UFC 84 – The Best Event of the Year

Today’s UFC was probably the best MMA event of the year. A lot happened and we saw a lot of good things. Here are the highlights of today’s event:

• Rogan calls Mandy Moore a groupie. Goldberg agrees. Locker Room Groupie!
• Machida takes referee Yves Lavigne down — without even touching him.
• Mario Yamasaki does a Mazagatti. He was about to stop the fight but got frozen in his tracks by BJ’s killing intent.  Just like Steve did last UFC with Jason MacDonald and Joe Doerksen.

Here again is an image of Lyoto taking Yves down without even touching him:

Well, that’s the essence of UFC 84. Now, let’s get on with the lesser things, the fights:

Goran Reljik does a number on Gouveia! In what was one of the more exciting fights in a night packed with exciting fights, Goran Reljic stands more or less evenly with Gouveia, but gets rocked, taken down and pounded against the fence. He then escapes, takes Gouveia down with a punch, and then finishes him from the top. What an amazing reversal! He also shows that he is indeed the protege of Mirko Crocop, he destroyed Wilson’s right arm with those unbelievable left leg roundhouses. His only problem is that he mentioned Randy Couture in front of millions, meaning Dana White will want to ship him out as soon as possible.

Soukoudjou vs. Nakamura – well I am happy Kaz lost, I hope Dana White fires him beacuse I really don’t want to see him again. With the long history of layoffs the UFC is having today, I would not be surprised to hear him let go within the week. Sokoudjou uses extreme athleticism again to pepper Nakamura with kicks, Nakamura shows a habit of catching the leg later on with his hand, so Sokoudjou takes advantage and kicks, as Nakamura catches the leg Sokou uses the same extreme balance he showed against Arona to launch a super man punch AFTER the kick, and rocks Nakamura flush until he falls down on his right knee, injuring it ala Crocop vs. Gonzaga, and gets counted out for the TKO.

Yoshida puts up a great performance. His unwitting oppponent clinches him unexpectedly (though Yoshida says it was “just as planned” with his best Yagami Light impression) and ends up doing a perfect judo hip toss and right into an anaconda choke. The poor guy passes out without tapping and Herb Dean calls the fight.

Toquinho vs. Salaverry – this was probably the most lopsided fight of the evening and there should really have been no question that Salaverry would get his ass handed to him. Toquinho shows absolutely perfect jiujitsu. He slips a leg kick from Ivan and ducks into a beautiful takedown. Once down he lands in sidecontrol, perfectly and easily passes to mount, transitions to the rear, plays with a rear naked choke attempt for a minute and as Ivan tries to escape he transitions perfectly into the most beautiful rear armbar I have ever seen in my life. Salaverry, totally outclassed.

Carwin vs. Wellisch – well Wellisch is a decent fighter but this had to be KO of the night, a scant 40 seconds in after trading in a boxing match Carwin steps in with a one two and catches Carwin solidly with the right cross, sending Wellisch’s mouthpiece flying straight out of his mouth and stopping the fight there and then. Wellisch only got flash KO’d and he was alright seconds after dropping but the referee wants no more of that because Carwin could have brutalized him with ground and pound after he dropped. Good KO for Carwin.

Thiago Silva and Mendes — Mendes showed a good showing but Thiago truly has the heart of a champion. Mendes’ standup was better and he totally rocked Thiago with a guarded high kick that blasted through Thiago’s guard and into the back of his head, sending Thiago down to the canvas. Mendes tries to finish but Thiago keeps his cool and hangs on, managing to get out of the situation. After another standup Thiago again gets rocked and falls down, Mendes is a bit hesitant but tries to finish again, but fails to do so and they stand up again. Unfortunately for Mendes he gets in too close after being too eager, Thiago clinches and takes him down, Thiago then gets mount and pounds Mendes out. Excellent reversal and shows a bit of a lack of heart in Mendes who taps to the strikes. Thiago continues his wrecking ball act through the LHW division, is Machida next for him?

