America, you look better and better every year.

In your honor, I will eat grilled meat and blow a bunch of stuff up.

Oh and the ol’ blog turns 3 today… made it out of the terrible two’s with barely a scratch.  How about that.  Take a trip down memory lane:
July 06
July 07

In what appears to be a hole in the space time continuum, Nike is going to release a shoe inspired by the greatest sequel of all time - that’s right Godfather and Rocky fans…. Back to the Future II.  Go ahead, I dare you to try to dispute that.

The McFly, as I’m calling it, or the Nike Hyperdunk as they’re calling it, is however missing one key factor - the powered laces.

Here’s hoping they get that figured out soon.  Because ultimately we all know what this really means - we’re one step closer to the Hoverboard.  Inventors of the world, consider this a warning - you’d better get on it.

In related news of my childhood, The Rock-afire Explosion is back together again.  I’m telling you, you just can’t keep a good thing down… cream always rises to the top.

Apparently June has become my unofficial month of blog vacation… the internet equivalent to sunburn and slip n’ slides. But good news is around the corner. July starts Tuesday.  And being that July is the greatest month in the calendar year, there is never a better time to get back to blogging.  But that’s Tuesday. And today is only Saturday.  So here’s a few things to hold you over until then.

1. Watch this commercial from an insurance company in WA.
Take that crappy local commercials.

2. Go listen to Sigur Ros’ new record, Med sud I eyerum vid spilum endalaust.  Yeah, it’s amazing. Yeah, that’s really what it’s called.  No, you shouldn’t try to say it, you’ll just feel silly.

3. Go find some cash so you can buy the new Elevation Worship album, We Are Alive, on July 6. If you’re short on cash, hit this guy up.

4. Visit my roommate Josh’s blog.  He’s just getting started after a year hiatus.  Show him some love.

5. Go play Magic Pen.  And get ready to waste the next 2 hours.  Call Larry at the Magic Pen Hotline if you get stumped. Or just go play Bloody Penguin Baseball instead.

There. That should do it. See you Tuesday.

Oh hello there.  Yeah, I know, I’ve been a little neglectful slash busy recently - getting ahead on work before going out of town, going out town, getting back and catching up from going out of town… you know how it goes - same song, different verse.  But I’m finally back to a point where I have time to catch up on the old bloggity-blog.  So like I said a little earlier, I was up in Virginia at Rockbridge with some of my Young Life fellas. Check out some choice hot pics…

Northwestern Young Life - lookin’ oh so good.

Sock Hop Night

Volleyball Tourney

Me and Javon

Those weeks are YL summer camp are altogether the most refreshing and tiring weeks of my life.  I freakin’ love it.  Young Life reaches kids where there at - at all their awkward points of high school, full of girls and mistakes and peer pressure and sports and parents and everything that pulls for their attention and desires.  It puts the gospel in a beautiful place that leaves denominations and disagreements and the whole religion aspect of Christianity at the door, presenting Jesus as the loving, just, forgiving Savior He is - all in the face of our sinful separation from God.  And it does it in a place that gives them a chance to be kids again. It makes it all worth being a Young Life leader - watching your friends wrestle with this new way to see a loving Jesus beyond the Bible belt. It’s just plain awesome. They really are some of the best weeks of my life. Plus its a great place to set that tan base for the summer. Yeah dog..

A friend of mine named his design company Stunt Double. It’s so clever! He’s a designer and he makes the client look good, just like a stunt double does. He’s a genius!

Again, another idea I wish I came up with.

Here are the top 5 ideas I wish I would’ve thought of…but I didn’t:

5. YouTube. Give people a place to talk about themselves (because everyone loves to do it whether they like it or not), leverage technological advancements and cash in at the same time. Genius.

4. The rubber playground ball (the kind you play kickball with). So many uses, so simple. Genius.

3. This logo design for a construction company. It’s such a creative use of space and it’s simple. I think the guy is German, not really sure. I stumbled across it a few weeks ago and instantly loved everything about it. Genius.

2. The backscratcher shaped like a little hand. Cute and functional…like Ewoks. Genius.

1. Fish Tacos. Someone, somewhere thought it would be a great idea to mix tacos with fish and…the fish taco. One of my fav foods of all time. Thank you fish taco man. Super genius.

-LH, Sworth’s stunt double for the week

well, what better way to follow up two weeks worth of weak blogging than to take a week off? that’s right folks, the bird has flown the cuckoo nest.  I’m leaving tonight to take some of my friends to Young Life camp in Rockbridge, VA for the next week.  Pray for us while we’re gone if you think about… and see you in a few days.

PS my sister is in China right now hiking with some friends, and she tells me that the Commi’s have blocked my blog.  Now that’s what I’m talking about.

There are way too many reasons for me to list why my job is better than your job (unless you are one of these or host a show like this) - but one of them is people I get to spend the working hours with - especially that Chris Brown fella (no, not that one). Yesterday he and Caleb played me like fiddle, resulting in this picture:

Zing. Read about my alleged “friends” here.

and while I’m still in the planning phase of Death Strike ‘08: Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Cold, I documented the opening act here. Enjoy.

