Mondo Fest 2007

Mondo Fest was really weird this year.  Normally the yo-yoers don’t really fit in very well, but there are usually enough of us to stay interested.  Since there was not a contest this year we did not get many of the yo-yoing regulars even from around the area like Alex, John, and Kevin.  But we did have Dave come up from Iowa and we got to hang out with Scott and Andy for the first time since they moved to Minnesota.  And of course Doctor Popular was there.  Mondo also was severely lacking anything interesting to look at.  It seemed like there was a fraction of the amount of people in the gym practicing club juggling or anything else remotely interesting and that really bummed me out.   And the show was pretty bad too… I guess it was good compared to previous years but I always compare it to Mad Fest and by comparison Mondo sucks.  Jeff Kasper was the MC for the first time this year and despite all his talent he did not do a very good job.  My favorite parts of the show were the Amazing Ned who did a fantastic paper juggling performances and Mark Hayward who did a routine I have  seen a half dozen times but Mark makes it entertaining every single time and I think this was the best show I have ever seen Mark do, so kudos for that my friend.

My favorite part of the weekend was photographing stuff.  I did two things this weekend that I have never done, first I photographed in the gym without using a flash (see first image above) and the second thing was I used a flash but I didn’t attach it to the camera, so I held it above my head (see picture at left of Mark).  And I created two of the  coolest pictures I have ever taken doing that (see two photos referenced).

Notice the picture of Mark?  His shirt says “Rastelli is the innovator of russian technique”.  It’s a Jay Gilligan shirt and it is historically accurate, you can tell your friends that you learned something today on Schalicto.com.

To end the weekend most of the yo-yoers came over to my house and we had a nice little fire outback.  We sat around and cooked hot dogs and shot each other with air soft pellets until the night grew late.  It was by far my favorite part of the weekend so I’d like to thank my friends who came over for making an awesome weekend out of a very weak Mondo Fest. 

On a final note I did turn commenting back on at floor42online.com (my online photo album) but I did install a captcha plugin so all you’ll have to do to comment is type in the matching letters so the website will very you as being an honest to God human.

Cheers.

-Josh