Before this website I use to be really good at life blogging and lately I am just way to busy to get around to it. So last Thursday I had a really full day so I made sure to document it for the blog. The first photo above is Lucky who is my roommates cat. He is quite a character and greeted me before I left in the morning with him in the “play dead” position. Funny story actually is that the cat use to belong to Daijiro Yoshihara.

I headed down to Orange County for the first leg of my day and off Highway 55 there happens to be a Chick-Fil-A which I grabbed some breakfast at. They only have a few of these in California so when I am near one it’s a must for breakfast.

I saw this 1957 Porsche Carrera on Highway 55 heading to Hyundai. This thing looked flawless and was well maintained and cared for by the owner. It had a great sound to it as he flew by me down the highway.

My first stop was Hyundai North America to pick up some Genesis seats. Miles was a great help finding some seats for a new project we are doing. We will have more on project coming to the website soon.

I had to drop off my Mercedes carburetor to get rebuilt since it has been having some issues after it idles for a few minutes. In the parking lot is a red Mercedes CLK63 AMG Black  that looked fantastic. A white M3 was also in the corner of the parking lot when I swung by.

After dropping off the Mercedes parts in Orange County I headed up to Manhattan Beach to shoot some Wrecked Magazine voice overs. Peter from Modified Magazine lives at the apartment we were recording at and had this nostalgic Super Street Magazine cover hanging in the dining room.

Nik did an awesome job with our Wrecked Magazine voice overs. She is the voice of a tutorial we are releasing later this month. This second photo is Nik engrossed in deep thought about her favorite Formula Drift driver Rhys Millen.

After dropping off Nik and heading into Downtown Los Angeles I found some traffic of course.

Here I am crossing the Sixth Street Bridge heading into Los Angeles. This bridge is always empty and has a distinct look and feel that I just love as you drive into downtown.

Coming off the Sixth Street bridge you get a great view of Downtown Los Angeles. It’s also not very often you see clouds around Los Angeles so I really liked this shot.

Sitting on a desk when I walked in to my meeting was a Forza Motorsport 3 Xbox 360. Very few of these were made and it features an Audi R8 and a carbon fiber styled front.

I also scored two gifts while visiting including Halo 3 ODST and a Snoop Dog x Famous Stars Straps 10 Year Anniversary Party t-shirt. The photograph of Snoop Dog was shot by Estevan Oriol.

The last shot comes from the ID Agency where some awesome classic cars are sitting right now. My favorite is this blue Chevrolet truck you can see in this shot. After leaving here it was off to home in lots of traffic.

Vaughn Gittin Jr. swung by our house before having a meeting with an advertiser as he makes his round through Southern California. He brought over a 2010 Mustang convertible in my favorite color grabber blue. Here it is in the driveway next to Project350z!

Just before Vaughn Gittin had arrived my Christmas present finally came in. It’s a full NBA Jam arcade system which can play up to four people. We had some intense battles on the sticks before he finally had to head over to his meeting for the day.

A quick snap before he left of the Mustang and 350z from the front as well.

Don’t worry about me here out on the west coast. I know it’s flooding, pouring rain for the next 70 days and you guys might need boats to make it around but I pulled the weather report for the rest of 2009 in Los Angeles and it says sunny. Cody Wellons from S3 Magazine has even started a website called ATLflood.com which has a photo that looks strikingly like it was from my old house at 1280 West.Thank goodness we moved out west to the drought. I have yet to see a harder rain than a sprinkle in the year I have lived here and it rarely lasts more than 30 minutes, amazing I know. One thing I don’t miss is the stupid rain.

Check out the 75-85 Interchange underwater: http://www.atlflood.com/news/?p=13

Sorry I have been posting so much non automotive related content but I will work on getting some more of that coming on the blog when I can. I am a huge tennis fan and have been for quite sometime. When I was little my Memere (French for grandmother) would always take me to watch her play tennis and I’ve been a fan every since. Countless travel hours on the road are wasted playing Virtua Tennis 3 and many hours watching endless coverage of the major events.

Watching the US Open I first noticed this girl from Marietta, Georgia when she faced off against my favorite female tennis player of all time, Maria Sharapova. Watching Melanie stay composed and defeat her was truly amazing. Melanie managed to win me over as a fan from her residence in Marietta, Georgia. I grew up right there until I moved to Los Angeles last year and love her representing in the US Open for Georgia.

Appearing in only her second US Open,, Oudin ousted seeded players Elena Dementieva (4), Maria Sharapova (29), and Nadia Petrova (13) on her way to the quarterfinals. Entering the quarterfinals she was the youngest to enter since Serena Williams in 1999. Last night she was defeated by a 19 year-old Caroline Wozniacki from Denmark in a tough 6-2/6-2 set. She shook up woman’s tennis and hopefully the next majors will be as exciting as this US Open ladder.

I just found this video on Digg and had to post it on my blog. BASE jumping has always blown me away but to jump off the Burj Dubai Tower in Dubai (currently the world’s largest building) had to of been insane. Here is a little video of the whole story and make sure to read the text at the very end of the video. I promise I will get caught up on my blogging from my end very soon!

