Hey All, Sly Stone and Brian Wilson were born just a few weeks apart, and departed in similar one-two fashion, earlier this month, at age 82. For boomer-age music lovers, it felt like a death in the family. The double blow in fact made the loss feel greater than the sum of the two parts—never mind the fact that both beat long odds to even reach seniority. Unless you're Paul McCartney, it is just ...
Hey All, The most-wrong moment in Encyclopedia of Surfing, ever, so far anyway, was the print version intro line for the "sandboarding" entry, and here you go: "Ancient Egyptians used planks made of pottery or wood to slide down sand dunes." My inner Dune-child still believes that archeologists will someday send word from Cairo that they have at last found clay fragments from what is clearly a Wh...
Hey All, A Sunday Joint will usually march off to quietly but proudly fall in with its EOS comrades. Another citizen-soldier in the Phalanx of Joints. But some will U-turn back to me, asking—nay, demanding—for an extension or coda or add-on of some kind. I will then bang a postscript into the next Joint. Or I will save a few up and fasten them together into a Rauschenberg-like Sunday Joint Combin...
Hey All, Filmmaker Jack McCoy died last week, at 76, after a few years of declining health. Just two days earlier he'd wrapped up a 13-city tour, showing his classic 2004 film Blue Horizon to packed houses from Perth to Nambour. Carl "Tinker" West, founder of Challenger Eastern Surfboards and Bruce Springsteen's original manager, also died last week, age 89. Derek Rielly and I shared a few thou...
Hey All, Beach culture connoisseur Murray Walding of Noosa reached out after last week's shock-doc Sunday Joint to remind me that former Aussie "It" girl and recent Joint headliner Tanya Binning had a cameo in Mondo Cane, the mother of all mondos, as a young teen lifesaver—very young, just 15—giving a mouth-to-mouth resuscitation demo to an "unconscious" man laying on the beach. (Click here, scro...
Hey All, My memory, as I knock softly on the door of my Methuselah years, has the vigor and speed of a potato-powered Game Boy. I have to tie a piece of string around my finger to remember why I tied string to my other finger. But the decay is patchy. Memory holes live side-by-side with something close to total recall. I have X-ray clarity, for example, that the word "mondo" came into our SoCal s...
Hey All, Clyde Aikau of Hawaii died last week, age 75, at home, from pancreatic cancer and heart disease, and while much of the coverage and commentary has been about Clyde himself, you didn't have to read far before getting to Eddie Aikau. Which makes sense. It is hard, maybe impossible, to unlink the two brothers—a notion that Clyde himself would no doubt approve of. Eddie, three years older, w...
Great subject line for today's Joint, and all I did was steal Ernest Hemingway's favorite barstool quote and change one word. "Mountaineering" was his actual third and final sport, of course, not "surfing"—which makes sense because what Hemingway valued above all things, apart from a pitcher of daiquiris and an open tab, was the lurking specter of danger and death. Surfing was never going to fit t...
Hey All, Three people got back to me about Kathy LaCroix, mysterious star of last week's Joint. Rusty Miller checked in from Byron Bay, just minutes after the Joint posted, to say that he and Kathy "had some surfs together somewhere, sometime," and that she was "an amazing and intriguing person" and "a beautiful spirit." A lovely memory, if low on detail. Fair enough, Rusty and Kathy met at the 1...
Hey All, If I've learned anything from the first two Knives Out movies (next one due in Fall), it is that I prefer my detective mysteries with a twist of dry humor, and Daniel Craig is the Chubby Checker of dry sleuthing. If I've learned anything else from the first two Knives Out movies (both excellent but the sequel is funnier) it is that mystery begets mystery, which brings us to the business...