Wanderlei and Jardine – well I called it before, Wandy may have had trouble with Chuck but Jardine should be a cakewalk. Styles make fights — Wandy’s brawling fed right into Chuck’s countering style and longer reach advantage, but against Jardine’s unorthodox stance and style me and a lot of other fans saw Wandy just walking in and doing damage to Jardine on the inside. And guess what? He did and screwed Jardine even faster than Carwin did Wellisch. Wandy is battle-worn but he always brings it and Jardine thought way too highly of himself. It’s great to see him get knocked a peg down he is someone who thought too highly of himself after beating Forrest and Chuck, but truth is he isn’t good enough to be someone in this crowded LHW division just yet.

Wanderlei demolishes Keith Jardine

Machida vs. Tito — perhaps my most anticipated fight of the night, I wanted to see Machida totally embarass Tito. And he almost did, except for a slip at the end of the fight. This was a great fight, and Machida showed us a lot: in Round 1 he frustrates a takedown attempt by Tito, which did not even come close. He then punishes Tito in typical Machida fashion with his trademark strikes: right low kick, left cross, right jab, and totally shuts down all of Tito’s offense. He then goes for a punctuation mark at the end of the round and clinches Tito for an upperbody judo takedown! Tito got his ass handed to him.

Machida then comes into the 2nd round doing much of the same, stops Tito’s 2nd takedown attempt and shows a few new moves like a fake left kick which he turns into a scissor kick with his right. He also uses the same Brazilian Kick that Glaube Feitosa has on Tito, and while avoiding Tito with a left sidestep around the ring he forces referee Yves Lavigne down to the Matt with the force of his evasion!!!! That was freaking great.

Machida uses a flying scissor kick on Tito

In the third however Tito manages to clinch well and does some Randy Couture dirty boxing on Lyoto, which seems to take some stamina out of Lyoto. After more of the same, Lyoto catches Tito with a powerful knee to the midsection that drops Tito. Lyoto jumps in seeing the finish and gives it all into a pounding in Tito’s guard, but Tito survives and slips his legs up in an arm triangle over Machida! Seems Machida blew his wad a bit and let his guard down. As Machida rolls he manages to pull his arm out so that the elbow is at Tito’s groin, keeping him safe from the triangle attempt. He rolls out and Tito transitions to an armbar, but Machida’s arm is too low to be in any danger. Machida gets out easily but it puts a smudge no his otherwise perfect performance. Machida went for more chances than he usually does in R3 and it was not surprising that he would get caught in an attempt, despite being in little danger.

Liver shot with a knee drops Tito

End result is still a 30-27 decision for Machida and Tito is thoroughly embarassed, being completely unable to use his style at all. Machida knows though that it was a tough match and he did not walk all over Tito, the two show big respect for each other after the fight. War Machida!

Finally Sherk vs. BJ, I was expecting a totally different fight, but for some reason Sherk came in with arguably the worst gameplan he could have had. He apparently wanted to stand with BJ a bit and outstrike him before going for the takedowns. Presumably to soften up BJ’s legendary takedown defense.

Sherk attempts one takedown at the start of R1, which he wasn’t anywhere close to getting, BJ punishes him with a few punches and a knee and they get to what most of the 15 minutes of the fight will be: a kick boxing match. Sherk lands a few good leg kicks and his hands look good as they typically do, with fast punches and hooks. He lands a few however they seem to have no effect whatsoever on BJ, as Sherk’s standup is again suspect of being devoid of any power. BJ on the other hand tags Sherk over and over with his left jab and one two combos, and the round ends with Sherk’s face cut under the eye.

Round 2 is more of the same, with BJ consistently outpunching Sherk. Sherk gets in some good hooks and swings but once again BJ totally ignores them as if they were fly swatter slaps, and continues to do a number on Sherk’s face. This continues on to the third round, and Sherk does get one good flurry where BJ almost seems like he is rocked a bit, but BJ comes right back with punches and knees and proves that Sherk’s standup, while good-looking, is totally ineffective.

