The other day we had our first official photo shoot.  Very exciting.  We were doing it for the Arizona Republic for a story this guy wrote about how we're famous now because of YouTube (look for it on October 2nd, or 3rd or something).  It turned out to be a two or three hour ordeal fraught with strange, embarrassing and sometimes painful positions and one unexpected visitor. 

For the first part of the shoot the photographer decided to take us to the "greenbelt" which is this strip of park that runs along Scottsdale Road that has little lakes and paths and junk for a couple miles.  These were the directions that he gave us for our first pose:

"OK.  So Mat, you stand here and look off in the horizon at the sun.  Then Daniel and Jessie, if you guys could stand on either side of him . . . there you go.  Now tilt back your heads on his shoulders . . . That's it.  Look over here . . . Now you two say 'Ya ha!' . . . Perfect."

Now, before I go any further I should say that our photographer for the evening was named Scott and he seemed like a real nice guy.  Good intentions and everything.  And he may be a really good photographer.  In fact the next few things that we tried actually seemed pretty normal.  And then he gave us some more directions:

"OK, let's see.  How about Mat, you walk down this path here.  And then Jessie, you walk in front of him and Daniel, you walk behind him.  Mat, you should have your hands in your pockets and look cool . . . and you two . . . how about we have you jump up in the air at the same time and then give me a big 'Ya ha!'" 

Daniel was real excited about this one.  I was not.  I thought Jess was going to die (it should be noted that she was a real good sport through the whole thing.)  After some pep talks ("Come on guys, we can do this . . .") and a lot of head shaking we went for it.  We would walk in a line about six or seven (ha) steps and then Scott would say "GO!" and Jess and Daniel would jump up in the air and say "Ya ha!" and I would try to look cool.  Needless to say, we required a few attempts to get the timing right.  About the third try after we started walking I hear a voice behind us:

"Hey Daniel!"

"Dad?"

"GO!"

So at the exact time that he should have, Scott took the picture, while Daniel jumped in the air and Daniel's dad Dave happened to be taking a bike ride through the greenbelt on the path that we were using to take a photo for the biggest newspaper in the state.  He didn't even stop.  Not to say hi, not to keep out of the shot, not to ask what in the world we were doing there.  He just rode right by and yelled, "Dad's gonna be in the shot! Take it riiiiiiiight NOW!!"  And he did.  Scott took the shot right as Dave passed by on his bike.  Unbelievable. 

But you know, it really didn't surprise us all that much.  I guess you have to know Dave.  He's pretty serious about his exercise.

- Mat

Just a quick note on my lunch break to let everyone know that we're on the front page of spin.com.  Here's the link to the article:

http://www.spin.com/features/heythisisawesome/2006/08/060821_obadiahparker/

- Mat

For those of you who dont know, our friend Brian posted a video of me playing a cover of Outkasts Hey Ya on YouTube.com.  You can see it here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=1ioKEDgnfs8.  Well that video has been up for over a month and last week about 2,400 people had visited that page.  Right now there have been 54,760 views and its going up every day.  The video has been on Fark.com as well as I-am-bored.com as well as some site in Sweden that apparently is pretty popular.  Weve sold about 40 or so CDs online (which is about 40 something more than we sold ever) and lots of people have been emailing us and saying nice things.

First of all, thanks to everyone that has looked us up enough to read this or left some kind of nice comment (actually, not-so-nice comments are fun to read too, but I'm assuming that those people aren't reading this).  Special thanks to those of you who bought our CD or a T-Shirt, I hope you all have someone that to give you high fives when you need them, because you deserve it. 

So, apparently some guys that run a radio show down on KFMA 92.1 & 101.3 in Tucson got a hold of the video and started playing it on the show.  They called me today and asked me to do an interview tomorrow.  I said yes.  Pretty crazy.  They do have a live stream from the internet that you can go to here: http://www.kfma.com/index_after.php.  Tune in tomorrow at about 7:20am (Arizona time) to hear the interview and well let you know if we can get a recording of it somehow. 

Crazy things are happening.  Don't know what it will lead to, but it is a lot of fun to read people on the internet saying things about you like this:

"Does anyone else want to start ripping their ears off at the mere mention of this song? Maybe that's just me." - Timicus

"Stupid." - Enohead

- Mat