for a McTwist, making Danny bail hard.  Gotta pay your dues, and Danny Way did.  I'd say Danny Way got the last laugh.  He's the guy who invented the launch part of the mega ramp, and later jumped the Great Wall of China with one.  The guy with the red T-shirt talking a lot in the Trashmore segment is Jason Jesse, who's funny, as ever.  

In the Shut Up and Skate contest in Dallas, there's a run or two by Mike Crum, who has a yellow helmet and black and white spotted shorts.  Mike was about 15 at the time.  He and Chris Gentry were the two young guys on the Vision skateboard tour I managed that summer, shortly before making this video.  I had to give him some props.  I'm not sure is Chris is in the Dallas or Houston segments.  At the end of the segment you see Jeff Phillips pulling a Phillips 66, a weird backwards invert trick he invented.  Then, at the Shut Up and Skate at Skatepark of Houston, we see a whole bunch of pros going for it, including the insane wall ride from Hell attempts off the side of the vert ramp.  Things are bigger in Texas, including the bails.  You'll also see a naked Ho Ho plant, by Steve Schneer, I believe.  It's kept marginally PG with the use of a sock.

In the Arizona NSA street contest, you see the era when the top vert skaters were also placing high in street contests, because the street course was basically a bunch of pieces of ramps.  Christian Hosoi, Tony Hawk, and Steve Caballero all tear it up in this section, but Eric Dressen holds it up for the New School of emerging street skaters at that time.  In the NSA Ohio vert contest we have Hawk, Hosoi, and Cab, but the standout in that segment is Tony Magnusson, doing ridiculously high airs.  He has the red T-shirt with the "X" logo in white.  Damn that guy could go high back then.  In the Rhode Island contest, there's a pretty good fight in the background of one shot.  See if you catch it first pass.  

In the NSA Visalia (central California) contest, the announcer says, "This is our Masters Division, all these guys are over 27" (years old).  That's funny to hear now, when Steve Alba is still schralping in pools at 60, and Chris Miller is still amazing at vert in his late 50's, along with many others.  Chris Miller has the yellow helmet at that event, and the black and white striped shirt.  Also mixed in this video is footage of the Dog Bowl from about 1980, a night session at the Nude Bowl in 1990, and some footage at Baldy Pipe.  I think that's Dave Duncan leading that pack at Baldy, but I'm not sure.  Then we see a bit of the San Francisco street contest in the drained pools at the city hall.  

Then, at the end, there's a session on the halfpipe with the big faces painted on it.  That's a Tracker trucks demo at the Action Sports Retailer trade show. That character on the ramp is an Andy Jenkins character, from his Wrench Pilot comics in Transworld Skateboarding.  So I assume Andy J. and crew painted that ramp.  This was three years before Andy became art director at Girl Skateboards.  Cool.  I shot this footage of the demo, which features Tony Hawk, with his hair about as long as it ever got, and Joe Johnson who has the super long pony tail, and several other skaters.  I edited in a bunch of really technical stuff that Tony was doing, since that's what you didn't see in most other videos at the time.  The very last trick in that segment is Bucky Lasek, an new pro on the scene at the time.  That was the first time I ever heard of Bucky.  He busts out with a backside 360 ollie, a trick Tony couldn't even do then,  Tony freaked, when he saw Bucky do that, and that's why I turned the camera to Tony, who was sitting on the ramp pretty much next to me freaking out over Bucky's trick.  When Tony Hawk freaks out while seeing you land a new trick, it's a pretty damn hard trick.    

I've said several times, I've never actually met Tony Hawk.  I've never actually been introduced, or talked to him.  I have shot photos and video of him skating, worked at 3 or 4 contests he was at, shot video at his Fallbrook house of Ken Park and Joe Johnson, with Don Hoffman (when Tony was off doing demos) in 1989.  I saw Tony's first 900 live, from the side of the ramp in 1999.  I was standing about 20 feet form the halfpipe, by some weird quirk of fate.  So I've been around places he was skating, but never actually talked to him.  That's kind of a bummer, since I first saw him skate live in 1988, and we've all seen him grow into this household name since, doing all kinds of cool things along the way.  

In any case, all that, plus quite a bit more, is packed into Skater's Quarterly #2.  Watching it over, I was stoked, it's a shitload of great skating from that era, when vert was the thing, and as street was just beginning to really take off big time.  My favorite shot of this whole video though is John and Heathyr, after the wedding, on the merry-go-round, and especially on the bumper cars.  I love it when John just drives into the wall.  Too funny.  Heathyr and John went their separate ways many years ago, but that was, by far, the coolest wedding I've ever been to, an one of my coolest video jobs I ever had.  John still owns Black Label Skateboards and does a lot of design work, and Heathyr runs Mantrap 1989.

