First up, the first hoop trick to make it into my tech blog! My friend Katie/Surprise showed my a funky isolation trick that I dug that seemed to have this odd stopping point. Remembering some bits learned from a recent Hoop Path workshop, I realized a body can keep the hoop constantly in motion by jumping one's grip. The demo here is terrible--it's with my old hoop, which weighs a ton. Nonetheless, I swear this one is doable (incidentally, if any hoopers out there know what it's called, please drop a line in my comment box).

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By popular demand: a follow-up to my last hoop tutorial, this time on the horizontal equivalent of the cateye pattern I demoed last time. It breaks down in a very similar fashion to the vertical, but requires a bit more wrist strength at a couple intervals. I've also included a brief discussion on how you can use both vertical and horizontal cateyes in conjunction with isolations and extensions to flow between tricks. This is a variation on Alien Jon's unit circle theory. For more info on this, visit his YouTube channel. Enjoy! :)

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On world hoop day, I found myself teaching a large crowd of hoopers how to do a move that's called a cateye in poi. Here's a to-do for it being as how I haven't seen another video tutorial out there for it. To see this move in action, check out videos by Rainbow Michael or Sean Stogner.

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Over the weekend I bid a fond farewell to two of my favorite people in the world: Tash Kouri and Sean Stogner. They've been keeping the firespinning community going in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn for the past four years as they've been finishing up college in between starting a hoop performance troop called the Gyronauts and doing more gigs than I can count.

A sample of the craziness of the circle at Firedrums 2009 in the circle Saturday night. Seriously, there was so much damn fire the safeties must've been going crazy. Cyrille is spinning just to the left of center about midway back, but I don't recognize any of the other spinners in this vid. If you do, let me know and I'll add them to the tags. Seriously, down in front, motherf$%ker!

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New Year's Day! We celebrate by going to the park and spinning toys in negative-degree weather.

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Tash Kouri doing a fire hoop routine at a New Year's Eve party at Taboo in Brooklyn.

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