Man, I love my job.

It’s been a blog-less week thus far do to a shortened work week, followed by an off-site staff meeting, all while trying to finish up one of favorite projects ever as well as all the design work for June. I don’t have time to get into why I’m doing all my June work in a 3 day work week, but I will later. How’s that for blog bait?

At any rate, since I haven’t had time to write much, I figured I’d give you something to watch to hold you over until the weekend. Unless you live in the woods or you’ve been in Panama on vacation, you’ve probably seen the new Apple/Coldplay commercial… which has quickly risen in the ranks to one of my all-time favorite commercials, if for nothing else that it being pure eye-candy. Plus, it features the song I talked about here - a deadly one/two punch. Watch in now… then wipe the drool off your shirt.

And after seeing that, it made me think of 2 other commercials I’ve seen recently that have cemented my faith in the beauty of creativity and execution, both in very different ways.

Honda filmed this commercial with no computer animation. It took them over 600 attempts over several weeks. Physics has never looked so good.

and in a follow-up to my favorite commercial of all-time (this actually may be a spin-off… I’m a little unsure of the terminology here…) Sony delivers another surreal ad for Japanese electronics that makes me want to simultaneously love life and buy a camera.

I haven’t made my decision yet for who I’m going to vote for come November, but I do know one thing - if Barack Obama doesn’t win the presidency, he should go into marketing. As someone who went to school for it, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on good marketing and creative strategies - and as I’ve said before, if you can’t sell yourself, you shouldn’t sell anything. And never before have I seen a candidate on any level market themselves so elegantly, thoroughly and cohesively, operating almost like a high-end consumer brand. Even his logo blazes new trails in campaign design - his ‘O’ logo is the Nike Swoosh of American politics.

And whether or not Obama himself is actually coming up with his own marketing tactics, he also is at the top of his class with guerrilla campaign advertising. Now I’m not talking about “reaching out to the kids” by making an appearance on the Daily Show or bantering with David Letterman or showing up on SNL for some self-inflicted humor. These are all great, but they are all first person. The real strength of this new marketing comes not from you directly, but from those who support you. And its working for Obama primarily for this reason: he’s been able to get people with voices in the creative community to not only rally around him, but use their talents to further his cause. And no, I’m not talking about Obama Girl.

Case in point - Designer Shepherd Fairey of OBEY/Giant fame recently designed a limited edition poster for Obama, that sold so well that it’s currently out of stock in the Obama online store and is selling on e-bay for rockstar prices.

Fairey is leading the way for a whole design community, bent on creating new and compelling Obama imagery ranging from posters to t-shirts to buttons…



Major League Baseball even had to get involved by shutting down a designer who was selling Obama t-shirts designed after baseball team logos.

Follow all of that with a music video based solely on an Obama speech, and crammed with celebrities ranging from Scarlett Johansson to Herbie Hancock to Kareem Adbul-Jabbar, helmed by artist will.i.am, and the case can be made that Obama has become a larger-than-life figure and leader for young Americans who turn to MTV more than CNN.

And for the icing on the cake, how do you know when you’ve made it? When someone takes the time to craft a well orchestrated spoof of said well-known music video (caution sharp blog subject turn ahead…)

I present to you Cobra Nation.

That’s right folks - GI Joe is back. And better than ever. And they’re harnessing all the new media outlets. You can even follow Cobra Commander and General Hawk on Twitter. And their new rise will culminate in 2009 with the release of their new, live action movie. Let’s hope it’s more like this, and less like this.

In a related story, my boss recently captured a Cobra snake who had been taking refuge in his home. Read about it here.

I’ve never been accused of being overly environmental - if I ever buy a hybrid, it’ll be for the gas mileage, not the carbon footprint. However I do care about Africa, and the poverty, disease and injustice there. It’s one of the reasons I support causes like DATA, Compassion International and Save Darfur. But if you can’t give people water first, then all the other stuff sort of becomes irrelevant. Which is where my concern for Africa overlaps an environmental issue. One in five people in the world do not have safe drinking water. That’s over a billion people. That’s a lot. And many of the worlds diseases are waterborne illnesses. Diseases like typhoid, dysentery, salmonella, diphtheria, E. coli, or cholera - you know, the good stuff. But how do you fix water? It’s not like you can just put money into until it cleans itself.

But I recently heard about two things currently being developed that would radically change the way the world sees its water.

The LifeStraw®

A personal water filter that lasts for a year, kills 99% of bacteria, and only costs $3 - or the amount you spent on coffee this morning. The mind-blow to this is that most of the people who could use this, can’t afford it.

The Slingshot

Dean Kamen, the guy who invented the Segway, is putting his smarts to more noble causes this days, as he develops a new water purifier (or a vapor compression distiller for people with big brains…) called the Slingshot that could purify over 1000 liters of water in a day and in turn wipe out 50% of the world’s disease. Pretty amazing stuff. Colbert interviewed him a few weeks back. Check it out here.

Neither one of these is ready for mass production, but does provide some sweet hope for the future. That’s all for the this public service announcement - we now join your regularly scheduled blogging currently in progress.