Now, a look back to that era in action sports, as the 1980's ended and the 1990's began, led by a big recession.  In 1990, BMX had been declared "dead" for a year, and skateboarding was heading that way.  The new sport of snowboarding was just hitting mainstream people's radar, and mountain biking was where the bike industry had decided to focus its attention and its money.  I don't know what waves exist in the surfing industry (no pun intended), but it was flowing along.  It was an era where VHS videos were the thing, and Friday night trips to the local video store to get videos for the weekend were a popular thing.  While major video store chains like Blockbuster existed, there were plenty of small, mom and pop run video stores.  Working as a video store clerk was one of my many odd jobs, later in the 1990's.  In addition, there were small bike, skateboard, and ski/snowboard shops in many places.  

This is the RCA model of the S-VHS video camera I bought in 1989, forking out $1,100, on my credit cards, and making payments well into the 1990's.  The higher quality, and relatively low cost of S-VHS, SVHS-C, and Hi8 video cameras made low budget video production available to everyday people.  I was one of the first BMX freestylers to start producing my own videos, and the same thing was happening in skateboarding, snowboarding, and surfing.  

At the same time, the prosumer video camera and equipment industry was in its early days.  "Prosumer" equipment was somewhat better quality than the standard consumer VHS or 8mm video equipment, but was much cheaper than the broadcast quality equipment used by TV shows and local TV news stations.  The late 1980's into the 1990's was the period that began to democratize video media, giving anyone willing to learn the basics, the chance to make videos and share them (on VHS tapes).  

This democratization of the media began with the Apple Macintosh in 1984, and the rise of desktop publishing.  That technology allowed anyone to create newsletters, zines, magazines, and even books.  Prosumer video equipment did the same for video media.  Then came the internet, and eventually enough bandwidth to share text, audio, and video worldwide, on the internet.  Social media platforms later built on this.  The overall positive effect of all this technology in giving voices to the voiceless cannot be understated.  These technologies completely changed society.  This is why so many people in certain (highly ignorant) groups are now trying to censor everyone left and right these days.  The older power brokers of the world loved the days when they controlled ALL of the media.  Those days are gone.

Into that world of low budget, niche videos, many opportunities came along.  Gerard, a SoCal business guy from Hermosa Beach, with a knack for sales, started a video distribution company.  He mainly sold surf videos in the early 1980's. He expanded to skateboarding, and then into snowboarding, later on.  Yes, he's the guy who distributed by self-produced, 1990 BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend.  NSI sold about 500 of my videos in the U.S., which was pretty damn good since I didn't have a name, a business brand, or history of making previous videos.  

I can't remember how I met Gerard, I think I got to know him in early 1990, when Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, was dissolved.  By early March 1990, it was just me and some video equipment in an office at the Vision headquarters in Santa Ana.  I took a lot of phone calls from people who had been doing business with Unreel in the years before.  Unreel founder Don Hoffman worked freelance after that, project by project, as Vision went into a downward spiral in to the recession.  

For nearly six months, I sat in a big office, day after day, and had nothing to do.  Many people would love that, but it drove me nuts.  I've always been motivated to do something.  I quit at the end of June, then got hired to drive the dually and halfpipe trailer on a three week skateboard tour across the U.S..  As soon as the tour ended, I hopped a plane, on my own dime, and flew to Indianapolis, to shoot video of the 2-Hip King of Vert contest there.  I also drove to Chicago for a couple days, and shot footage of Bob Kohl, Brian Dahl (injured at the contest), and a new vert rider coming up, named Jon Peacy.  Then I drove my little rental Mazda from Chicago to Ohio, topping it out at 108 mph on the Ohio turnpike, in the rain.  I met and hung out for a couple of days with Jon Stainbrook and his band The Stain, whose music I used for my video.  Most of the music from Skater's Quarterly is by The Stain, as well.  I also went to see my grandma near Akron, who was 85 at the time.  

When I made it back to Huntington Beach, I had no job, no income, some savings, and about 12 credit cards, one of which I had put $1,000 on during the skate tour.  Vision paid me that money back, but, being a 24-year-old idiot, I didn't pay off my credit card.  I paid it down a little, then made monthly payments and lived off of the money for a while.  Sometime around August or September of 1990, I think I met Gerard at NSI, and started doing some freelance work for him.  I worked part time shooting the bits, and then editing Skater's Quarterly #2.  In October, I spent a lot of time, and money, editing The Ultimate Weekend.  It cost me $1,000 just to rent the edit system I used to edit the video for 40 hours.  If I had any business sense back then, I would have just kept working at Vision, and used their equipment for free.  But I just had to quit Vision out of boredom.  