Before I start this whole topic I want to state that I am a proud GM shareholder. Saturn was a brand that was going no where and doing nothing for General Motors except burning billions of dollars with no hope for return on investment.

I made a comment on twitter.com/joeyredmond yesterday “Saturn is dead! Finally some good news in the automotive industry.” I received a blast of e-mails, tweets, and facebook comments bitching that other GM entities should be taken out and why Saturn should survive. Before I get to into the topic let’s have a little history lesson on the great Saturn brand.

Saturn was launched 24 years ago in January of 1985. The Saturn brand launch was GM’s response to “to the success of Japanese & German small-car imports.” The brand doesn’t hold a candle to the dominating sellers in the market segment and they cannot come close to a competitive price point.

Let’s look at the facts:
2009 Saturn Aura XE Sedan: $22,655 MSRP
2009 Honda Civic Sedan: $15,505 MSRP
2009 Mazda 6 I Sport Sedan: $21,150 MSRP
2009 Toyota Camry Base Sedan: $20,195 MSRP
2009 Toyota Corolla Base Sedan: $16,150 MSRP
2009 Honda Accord LX Sedan: $21,555 MSRP
2009 Nissan Altima Base Sedan: $19,900 MSRP
2009 Subaru Impreza 2.5i Sedan: $18,495 MSRP
2009 Mitsubishi Lancer DE Sedan: $15,090 MSRP
2009 Volkswagon Jetta SE Sedan: $21,020 MSRP

I picked the sedan base model Saturn Aura XE Sedan which comes in the cheapest at $22,655 MSRP. I listed 10 cars that were similar in category and either Japanese or German origin. You know those “small-car imports” that Saturn was created to beat and destroy, maybe even save America!? Ironically I picked 9 other cars that were Japanese/German sedans base models like our Saturn. They were carry a  cheaper MSRP and I would rather drive all of them before a Saturn.

Without a price point lower than it’s competition and some lucky design what is the motivation for purchase? The car has no real culture or adoption from a segment in the market. Aftermarket support for tuners is out of the question and way behind many other cars on the list. Most people purchasing a car use it to identify with a person brand they believe themselves to fall in (or want to fall in). Running that list above most of those cars fall into a category of purchasers or stereotypes that most people put the owners into. When I see a Saturn no branding, thoughts, or ideas come into mind. I don’t put Saturn into any category or relate to the owners because of any culture behind the brand.

On my last note let’s also remember Saturn was a failure from the start. It was launched as a property outside of the GM super machine. Saturn even had it’s own dealership network at first. Then as sales faltered and never met expectations it was brought in as another badge under GM. Sadly the public and shareholders do not know how much Saturn has lost in recent years because they don’t report the figures separately (or at least where I can easily locate them.) A general figure I can find is that Saturn has lost over $1,000,000,000 in recent years on it’s own. Next time GM wants to beat Japanese car companies perhaps they should focus on quality, performance, and durability while scrapping the plastic body. Just my two cents but a $22,000 plastic paneled machine on four wheels doesn’t seem to be luring me into any dealerships over the next year or two. Perhaps they need to steal some guys on the new Hyundai project because they have clearly figured something out.

For the longest time my iTunes has been a huge disaster and I finally deceided it was time for an end. With 5,224 songs (around 16 days of music) is mostly mislabeled, mis genre’d, and missing album art. My new goal is to get this cleaned up in my spare time with album covers, proper genre, year of production, album, and artist. In three days I managed to finish the letter A and hopefully sooner than later I will give up or finish it. Finally my iPod will make sense soon and I can actually find my music!  I still have my Google Maps project going too that I will update you guys on.

If you follow me on twitter (www.twitter.com/joeyredmond) you would of seen that I spotted a Gumpert Apollo today on Fairfax Ave. by my house. I was on the phone (hands free CHP) and screaming and annoyed with traffic that the car past me so fast I hardly realized what I just saw.

With that being said I didn’t score any photos but I figured with some Internet research I could find out about this Gumpert Apollo. Someone spotted it about 5 months ago at the Fatburger down the street from me on Santa Monica Blvd. (FYI that Fatburger is amazing)! Matching the plate it appears this is the same one that ran on the 2008 Gumball 3000 in May from San Francisco, California to Beijing, China.

After doing some research on who drove the Gumball 3000 Gumpert Apollo (assuming this was the same one, now painted orange from black) it is driven by Mr. Moto AKA Reza from Teckademics fame. You would recognize him from some of the older films when he traveled with Dado and Dustin in the older films. Here is Reza’s website (http://www.mrmota.com/).

That is my detective work for the day! It looks like 10 were sent to the USA and a shop called Evolution Motorsports in Arizona is the only approved shop to work on the cars by Gumpert. Thanks to Team-BHP and Jarod DeAnda (Gumball 3000) for some information to help out.

