FBI Most Wanted or Local Dive Bar?

I've spent plenty of time in the Lower East Side and the East Village, home of the hipster. Shaggy hair, grease-stained ratty clothing, tapered jeans, etc. I've seen them trying to appear as if they were from the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, and even the 90's. There are the hippies, the grungers, the punk-rockers, and the British-invaders. But we saw a new (and undesirable) hipster classification downtown last weekend: The child molester, complete with the pedo-smile and the big, slightly smokey coke-bottle glasses and everything. It is quite eery...

Rocking "The Look"

We couldn't stop laughing about this guy. We were hanging out and drinking jungle juice way, way downtown at Winnie's, which is borderline Chinatown and the Justice district, clearly in the middle of nowhere near the famous Five Points neighborhood. This place was quite interesting, complete with karaoke, drunk old Chinese guys who would occassionally sing a random song, old ladies in kimono's working the bar, a group of lesbians from England, a group of younger guys passed out on the tables from said jungle-juice, and hipsters dressed so awkwardly that they resembled child molesters :o/ . All in all, however, a great way to spend the evening after stuffing ourselves with Vietnamese food in nearby Chinatown.

This week has been low key due to training classes I've been taking for work, but that didn't stop me from checking out the Renzo Gracie Jiu Jitsu institute in midtown. After getting hooked on Pride FC Mixed-Martial Arts fights, I've been thinking about taking martial arts for a while so I figured I'd check out the infamous Gracie school. They had a free intro course so I headed there in my monkey suit after my training course. The first thing I see when I walk in are 10-feet-tall Brazilians with arm the size of my head. And they were all over the place. Just slightly intimidating.

I ended up being the only person in the intro course that day so I got some one-on-one lessons on take-downs and the reasons why Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is special, notably submission poses like choke-holds and how to put enough force on joints to destroy them, as demonstrated on me by my teacher. "Here's the knee. Here's the ACL, the patella, and here's how you snap it. You can even thrown in an achilles hold and break that in the same move." It was AWESOME! But they are pretty serious at this place and I'm not looking for commitment (well, to martial arts anyway ;o) at the moment so I think I'll just take a Jiu Jitsu self-defense class first and see if I really want to pony up $200 a month to train for the next Pride FC championship....

J. Riley, I now know two take-downs and how to knock someone out with a choke. Too bad I don't have little sisters nearby to practice on. Just kidding Summ, who is coming out in like a week :o/....