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Sustainability 101: The Rebirth of Riding Wood: An Interview with Larry O’Brien and Mike Shourds

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by Terrie Leigh Relf  /Originally Posted at OB Rag

Nothing says OB more than surf, sweet boards, and social consciousness!

In the following interview, OBcean Larry O’Brien, vintage body board collector, cave explorer, and aspiring eccentric shares one of his many passions: Creating boards from found wood and other materials.

Coronadoian “Paipo Mike” Shourds, builder of wooden body boards and recycled junk bikes since 1960, is also a collector and all-around creative person.

Terrie Leigh Relf: What inspired you to create your body boards?

Larry O’Brien: Back when I was in junior high school, carpentry was something taught in school, and sex was something you learned on the street. Making a three-foot plywood belly board was one of the elective projects for eighth graders. I didn’t make one, but some of my friends did, and then rode them. At that time, I was more interested in bodysurfing.

Nowadays, most woodshops have been removed from our schools, and I think there is only one that serves the citywide adult continuing education programs. So, woodworking has become something you learn at home or on the street. Fortunately, the Internet has been a real game-changer, and I think it’s been the biggest factor in the rebirth of riding wood.

I have no trade secrets. I freely share my designs and building techniques. I want people to make their own boards. We must keep the flame alive. I remain hopeful that someday we can liberate the glee club, and teach kids woodworking in all of the schools.

I’ve been a collector of vintage surfboards and belly boards for many years. It was only about ten years ago that I started making my own wooden boards. I don’t do it for profit. To me, they are ride-able art, and they also tickle my inner mad scientist.

Mike Shourds: I also started making wood boards back in 1960. My dad wouldn’t buy me and my brother a surfboard, so he gave us a ½” sheet of plywood and a jigsaw and said, “Make one.” Thanks dad! The beach was our playground when we were kids, so everything rotated around it.   [Read more…]

San Diego Cancer Survivor to Swim English Channel

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By Danny Cappiello 

Swimming twenty one miles in cold, rough water seems like an impossible feat. But I guess everything is relative. When you have battled cancer and won, very little probably seems impossible. That is the very perspective Allison DeFrancesco has and that is why she has decided to swim the English Channel this September.

Going into her senior year of college, Allison, a native of North County San Diego, was struggling with health problems. She did not know what was going on and threw herself into her collegiate swim training at NYU. But her health did not turn around and she eventually had to have it checked out. She graduated college early and came back to San Diego to get medical attention. Before she could figure out what was happening with her body, she learned some difficult news. Her college coach, Lauren Kyle Beam, had been diagnosed with colon cancer. Lauren was pregnant and lost the baby to the disease. Shortly thereafter, the next wave of bad news hit Alli. She too had cancer, a classic case of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

Although diagnosis and treatment started for Lauren only a month or so before Allison’s, the coach and mentor stayed true to her role. She coached Alli through the process, encouraging her to stay positive, remain true to herself and to question the treatment options. All of this, especially the last piece if advice, proved crucial to Alli’s struggle. As it turned out, she had been under-diagnosed and therefore her treatment was not working. She sought out second opinions and her care was eventually transferred to the UCLA Lymphoma Program.   [Read more…]

Sex In San Diego: A Journey Into Dave Barry’s Colon (A Must Read)

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Dave Barry / The Miami Herald

OK. You turned 50. You know you’re supposed to get a colonoscopy. But you haven’t. Here are your reasons:

1. You’ve been busy.

2. You don’t have a history of cancer in your family.

3. You haven’t noticed any problems.

4. You don’t want a doctor to stick a tube 17,000 feet up your butt.

Let’s examine these reasons one at a time. No, wait, let’s not. Because you and I both know that the only real reason is No. 4. This is natural. The idea of having another human, even a medical human, becoming deeply involved in what is technically known as your ”behindular zone” gives you the creeping willies.
  [Read more…]

San Onofre Layoffs: Latest Sign of Nuke Plant’s Demise

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By Michael Steinberg / Blackrain Press

Monday’s notice that San Onofre’s owners are laying off 730 workers—one third of the workforce—is yet another indication of a nuclear power plant in severe distress.

Both formerly operating reactors have been shut down since January due to revelations that key components called steam generators had rapidly and largely turned into junk. In following months promises of restart from the company have repeatedly been pushed back.

On July 31 Huff Post LA reported that this crisis had cost the plant “at least $165 million” at that point. This figure consisted of “$48 million for inspection and maintenance costs” and $117 million “to buy replacement power.”   [Read more…]

Movie Review : ‘Killer Joe’ and the SOL Underclass

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By Frances O’Neill Zimmerman

While I’m worrying about the disconnect between Paul Ryan’s beautiful blue eyes and baby face and his flinty role as Mitt Romney’s Slasher in Chief for every single American social, medical and educational program, I turned last night for solace to the Landmark Hillcrest Cinema and sexy, handsome, cool Matthew McConaughey in “Killer Joe.” I recommend it if you need a break from Mittens and his new hatchet man.