Round 3 ends with BJ pressuring Sherk back with his punch combos, BJ uses the same punch he used on Kaoru Uno almost a decade ago and forces Sherk back against the fence. As he does BJ senses an opportunity and runs in with a high knee which Sherk ducks right into after reeling from the fence. Sherk is blasted down and BJ follows up with two quick uppercuts to Sherk’s jaw, knocking him out. Mario Yamasaki moves in to stop the fight but as he does BJ continues to pound out Sherk’s face, and Yamasaki is seemingly stopped by BJ’s killing intensity. The bell rings and Yamasaki breaks them up. BJ thinks he’s won but Yamasaki hesitates again, BJ callst he fight “I win!” and Sherk looks on from the ground, unable to get up. BJ licks his gloves *again* and runs to Sherk’s corner, gets some blood from Sherk’s gloves and licks his hand again. BJ now officially has assimilated Sean Sherk’s strength, making him a double stronger fighter. If only he had managed to bloody Machida up he would have had Samurai Blood in him, too, but he missed his opportunity.

Yamasaki is won over by BJ’s bravado and calls the fight over. Sherk confesses he didn’t even hear the bell, he was clearly out and the fight should have ended sooner had Mario made the proper call earlier. BJ becomes undisputed UFC LW champion and shows that he is a few levels above Sherk in ability. Back to the drawing board for Sherk, and Rogan calls out GSP for BJ. Expect to see BJ move up to Welterweight soon.

In retrospect Sherk probably wishes he went for more takedowns, theoretically that would have tired BJ out sooner and that was Sherk’s plan coming into this fight. Even if BJ stuffed all of Sherk’s takedowns, he would have expended more energy than just standing up and boxing. It’s still highly unlikely that Sherk would have won with that gameplan, but I think it was a far better idea than standing with BJ. BJ has the best hands in the UFC LW division, the only people in the world who can compare are Takanori Gomi and possibly Nick Diaz. Sherk signed his death warrant by choosing to strike with BJ. It goes to show: if your only gameplan to win a fight is by out-cardio-ing your opponent, you don’t have much of a chance. BJ is way above Sherk and this fight proved it.

***

I did not get to see Clementi or Kim fight but I will check their fights later on.

Even without those fights though that was easily the best event of the year so far. We had some great events from Dream and Sengoku and a good few UFCs too but this easily tops all of them. This has been a great year for MMA and we still have the Affliction Banned card to look forward to in two months time. It’s a great time to be a fan and I hope we get to see many more great fights to come!

Rainbow Six Vegas II: the illustrious history of FAIL begins here

Holy Crap this had to be the single STUPIDEST Rainbow Six game ever made, hell the stupidest Tom Clancy game ever made, this was a freaking disgrace, a retarded pitiful excuse of a tactical combat game.

Let’s look at the glorious feature list:

• Enemy Spawning out of thin air directly within your line of sight! Sometimes right next to you!
• Stupid Enemy AI that never learns how to flank or otherwise take advantage of your blind side.
• Scripted Events that put you right in the middle of an ambush situation where enemies spawn right in the middle of thin air, higher ground, and otherwise ready to take potshots at you while simultaneously decapitating one of your squadmates automatically upon spawn!
• Lengthy Solo Flight mission to totally make you forget all manner of tactics and squad combat to ensure you go rambo on a Hundred terrorists all by your lonesome!
• Convenient ammo boxes found in plush condo units and casinos for no apparent reason!
• Final Boss Fight in puzzle format that must be tackled via trial and error to figure out what to do, loading and reloading over and over as necessary after you inevitably die until you figure out what you’re supposed to do!

I mean goddammit a FINAL BOSS FIGHT wtf is this a JRPG? There is something about Tactical Shooter games that Ubisoft needs to learn, before they royally screw up and turn all of Red Storm’s previous masterpieces into Doom 4. Tactical Squad games are based on SQUADS! Repeat after me, SQUAD COMBAT!!! SQUAD CONTROL!!! SQUAD TACTICS!!!! Not going around fucking Rambo mowing down terrorists by the dozens!

This game just had massive fail all over it. To celebrate how much fail this game was, let me post this commemorative Fail Pic:

The Samsung Blackjack

I have been walking around with an O2 Atom Exec for almost two years now. It was my second PocketPC phone and I really loved it for its compact size. PocketPCs are notorious for being huge brick slabs but the O2 Atom was perhaps the second PocketPC to really be small enough to pass off as a celphone as opposed to a miniature laptop (the first being the O2 Mini 2 aka the HTC Magician).

