video blog

It's the week of UFC 106, but coming off a trip across the pond for last weekend's show, Dana White doesn't feel like he has enough material for a new video blog.  Fortunately for him, his personal videographer never uploaded the fight night footage from UFC 104 in Los Angeles, so why not just put that on the internet and call it good?  Things are going smoothly at first.  DW presses the flesh with some celebrities, talks to some fighters in the locker rooms, passes by ace interviewer and hopelessly unfashionable friend of the Potato Ariel Helwani (is that a flannel shirt? is it 1994?) at the 5:15 mark.  But when he watches refereee Steve Mazzagatti's oddly-timed stoppage in the Cain Velasquez-Ben Rothwell fight, that's when White loses his cool just a bit.

"Mazzagatti will fuck up any fight," White says directly into the camera.  "The worst referee in the history of fighting.  Period.  I don't care if there was a fight back in the old days, okay, the Stone Age.  Mazzagatti is the worst referee ever.  The guy has no business watching mixed martial arts, let alone refereeing it."

White then visited both Velasquez and Rothwell to make sure they both knew what a terrible referee Mazzagatti was, and after that he presumably called Mazzagatti's children to let them know that their father is a failure.  That part must have been edited out.

Well, they're back.  UFC president Dana White may say that he's done doing video blogs from time to time, but who's he kidding, the siren's song of talking into a camera is impossible to resist for very long.  In this edition, DW travels to Mesquite, Nevada to watch his cousin lose a fight (though we don't get to see exactly how he loses, which is weird).  After that he heads to Los Angeles to give away some UFC 104 tickets with the help of Twitter, which, to hear Dana tell it, is the most magical invention of the last fifty years.  Don't get us wrong, we use it too, but does he realize that it's basically just Facebook status updates without any of the other perks?

After the jump, a preview of the UFC 104 "Countdown" show, including Lyoto Machida's hero's welcome in Brazil after winning the light heavyweight strap.  What do you want to bet that Rashad Evans did not get the same response when he won it?

Everybody wants to video blog these days.  From Dana White to the hipster grifter, people all over the world have awakened to the power of pointing a camera at their own face while they do/say things.  But dammit, there is a right way and a wrong way to do this.  What you see B.J. Penn doing up there is the wrong way.  Why?  Because he's just standing in front of the camera with the ocean as his background, talking for a minute and a half.  Again we hear about Marv Marinovich's revolutionary training methods, and again we see none of it. 

Here's the question you have to ask yourself when you video blog: am I doing anything here that could not be done in a really long voicemail message?  If the answer is no, it's time to rethink your approach.  If the answer is yes, but only because you go on for way too long, then you are Mark Pavelich.  You'll see what I mean after the jump.

(Props: MMA Fanhouse)

With Dana slowly transitioning out of his web presence, the UFC is getting into an event-specific rotation for their video blogs. Last time we had Chuck Liddell letting us see the days leading up to his retirement, and now we've got Matt Serra giving us an impromptu episode of UFC Cribs. (Livin' lawge, Matty!) Later, Serra stops by the gym, mainly just to mock Ray "The Hoarder" Longo. Many laughs are had, many balls are busted.

CageWriter brings us this video of UFC 97's headliners weighing in yesterday in Montreal. Anderson Silva established his dominance during the face-off, coming so close to Thales Leites that the challenger had to take a step backwards (3:45 mark); he's lucky the Spider didn't give him two for flinching. Don't forget to come back to CagePotato.com tonight as we liveblog the action beginning at 10 p.m. ET / 7 p.m. PT.

Below: Yesterday's edition of Dana White's video blog, in which DW finally loses his UFC Undisputed championship title to Georges St. Pierre ("I think there was Vaseline on the controller"), hangs some more with his Army vet buddy, and gives his fighters the traditional F-bomb-laced pep talk.