Hey All, Last week’s hot curl exploration began with high surf-history purpose. The Depression Age design breakthrough got its long-overdue EOS page. Hot curl inventor John Kelly describes the board’s origin story. Froiseth, Downing, Kekai, and Quigg all chip in, and surf historian Mark Fragale wraps things up here. No doubt, the hot curl is a bright red chisel-tip Sharpie moment on our board de...
Hey All, My two musical connections to Tom Curren are as follows. First, my lifelong best pal friend Marc Theodore (handsome fellow in the glasses, lower right, below), for Christmas 1986, bought me Otis Redding Live on VHS—an import, no less, because that’s the kind of friend Marc was and still is. I cherished that tape right up to the day, eight or ten months later, when I lent it to Curren (to...
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 ...