I ended up getting an O2 Atom Exec, which was basically a souped up Atom with a more elegant finish, but it had one major flaw: the battery life was not very good and the device got hot very fast when WiFi was turned on — this would burn the battery at a tremendous rate, which caused the said heating up. Other than that I was perfectly happy with the device, up until I got an iPod Touch. I am not saying that the Touch is a superior device to the O2 Atom Exec; the two are clearly different kinds of gadgets that fill different needs, however the glaring factor was in the physical make up of the two devices: The Atom Exec was a chunky 18mm in thickness. Two years ago this was great as many phones were in the 20mm range and certianly most PocketPCs were even bigger.

However in this new age where you have devices like the HTC Touch (which weighs in at 13.9mm) and the LG KS20 which is at a mindblowing 12.8mm — probably the thinnest PocketPC to date — the Atom Exec suddenly wasn’t feeling all that suave. Worse, when I got the iPod Touch which was a mere 8mm in thickness, let’s just say the Atom Exec started feeling fatter and fatter in my pant pocket.

And so began my search for a thinner phone. But I came across a bit of a quandary. I originally got into PocketPC phones because I needed a PDA that I could use to take notes on the go and otherwise manage my data in a device that I always kept with me. I said goodbye to conventional celphones a long time ago in favor of PocketPCs for this express purpose. This was the beginning of my trend towards convergence as I began to consolidate my gadgets into one do-it-all device, but this had problems as I posted in another part of this blog. Yet I have never regretted doing so, and I love my Atom Exec but I began to realize that now that I had an iPod Touch, the role of PDA may very well fall to the Touch instead of my phone.

As I had noted in another entry on this blog, the Touch does a great job of being a PDA (among other things) and being as thin and pocketable as it is, I always had it on me. There’s also something about the iPod allure that makes you always want to have it with you anyway, and it certainly doesn’t fail to disappoint as eye candy. So, did I really still need a PocketPC for my phone as a PDA?

On the other hand, I was feeling the need for more than just a candybar touchscreen tablet. The PocketPCs were always awesome phones in that they were really easy to use. The touchscreen made navigating them really easy, and perhaps most importantly Microsoft came up with a little gem called MS Voice Command which is probably the best thing to ever happen to a phone. With Voice Command, you could dial contacts, receive notifications on SMS and even use the phone as a DJ for your MP3 jukebox with nothing more than your voice. I fell in love with it. I use it all the time. There’s nothing like talking to your phone and having it do your bidding. It’s especially useful while driving where you don’t have time to look at your phone. Instead all I do is press a button and say, “Call So and So” and the phone responds promptly and sends the audio over to my bluetooth handsfree. Ah, this is mobile bliss.

But the PPCs that I had were all candy bar tablets with no keyboard! I found that this was not the ideal setup for writing text messages, and here in the Philippines SMS is the name of the game, we are known as the Text Messaging Capital of the world with phone company reports showing that we send the most text messages per person in the entire world. For text messaging, nothing beats a QWERTY keyboard in terms of speed and convenience. And I mean a real, hard keyboard, and not the soft keyboards you get on a touchscreen like I had on my PocketPCs and the Touch.

So I went and did a search and found that the Samsung i600, the international version of the Blackjack which was considerably popular in America, may just be what I needed. It was thin — 11mm, but had a full QWERTY keyboard and it ran on Windows Mobile 5. The catch was it wasn’t a touchscreen; it was running Windows Mobile 5 for Smartphone, rather than the PocketPC edition. In use all this meant was it wasn’t touchscreen, and seeing as I already had a Touch, the touchscreen was no longer a major concern. I could opt to get the i780 instead — which is basically the i600 but a little chunkier at about 13mm. But the main reason I got into replacing my Atom in the first place was because I wanted something thinner, no?

