Nat Arem's Blog

Is anyone out there really good with Photoshop or do you know someone who’s really good? If so, I have a relatively simple (ie, one image) job for you/them. I need to take a picture of myself and photoshop it to look both old-style (ie, 1700s) in terms of dress and awesome in terms of things that I have with me in the picture. For instance, I probably want to add a falcon, maybe a parrot, definitely a cigar or pipe, probably some sort of fine alcohol, a diamond-encrusted gold telescope in the background, etc. It basically has to be ridiculous. This is somewhat like what I’m talking about:

The differences are that mine needs to be way more badass, more classical in terms of dress, more accessories and possibly not lying down (although I am open to the idea).

So basically, if you or someone you know is good at doing that sort of thing, I will get a friend to take the original picture and we can go from there. This will ultimately be used to get a portrait painted so it needs to be decent resolution but it doesn’t have to be super high res. Thanks!

Feel free to reach me via my contact page or directly via gmail at the username natarem.

In what has become somewhat of a tradition, I am concluding my annual trip to Georgia. The trip usually consists of some combination of Athens and Atlanta but this year it was just an Atlanta version. In 2006 and 2007 (the year we filmed thepokerfilm) I lived in Atlanta in the fall. In 2008 I came back from Costa Rica for the UFC. Here are some posts from that trip. Then in 2009 I came back from Cayman for Auburn at Georgia. In 2010 I flew in from Las Vegas for Vanderbilt at UGA (lol).

And that brings us to this year in which I flew in for Thanksgiving at the yellowsub86 Family Estate & Residences (trademark pending) and the Georgia Tech/UGA festivities. Thanksgiving was a big success if you’re measuring it on the “what you’re suppposed to do on TG” measuring stick. In other words, I ate an absurd amount, hung out with some fun people and then felt sick for a few hours while slumped on the couch watching NFL football. Mission accomplished. I hadn’t been that full in years. I think the multiple servings of everything probably contributed to that.

On the other hand, going to Tech/UGA was not much of a success. It was a tough ticket and even bad seats were hitting $200. Not really worth it. Instead we spent all of Saturday watching college football from the couch. Even though I’m really not that big of a college football fan these days, I still enjoy watching the games during rivalry week. Especially the games with major implications for BCS bowls. On the other hand, I get bored in about 45 seconds whenever watching random “No 21 v some unranked team on a ESPNU broadcast” games in September or whatever. We wrapped up Saturday with a visit to the area known as East Andrews in Buckhead. I didn’t really drink too much though so it wasn’t a ton of fun — for me at least. Ever since attending the Bodog WSOP Main Event party this past summer in Vegas, I haven’t had any appetite for alcohol whatsoever. I got absurdly drunk at the Bodog party and the resulting hangover was so terrible that I actually feel sick at the thought of being drunk. So my night on Saturday consisted of a few sipped beers. Which is more than enough for me these days.

Since we missed the college game on Saturday, we decided to pick up some tickets on Stubhub for the Minnesota Vikings at Atlanta Falcons game on Sunday. It was not what I would call a “premier matchup” game. Overall the game was extremely blah. A couple touchdowns, Vikings being terrible, Atlanta letting the Vikings back in the game, etc. Actually, at some point in the 3rd quarter sub and I were discussing how nondescript the game was. It eventually picked up at the end, especially if you bet on the game (the line was 9.5 or 10, depending). And we did see Percy Harvin run a kickoff back to the three yard line for the longest non-scoring play in NFL history. When he was tackled at the three with a few minutes left, it was 24-14 Atlanta so it wasn’t exactly like they were under huge threat of losing the game. The Vikings needed to punch it in and then get the ball back and score again. But, if you bet on the game, it was obviously a huge set of four downs. Somehow, the Atlanta defense managed to hold and the game ended at 24-14. This made sub quite happy as it represented a rather large swing for him to have Atlanta cover in most of his bets.