At the time, Gerard had a little office for NSI in Gardena, inland of the South Bay area of Los Angeles county.  For you Old School freestylers, Gardena is a few miles from the Velodrome at Cal State Dominguez, where we had so many AFA contests in the 1980's.  NSI was a small, operation, three people at most, but Gerard sold a lot of videos.  He sold them in groups of two or three, or maybe 10 or 20 videos, on a big order.  He sold the popular videos, like the top surf videos of the day, and all the Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade videos.  He sold them to thousands of small surf shops, skate shops, and mom and pop video shops.  

At the time, it cost about $3 to make a VHS copy of a 60 minute video, plus maybe a quarter each for boxes and labels, if you got enough printed up.  He would buy them for $5 or $6 from the companies, I think, and wholesale them to the shops for $9 or $10.  Something like that.  Small distributors like NSI made around $2 to $3 a video, and he often shipped out 100 to 150 orders, usually 2 to 5 videos each, every day during the holiday season.  It was a lot of work packing and shipping, but he worked the phones hard, and did pretty well, with minimal overhead.  I helped with a lot of that packing and shipping during the 1990 Christmas season.  He also had some other streams of income, I think he had a rental house or two.  The guy worked hard, sold a ton of videos, a few at a time, and small surf, skate, and snowboard companies loved him, because he sold a huge percentage of their videos to his vast network of little shops.  

Now we finally get to the idea behind Skater's Quarterly.  This was a brilliant idea for that time.  If you watch this video, most of it is footage from NSA skate contests.  You'll see the big names, Tony Hawk, Christian Hosoi, Steve Caballero, Chris Miller, Eric Dressen, mostly in NSA contest footage.  Since he sold so many videos, he'd call up the people he knew at the NSA (he sold their videos), and other companies, and say, "Hey, it's Gerard here.  I'm gonna make a skateboard video magazine, do you mind if I use some of the footage from your latest video?  I'll be promoting your video, and it'll help me sell some more of your videos."  Something like that.  Every time, they'd say, "Uh... sure... go ahead."

That's where I came in.  He had me edit video parts from other people's videos, a whole bunch of them, into the Skater's Quarterly.  Then we'd shoot the intros, most right in the office (he'd moved back into his garage by this point).  For SQ #2, we spent the weekend at the Action Sports Retailer trade show shooting video (the skate session at the end, with the Andy Jenkins character painted on the ramp), plus we went up to the Bones Brigade 7: Propaganda video premiere, in Santa Barbara.  Total costs were my hourly rate to shoot and edit, a hotel room for two nights at the trade show, and some video tape.  He had an S-VHS edit system, and the line on cheap labels and boxes.  For maybe $600 total production costs, and $3 per VHS copy, NSI had Skater's Quarterly Video Magazine #2. 

Here's the smart part.  When he called up all those shops, he'd say, "Hey, it's NSI video, we have three new surf videos out this month, and two skateboard videos.  They'd order 3 or 4 of the videos, and he made About $3 each.  Then he'd say, "I also have this skateboard video magazine, Skater's Quarterly, it's an hour of great skateboarding, with all the top names."  then they'd order two or three of the Skater's Quarterly videos.  But since he produced the video, he made about $6 per copy, not $3.  So a $12 profit jumped up to $12 plus $18 (3 SQ videos X $6), or $30 profit per sale.  That extra $6 to $18 per order adds up when you ship out 50 to 80 orders on a good day, and 150 orders per day over the holidays.  I made $9 or $10 an hour for my very limited editing skills.  That was my freelance job for the second half of 1990 and into 1991.  

I pretty much forgot about these videos.  I haven't seen any of them since I edited them, in late 1990 and early 1991.  I was just telling a friend about these videos a couple of days ago.  Then I looked up some skate video, and Skater's Quarterly popped up on the side on YouTube.  SQ #2 is the only one of the three NSI videos I edited on YouTube, but it was cool to watch it over again, 33 years later.  The footage is a lot better skating than I remember.  I also edited Skater's Quarterly #3, and Snowboarder's Quarterly #1, where we covered the premiere of Snowboarder's in Exile, my favorite snowboard video of the 90's.   

So that's the story behind one of the other little video projects I did in the early 90's, and three of the 16 bike, skate, and snowboard videos I produced or edited, between 1987 and 2001.