Rantings by Nick Buraglio

’nuff said.

I went about 6 weeks without a haircut for the first time in about 10 years…I also had somewhat of a hobo beard.
You be the judge.

Several people have mentioned triathlons to me in the last 2 weeks, which has me thinking…..could my injury riddled body, damaged from years of skateboarding, distance running, boxing and submission wrestling handle another triathlon?
I have not participated in one since 2006, and really not trained properly for one since 2005…..I have also not run any event runs or races since 2007 (or run at all since 2007 due to my very beat-to-hell back). Could I participate, perhaps not quite as competitively, in something like a sprint tri?
I should be able to train very little and still have no issues with something like a sprint….at least in my mind. The last event run I ran I did without training at all and finished respectably.

My limitations are annoying me lately. No more boxing. No more running. No more skateboarding.
Maybe I lived too hard, was too hard on my back and knees….who knows. I guess maybe I used up all of my “activity capital” when I was younger.
I did get the ol skateboard out the other morning and kicked around, just to prove that I could still at least do a few tricks cold. It was also a decent excuse for messing with iMovie 09. Here are the results:

My back didn’t hurt too bad when I was done. I may try and do the local sprint tri this year. It’s short enough and easy enough that I can probably do it with minimal prep and and it may just satisfy my need to prove to myself that I’m not totally falling apart.

Set to Minor Threat’s “Filler”, some of the church dancers have surprisingly similar dance styles to hardcore.

Courtesy of the one and only Sean Holland.

I never thought I’d be on a boat….

Hilarious…..no other words….

While rooting through a box in my basement, I came across something that I had no idea I still had. It was my very first watch, a cat-in-the-hat winder. I remember receiving this little treasure as a gift for xmas, probably around 1980. I was really young so memories are a little hazy, but I do remember wearing it proudly to grade school on it’s black leather band (now lost). I pulled this thing out of that box and it was like a blast from the past. Now that I have a 7 week old son, I find myself thinking about stuff I never, ever thought I’d spend mental cycles on, what kinds of things will he remember when he is my age? Will he save everything like I apparently did?
Amazingly enough, this watch still works. It’s a hand winder with some kind of a swiss movement. On the case back it reads:

Lafayette Watch Co
Swiss Made
Base Metal
26002

The “crystal” appears to be some kind of hard plastic and it’s fairly scuffed but it actually keeps decent time. My mother could not believe that I still had it.

Now, if I could only find a replacement for my first digital watch.

This is the only reference I have ever seen to one of these. It was probably my all time favorite watch, I remember when it stopped working. I was pretty bummed. Mine was black and I remember receiving it as well. Great memories.

Lately I’ve been going through old boxes of stuff, organizing and cleaning up. I never really packed well, or unpacked some of the stuff from when before I was married, with many things just thrown in boxes with reckless abandon. In rifling through the ill-packaged containers of my junk, I’ve happened across some treasures. Here are some examples:

I’ve also found things like the glass and keychain from my senior prom as well as the dried corsage. I still have yet to find my nearly never worn Limited edition Star Wars fossil watch that Rebecca bought me in 1996. I know it’s down there somewhere.

Anyone that knows me knows that I love T-Shirts. They’ve been pretty much the only thing I have worn for the bulk of my life, much to my mother and wife’s dismay. That said, there are a lot of shirt ideas that I’ve had in the past but I’ve never had any mechanism for making them. Often it’s not economical for local print shops to make just 1 or 2 shirts from a design, so a consumer needs to order them in bulk, making it not economical for the consumer. Enter the internet. There are so many ways to get this done now, from Custom Ink.com, to Zazzle and Cafe Press to Spreadshirt there are a myriad of ways to get a shirt made.
I opted to put most of my stuff on Spreadshirt so that anyone can buy a shirt that I thought was cool enough to make. I’ve added a link to the “shop” at the top of the page for anyone that wants to look.
This brings me to my newest shirt, the “Mac from It’s always Sunny in Philadelphia RIOT shirt“.
I didn’t find an “official” one so I decided to make one. It also has a small barcode of “RIOT” on the bottom of the back of the shirt, just for an added touch. There were a few others out there but I preferfed a different font (even if it wasn’t exact).

Image manipulation via either Photoshop, Gimp, or whatever is a wonderful tool and can provide hours of entertainment. In keeping with the skateboarding theme of the last few days, I decided to mess a little with some of the images and came up with this:

Reminiscent of the old do-it-yourself style that was so common in early skateboarding, I just had to have this image from the archives on a some sort of apparel.
Through the magic and wonder that is the internet, I had nearly instant gratification. A Short Sleeved T- Shirt, a long sleeved T-Shirt, and even the always stylish hooded sweatshirt. Now you can show your colors if you were a Clinton or Wapella, Illinois skateboarder from the early days.

Many know that I was, and still am, a huge fan of skateboarding. I started around age 12 (1987), while in Jr. High and continued through college up through probably 4-5 years ago.
Being from a smaller Midwestern town there is not a lot to do, and not a terribly large amount of outside culture. Magazines are something that we’d read to get updated on the newest tricks, what was new, who rode for what team, etc. There was no internet, and videos were often too expensive for most of us. Being the industrious bunch we were we tried to make our own skate ‘zine (several, actually), without the help of a computer, scanner, digital camera or any experience whatsoever. Well, I had totally forgotten about the very first one, titled “Cold Locals” circa 1988-1989 until I happened across it while looking for something completely different in a box from my parents house that I had never looked in. In there were a bunch of old skate pictures from the late 1980’s up through probably 1991 or 1992. Since I cherish these pictures (yes, the tricks are a little dated as are the clothes) so I thought I’d post a few on here along with scans of the very first (and only) issue of “Cold Locals”.

Cold Locals were:
Nick Buraglio
BJ Obermeyer
Gabe Stith
for reasons that I don’t remember Ryan Holt wasn’t in this issue but was a major part of our skate crew back then.