Here’s a short video of the super electrifying performance (I might be kidding) put on by Sean Kingston at halftime:

To wrap up the trip, last night (Sunday evening) we went to Restaurant Eugene which is apparently supposed to be one of the best restaurants in Atlanta. It’s a local foods sort of restaurant with a mix of veggie, meat and seafood dishes. It was a really good meal but, somehow, I managed to get stuck with the bill despite having one credit card against sub’s four credit cards (they had wine). And, speaking of CCR, after years of absolutely destroying sub in flips, I actually ran bad this trip. I paid for pretty much everything. Although, admittedly, I am still up so much on sub lifetime that it’s pretty hard to complain about losing ~$600 or whatever it was for all of the flips this weekend.

Now it’s time to find my way to the gate for my flight on wonderful US Airways. I have a short week at home before heading to Dallas for two weeks (for work) on Saturday. I’m not particularly exciting about spending most of December away from home but hopefully in January I’ll be able to get back to the mostly non-travely lifestyle that I lived for August to November (when I went to Paris).

I flew back from Paris a week ago after spending a week at the quasi-hellish place most commonly known as Disneyland Paris. No, I didn’t fly all the way to Paris to visit a boring theme park. I went there for the 2011 World Weightlifting Championships, also known as the WWC. One of the main reasons I went was because high level weightlifting competitions really don’t happen all that often. There are high level competitions like the Europe championships and the Asian Games but those obviously don’t feature lifters from all over the world. In fact, pretty much the only competitions that draw the best lifters from all over the world are the annual WWC and the Olympics (there isn’t a WWC during Olympic years). Since tickets are nearly impossible to come by for London, my next chance to see this sort of competition wouldn’t be until 2013 when the WWC will be in Warsaw. And I’m guessing that a lot of top lifters will take some time off after the Olympics so the quality of the lifting won’t be quite as high in 2013. So anyway, this was really my only chance for at least two years — if not more. Oh, and 2014 is Kazakhstan and 2015 is Houston. If I’m still into this stuff then I will definitely go to Houston. Kazakhstan sounds pretty awesome but I’d only go if I could avoid Soviet-era planes. Those Tupolevs that crash every other week are scary.

Anyway, on to the trip. The flight over was pretty smooth. I tried to get an upgrade from coach but unfortunately it didn’t clear so I was in coach. However, due to my status with Continental I was in an exit row so I had plenty of legroom. Also, the woman next to me was pretty small so overall the flight was pretty much as comfortable as it can be in coach. But I still didn’t manage to sleep all that much which made my first day in Europe a bit rough.

I arrived at Charles De Gaulle airport at 10am, met my friends who had flown over separately from Las Vegas and took the TGV directly to Disneyland Paris. It turns a 30-45 minute car ride into a 9 minute train ride at 100-something miles per hour. Really awesome. The train is so smooth and quiet. And fast. I can’t repeat that enough. I’ve never been on an Amtrak train that fast, even including the Acela. Although I have heard the Acela goes faster in parts of Connecticut, I’ve never been on the Acela in those areas. I love fast stuff so the train was a great start (although I should mention that I’d just spent 7 hours going 550 MPH). Once at the Disneyland Paris train stop, we switched trains to the RER A which is the local train. After that we took a bit of a wrong turn when Google Maps led me astray by mapping the hotel to the wrong spot. Either way we figured it out quickly and ended up at our hotel pretty soon after. The hotel was only one stop from Disneyland Paris and it was right by the tracks so it was actually super convenient. In an attempt to stay awake, we immediately left the hotel and grabbed some food, followed by heading back to the WWC venue for some afternoon weightlifting.

I was pretty tired so I really can’t remember most of the session that we watched. I do remember that the American lifter Amanda Sandoval was lifting so that means I was probably watching the 58kg female lifters. Here’s a video of Amanda competing in a prior event where she snatches (for those non-lifters, she basically throws the weight over her head in one movement) almost 190 lbs:

And no, she’s not bulky like you’d might think if you subscribe to conventional — but horribly wrong — wisdom in the US and some other parts of the world. I really wish that more girls would take up lifting as it would make them way hotter.

After getting a bunch of sleep Monday night, I woke up on Tuesday ready to watch some lifting and take some pictures. After all, I was there partially for business. I need a lot of pictures for the new weightlifting-related website so I needed to attend as many sessions as I could handle. And I definitely needed to go to all of the final sessions (also known as A sessions) where the best lifters were lifting in each category.

