Winter Surfing :: Long Beach , NY

Tuesday morning I was woken up by a dream. While putting on my 5/4/3 winter wetsuit for the first time, I found out that Jake had forgotten the gloves and booties he promissed to lend me. I started smacking him around and told him that he'd done it on purpose. Two hours later as we pulled into the parking lot, he told me that he too had the exact same dream one month earlier when Chris Gentile took him surfing in NY for his first winter session.
I had pretty much been a hater on cold water surfing. I had dealt with Santa Cruz 4/3 with booties which was fine but I thought to myself, "It's going to have to be at least 4ft with light offshore winds for me to pop my cold water cherry." Truth be told it was kinda anti-climatic. I paddled out into waist high clean surf, and the only thing remotely uncomfortable was that my face stung when I duck dove. The highlight of the whole session were the two girls that pulled up in their little Red Bull car asking us if we wanted some Red Bulls. I guess we did look like a couple of extreme dudes all buff in our winter surfing gear.

Get Your Burger Out

I thought I was obsessed with with cheeseburgers (distant 2nd to burritos), but you don't see me incorporating it into my daily attire. I guess it is too cold in NYC to be rocking one of these burger-rific dresses. I'll bet you a cheeseburger that I'll spot a couple come spring time and it'll be in Williamsburg worn by a Vegan. Can you begin to fathom the irony behind that?

Barc"th"elona

I started out my day long journey to Barcelona with a 5:30 cab ride to Heathrow and ended it with a kind Catalan gentleman telling me "Tienes que volver." "you have to come back." A trade show and a meeting with one of the founders of my favorite Basque line Loreak Mendian planted me in Barcelona for the day.

The MapThe StoreI managed to break free of my meetings and the trade show by 16:30 which left me just enough time to figure out the metro and manage to get lost somewhere in the vicinity of the Loreak Mendian store. I kept showing the locals the snap shot of the map I had on my blackberry, and every time without fail I received a "dalle" and then was told that they thought it was that way. ps: Barcelonans are the nicest people to ask for directions in the world. I think my Spanish might have taken them a little off guard by being a little too formal and a little too casual. Think of someone starting a conversation off with a "Excuse me sir" and then ending it with a "Thanks Bro you're the man." I even received a few kind pats on the back. After an hour of being lost I feared the only thing worse than the defeat of not finding the shop, which would be missing my flight, thus I hailed a cab to the airport.

Tip Top TapasMy only expectations after finishing up my meetings was to go and buy shirt from the Loreak Mendian store and enjoy some genuine tapas. What I settled for was getting lost for an hour and over priced tapas from a place called Tip Top Tapas at the Barcelona airport.

Panic on the streets of London

Matters of international business exported me to London for a few days and here is what there is to report.
A. Newcastle Brown Ale: (Newquay Brown)
Its not as classy of a drink as it is here in the states. It's the equivalent of someone coming to the states and ordering a Budweiser. During the summer of 99 in Portugal this guy looked at me and Jayson drinking a Super Bock and said "Why are you not drinking Budweiser? It is the King of Beers!" If he only knew we called in Buttwiper in college.

B. Leave Your Shank at Home:
London is cracking down on a severe knife problem. I think that the campaign slogan should be, "Don't be a wanker drop your shanker!"

C. Americans are not the only environmental A-Holes:
Shock value or not there are still people that think global warming is a fallacy and they are not just from Texas. I spotted this billboard while on the Heathrow express.

29 years on planet earth

And it still is all about burritos, babes, and waves. Thanks to John McSwain for the lazer portrait.

Human Tetris

Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov (Алексей Леонидович Пажитнов, born 1956) is a computer engineer from Russia now living in the United States, who developed the popular game Tetris while working for the Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a Soviet government-founded R&D centre. Pajitnov was to leave his mathematics school (#91) in Moscow. Pajitnov created Tetris with the help of Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov in 1985. The game, first available in the Soviet Union, appeared in the West in 1986. Pajitnov also created the lesser known sequel to Tetris, entitled Welltris, which has the same principle but in a three dimensional environment where you see the "board" from above. The Soviet bureaucracy licensed and managed Tetris, and advertised it with the slogan "From Russia with Love", Pajitnov did not receive royalties.

New Year :: New Cruiser

My Christmas present to myself this year was a new Krooked Zip Zinger, with some 62mm Satori softies for the harsh metropolitan city streets around the world, and some Ace trucks more suitable for grinding my way into 2008.