So I took the plunge a week ago and ended up getting a Samsung i600. Samsung is perhaps the world leader at making slim handhelds and the i600 was awesome. It was so thin and light, I could put it in my breastpocket without feeling weighed down like I did with the Atom Exec. This phone is actually lighter than the Atom, despite being a bit taller and wider. It was a lot thinner, though, and that’s exactly what I was after.

This is what I got upon opening the box:

And this is what the phone looks like (I attached a screen protector just to keep the screen mint and chewy):

All in all I am extremely happy with the device. I installed MS Voice Command and got to using with the same features as my Exec, and it has a QWERTY keyboard which is just awesome for text messaging. However, the problem is I really find myself longing for the touchscreen. The device is pretty user friendly but I find myself hitting the display with my finger a lot. It’s been a week since I got the i600 but years of using a touchscreen have left their mark.

The phone is also no longer suitable as a PDA. Whereas with my old PPCs you could easily bring up notepad and tasks and the calendar and navigate them with ease using the touchscreen, it is more of a chore to do so with the i600 and the phone is basically relegated to just that: being a phone, albeit with a kick-ass voice interface and an awesome QWERTY keyboard. But it no longer has the fluidity that my previous PPCs had as a PDA.

All in all though, it was a good bye. I traded in my Atom Exec, sold it to my best friend who really needed a phone. For the price I gave him, I was able to get this new phone just by adding a few hundred pesos, a pittance and I was able to upgrade to a new phone and experience a different kind of gadget. I love the phone though I am still somewhat on the fence after a week as to whether I should have gotten the Samsung i780 instead.

The i780 is chunkier and a bit heavier, but still thinner and lighter than the Atom Exec. But in overall size I’d say it’s quite bulkier than the Exec. Here is a comparison shot of it and the Samsung i320 from Mobile-Review.com (an excellent review site), which is more or less the little brother of my i600:

Have to say that the i780 is an awesome phone for such a cheap price. It’s like half the price of the typical HTC PocketPC, yet has all the features in a Blackberry formfactor. What’s there not to like? Aside from Samsung stubbornly refusing to use USB and sticking with proprietary connectors, I think the phone is a huge winner. The unusual 320×320 screen will pose some compatibility for some apps that are looking for a QVGA screen, but there are workarounds for it and most people won’t be using such apps anyway. At the price, the phone is a steal and I still mentally kick myself now for getting the i600 over it, but the i600 was about half the price and I basically got it for free trading in my Atom Exec. The i780 is probably the ultimate convergence gadget for me, but as the years have gone by I have found myself diverging from convergence and more back to specialized gadgets for specific needs.

Moving away from convergence, having a seperate PDA (the iPod Touch) and a seperate phone (the i600) made some sense although old habits die hard, I still long for the i780. Maybe eventually I will trade the i600 in for the i780 but for now it is doing great as the ultimate messaging device that it billed itself as, while my Touch is great for the ease of use as a PDA/MP3 Player/web browser.

Sensei I need a Doctor!

Some people on a board I frequent got into a Monster discussion and were wondering what exactly the difference is between a “doctor” and a “sensei.” The main character in the show “Monster” is a Japanese doctor who lives in Germany, and is alternately called Doctor or Sensei by different people.

A “doctor” is a title given to someone who studied the highest level of a particular science in a university (i.e. a doctorate). The most common usage is of course a doctor of medicine but there are doctors in chemistry, doctors in physics, literature, etc. I referred to my old professor in college as a doctor and he was “just” a literary teacher. He had a PhD in literature.

Just so you know, the real meaning of “doctor” is “teacher” and it was used to refer to the Church Fathers who taught religion to the masses. Doctor comes from Latin “docere” which means “to teach.”

A “sensei” is basically the same thing — a very learned person in a  particular science or skill. The common usage of the two terms is different in the two languages, but basically the two are words cut from the same cloth.

The word sensei comes from the word “sen” (predecessor) and “sei” (life) basically meaning someone who has experience and knowledge before you did in life. i.e. someone who is ahead of you in knowledge and experience, therefore qualified to teach you.

In the context of the show, this doesn’t really mean much. The main distinction is that one is a Western term and the other is an Eastern term.  There are differences in usage in different languages but basically the two mean the same thing.