I don’t really have the energy to write about every session. Nor do I think my blog readers care to read about every session. But I ended up attending something like 23 or 24 sessions. Each session consisted of approximately 10 lifters (it varied, sometimes 8, sometimes 12) each performing six lifts total. Each lift is usually spaced out by around 45 seconds plus there is a 10 minute break at the halfway point. So I’m estimating that I saw somewhere around 1500 lifts performed. And about five of those were world records (although only one male world record) and well over a dozen were world record attempts. Overall the lifting was really great.

I also managed to get a lot of good pictures. I ended up with roughly 5,600 pictures of about 250 of the best male and female lifters in the world. Here’s a very small sampling:

I’m just pumped for Poland in 2013 now! I’ll probably write up more about this trip at some point soon.

This past weekend I went down to Washington DC to visit my sister (who actually lives in Maryland on the outskirts of DC). I’ve been to Washington a number of times in my life (given that I grew up in Philadelphia, it’s pretty close) but it been at least a few years and I hadn’t actually looked around in a while. So I took a train down in the morning and I spent the better part of Friday walking from Union Station over to Georgetown, making a number of stops along the way at places like the White House and the Washington Monument. Overall I like Washington but it doesn’t really give me a good vibe as the type of place I would like to live. With all of the bland buildings and lack of a skyline, it just seems very cold and not welcoming to me. I do like certain areas, like Georgetown. But after living in Philadelphia for the past two months I just can’t say that I would take Washington over Philly in terms of a nice walkable downtown area. Maybe there are better areas in Washington and I didn’t see them but from what I saw, that’s the conclusion I would draw.

One of the reasons for my trip (besides visiting my sister, of course) was to go to an M83 concert at a place called Black Cat. It was a pretty small venue but M83 did a double header (6PM and 9PM shows) and both were sold out and tickets were selling for a number of multiples of face value on StubHub. So I definitely think they need to pick a bigger venue on their next tour — and they need to put Philly in their plans. The concert was awesome. I was able to hear all of the songs that I really wanted to hear. And I was pretty into the opening band (called Active Child), who I hadn’t heard before.

I recorded a bunch of songs on my iPhone using the Voice Recorder app. I know that it isn’t exactly audiophile quality. And I had people around me talking the whole time so you can hear them sometimes. But I wanted to see how it would sound and I also like listening to live music sometimes. So I uploaded the tracks to SoundCloud. You can play them here:

You can also view, play and download the set of songs here: http://soundcloud.com/natarem/sets/m83-at-black-cat.

Also, here’s a picture of my view:

Overall the trip was a lot of fun and I’m glad I went, despite the crappy weather/snow (!) last Saturday. I’m attempting to get onto a White House tour with my sister in January so I’ll go back down for that assuming the White House lets me on the tour. In case you White House background check people are googling people and you come across this blog: hook it up please.

To switch gears to future travel, I’m pretty excited to be headed to Paris for a week starting this Sunday. I’m going for the World Weightlifting Championships. Like many Olympic-level sports, Olympic-style weightlifting has regular World Championships (every year, except for Olympic years) and this year they decide to hold them at Euro Disney, also known as Parc Disneyland. It’s in the suburbs of Paris and I will be there for the whole week pretty much. I’m going with John Broz (a well-known Olympic lifting coach from Vegas who has one lifter competing in the men’s super heavyweight category). I’ve become pretty good friends with John over the last year so I’m looking forward to the lifting competition, seeing Paris and hanging out with John and Pat (his lifter who is competing).

On another note regarding weightlifting, I’ve finally found a good place in Philadelphia to lift. I’d all but given up on it but I finally found a CrossFit that happens to have four platforms in the basement. I agreed to loan my equipment to the gym while I’m training there. I have really high-end equipment so it’s generally only being used (hopefully) for Olympic lifting and not for CrossFit. But I’ve been going in and squatting for the last week. And I’ll start doing the Olympic lifts in the next few weeks as my leg strength recovers. I’m already feeling a decent amount stronger than I did last week during my first session but I’m still a decent amount off of where I was earlier this year (and even then I was weak by any respectable lifting standards). So I’m still playing catchup. I will be training a lot though, assuming I don’t get injured.