Hey All, It happens all the time. You toss off a pop-culture reference, all casual, hoping to ride the zephyr of cool, and it turns around like a Boeing-designed paper plane and jabs you in the eye. Maybe you’re a beat late (Yeah Baby! worked in ’98, not ’99). Or maybe, sadly, the reference itself no longer has an audience. “Kilroy Was Here” won’t play anywhere in 2020 except retirement homes and...
Hey All, My brother asked yesterday how much more I’m drinking since quarantine began, and when I said, “Same as before,” he was skeptical. But it’s true. One plus-sized Manhattan, shaken at 5:58 while the missus sets up the Scrabble board, then raised in a toast at 6:00. My drink has not grown in size since lockdown began. Then again, I pour with a heavy hand. For the past year or so, surface te...
Hey All, SURFER POLL ’63 is the opposite of COVID-19. Scientists are too busy at the moment to lab-test this idea and move it from hypothesis to fact, but I mean come on. Look at the pictures here. Look at all that sweaty social contact. Look at those worry-free faces. Imagine the number of hands shaken, and all the shouted spittle-flecked close-quarter conversations. Think of hundreds of the sha...
Hey All, If you are uninfected and still employed and more or less getting on with it as if you were a 59-year-old man grounded until further notice by your 91-year-old father (my Dad is home reading The Godfather and Proust and day-drinking Bombay Sapphire), your thoughts are likely rocketing with great fury and no real purpose in every direction, high and low, near and far, existential to nugat...
Hey All, Because I came to fatherhood late, and because the decades prior had been so incredibly full and fortunate, and because I lean optimist but can veer hard pessimist, I often thought during my wife's pregnancy that the birth of our child would be the last huge good thing in my life. In other words: marriage, career accomplishment, first board, best wave, 485-point Scrabble score, and my th...
Hey All, Nothing like an open-ended global pandemic with vertical exponential growth paired with looming economic catastrophe to make a surf-website CEO feel small and meaningless. Or so I thought after hitting “send” on last week’s Joint. But I’m beginning to come around. For starters, EOS over the past seven days had zero canceled subscriptions and 17 new sign-ups (three cancels and eight signu...
Hey All, Yesterday’s COVID-related EOS post begins like this: “Let’s take the positive view and say that humans will not only survive another hundred years but that our future selves will have enough food, shelter and free time to continue sifting our collective historical past, and that one of these sifters will develop an interest in surfing.” And somehow ends up here: I will continue to pull...
Hey All, Rare is the offhand remark that can both affront and amuse. But people, it happened to me just two days ago. After posting Linda Benson’s long-lost 1971 GAF View-Master reel, I spread the word, as we must, on social media. Within minutes, up pops a comment from longtime EOS supporter Aviva Rosenthal: “WTF is she wearing? It’s like a Mormon’s idea of frivolous underwear.” That second bit ...
Hey All, Everything I learned about Ron Drummond last week bumped him further up the EOS Extravagant Surf Character Power Rankings, and at this point Drummond is a hard #2, just a few paces behind Mad Jack Churchill. My fellow American surf geezers recall Drummond as the original alternative-craft maestro whose canoe forays at Dana Point were both inspiring and terrifying. (Watch this new clip: ...
Hey All, The Duke Kanahamoku contest ran for 20 years, starting in 1965 and ending in 1984. During the ’80s it was sort of a B-grade event, and throughout the ’70s it was very hit or miss. But from ’65 to ’69, the Duke was competitive surfing’s big enchilada—or whatever sized enchilada is right below the World Championships. Or no, let’s say the Duke was the big enchilada and the World Championsh...