Now I am by no means a Los Angeles resident or consider myself from Los Angeles. I moved here in December 2008 and have barely experienced the joys of surviving in Los Angeles. I thought I wouldn’t really learn much or experience many “new things” since I traveled here so frequently for work over the past few years. Well after being here a little over a month these are the things I have learned….these are the 10 Things I didn’t learn about Los Angeles until I actually moved to Los Angeles.

10. Los Angeles has amazing hamburgers and hamburger culture everywhere. The hamburger is my second favorite food item behind pizza and while putting forth great effort I have yet to eat at most of the amazing burger spots in Los Angeles. How I visited here for so long and remained unaware of this burger sensation in LA is beyond me to this moment! I will credit it with most of my friends being trendy “vegans” or into the lamest craze diet and unable to consume these products. If you really have doubts on the burger history of Los Angeles they made a movie about it called “Burgertown” which you can watch for free on Hulu so check it out.

9. People actually parallel park in Los Angeles. The only reason I kind of know how to do it or even what it is stems from the fact that to get my Georgia driver’s license I had to do it. In high school we talked about how stupid/funny it was that they made us do this because who in the world would parallel park? Once arriving in LA I figured I would just excuse myself from the task because I have a mid range semi luxury/performance car and surely that was a good enough reason to valet. That lasted about a week until I came to realize two very important things. I had spent $150 valet parking and watched one valet set off my car alarm and stall it twice driving it 500 feet to where I stood (not quite woth $150)! No one is above street parking here because you can find the likes of cars worth more than $250,000 wedged between cars everyday. Thankfully I have a backup camera!

8. Things like this photo above no longer shock me….if I saw someone dressed like above before living in Los Angeles I would either run away and hide or assume I missed the fact that today was Halloween. Now I just assume that someone is filming a movie or it’s Friday night.

7. How can we not talk about these tour buses…..Nightmare on Elm Street was filmed blocks from my current residence in Hollywood. No one really seems to find this a big deal EXCEPT every tourist from the midwest. These Hollywood Star buses are super annoying because they just stop randomly on the streets everywhere so these people can take pictures of places that look no different than any other block in Los Angeles. This boggles my mind.

6. Parking is virtually extortion anywhere in LA. It’s not like most major cities (Atlanta, Chicago, NYC) where the locals “know the spots to park.” These do not exist in LA, you are either going to pay $10 to valet, illegally park somewhere else, or stuff the meter and set your cell phone to go off 1 minute before it expires for a fill up. Most likely you will have several rolls of quarters in your glove box. If you actually take the time to read the 16 No Parking Signs or “Parking Rules” you won’t understand them anyway.

5. The years I wasted watching Saved by the Bell on TBS really taught me some useful things about California culture. Nobody likes the valley and anything over the hill is “uncool”, “gross”, and such “lower class” than everything in Los Angeles. Yet if you go to the valley nobody seems to be thrilled on Los Angeles. It’s just like the old Bayside/Valley High School wars I use to watch on TV. The secret here is 95% of the Los Angeles transplants all lived in the valley at some point before making it into actual Los Angeles County.

4. When your 2 miles away from someone that does not convert into 2 minutes. This was a habit I got into living on the east coast, it was simple math. Quickly I found that this is NEVER the case in Los Angeles. In fact, I found it a very hard habit to break and in turn was constantly late to appointments and meetings. In Los Angeles 2 miles is 20 minutes, it’s an easy formula, just move the decimal point. 1.5 miles is 15 minutes and 4 miles is just too far.

3. The only girls who actually WANT you to talk to them in LA are from the midwest. They are either aspiring movie stars/musicians/models but yet they all work in the food service Industry and YES they have a headshot/reel/demo tape. Please keep in mind they were the popular girls in high school (in case you were curious!)

2- People just don’t wear sunglasses to look cool in LA like the east coast. I have owned a nice pair of Electric Sunglasses for about a year that just sat in my door collecting dust. Once arriving in LA I have to use them at least once a day to avoid being blinded by the sunlight. Try driving down the 10 West an hour or two before sunset or really anywhere west in the evening and you will either put sunglasses on or crash.

1- No matter what anyone tells you, Los Angeles has HORRIBLE pizza everywhere. For a city so full of culture and delicious food (like the hamburgers mentioned in #10) you won’t see this one coming but as a diehard pizza fan I will tell you this has almost been the death of me. Luckily, I enlisted the advise of a former Philadelphia resident who pointed me to the only “acceptable” pizza joint in Los Angeles. It’s on Larchmont and called Village Pizzeria. Trust me on this, don’t let anyone else tell you about “amazing” pizza because it’s not true.

I found this is front of my house yesterday and it appears they were a victim of a Hollywood drive by. Ironically at 7pm last night they had a tow truck at the car and people taking items out of it. I woke up however this morning to find the car now across the street in the same condition. Perhaps they didn’t pay the tow guy? Who knows what is going on here but this EK got smashed up and it’s amazing. Thank the Holywood Stars that I have one of the only parking spaces in the whole city.