This is an incredibly violent, funny, and very dark film. It’s rated NC-17 for everything — did I mention violence? — but “Killer Joe” is really a perfect movie for our times. It provides as shocking a view of the SOL underclass in this country as I can remember, more powerful than the great dystopian “Blade Runner” from back in the ’80’s. That was sci-fi: this is 2012.   [Read more…]

Media Hacks: Why Our National Press Corps Is Failing the Public Abysmally

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You want a serious debate about the issues? Good luck!

It’s hard to imagine a greater irony than our political press, obsessed as it is with process stories, dubiously sourced rumors and trivial fluff, lamenting the fact that we can’t have a “serious national debate.”

Consider what may be the funniest lede in this cycle so far: “The elevated presidential campaign of ideas, fleetingly achieved after months of mudslinging, died Tuesday,” wrote Reid Epstein. “It was three days old.” Epstein went on to catalog all of the mean things the two campaigns were saying about each other, as if this is an election year or something.
  [Read more…]

Please Stop with the War Memorials!

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By Dave Patterson

Recently I have been reading about the need to better the existing, or build more war memorials. I disagree that we need more or better memorials. In fact I believe that we already have too many Veterans memorials and I will argue that we need to remove some of the ones we already have. And yes, we can do so while still honoring our Veterans.

There are a lot of war monuments in Washington D.C. where Mr. Scruggs points our thoughts. There are war memorials specific to the military branches. There are statues of tired soldiers, flaming swords and waves and dolphins and fountains and granite obelisks and walls with tens of thousands of names of U.S. killed. There are salutes to those that served, and those that were injured and those that died, and those that loaded the bombs or dropped them, and those that slogged through the snow or jungle being killed and maimed while killing people that were defending their homeland against us.   [Read more…]

Interview : Author Selden Edwards Talks About Time Travel and Time Dislocation

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By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing

Native Californian Selden Edwards is a born teacher, a convenient fact for a lifelong educator, Edwards’ career until his 2003 retirement. Except he didn’t stop teaching, not after the novel manuscript he had nurtured for 30 years became, in his supposed retirement, a 2008 best-selling novel — “The Little Book,” a story of time travel that carries protagonist Wheeler Burden from 1988 California to 1897 Vienna. Neither did Edwards stop teaching with his second novel, a sequel set in 1918, called “The Lost Prince,” from which he will be reading Friday at Warwick’s in La Jolla.

Even a recent phone interview — and a lively, fast-paced interview it was — turned into an enthusiastic introduction to the United States’ Progressive Era, a brief overview of existential individualism, and a synopsis of the Gilded Age. It seemed a natural and perfectly entertaining teaching opportunity, as are his novels.   [Read more…]

Why Statewide Regulations Are Needed for the Ban on Plastic Bags

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*Editor’s note: While written from the point of view of the city of Santa Cruz, this article presents a good argument for a ban on plastic bags at a state level — something we are moving closer toward with AB 298.

Originally appeared in the Santa Cruz Sentinel on July 12, 2012

OK — banning plastic bags has reached the “copy me, copy you” stage.

It probably just seems that everywhere a shopper turns these days, it’s “Do you have your own bag?” — or “that will be a dime for a paper bag.”

The city of Santa Cruz, usually at the forefront of environmental causes, became the latest, but probably not the last, local government to ban single-use plastic bags, with the 6-0 vote by the City Council Tuesday night. The ban will take effect in nine months.   [Read more…]

Democrats Fight Back; Republicans and Their Media Friends Get the Vapors

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by kos / Daily Kos

Dana Milbank:

Forgive me, but I’m not prepared to join this walk down Great Umbrage Street just yet. Yes, it’s ugly out there. But is this worse than four years ago, when Obama was accused by the GOP vice presidential nominee of “palling around with terrorists”? Or eight years ago, when Democratic nominee John Kerry was accused of falsifying his Vietnam War record?What’s different this time is that the Democrats are employing the same harsh tactics that have been used against them for so long, with so much success. They have ceased their traditional response of assuming the fetal position when attacked, and Obama’s campaign is giving as good as it gets — and then some.

Bullies don’t like it when their targets punch back, which is why the GOP is apoplectic right now. I mean, their reaction to Biden’s “chains” thing is comically hysterical. And Mitt Romney is genuinely unhinged.

I’m not sure why Republicans think that crying and whining about the big bad meanie Democrats is such a political winner. It never worked when Democrats tried it (just ask John Kerry).   [Read more…]

Putting the Sex Back in Birth Control: Why the Dominant Narrative on Contraception Undermines Young People

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by Andrew Jenkins, Choice USA

While I applaud Elizabeth Banks for her new ad supporting Planned Parenthood, birth control, and President Barack Obama–and wholeheartedly empathize with her personal story–I’m reminded of a sobering fact: the progressive community is deathly afraid of talking about sex and young people.

That’s right. I said it.

Between Banks new web promo aimed at female voters, Sandra Fluke’s testimony before Congress last February, and the reactive messaging around Rush Limbaugh’s vile comments, one thing has remained clear: our movement is far more comfortable elevating stories about birth control when they don’t involve sex. Pure unadulterated sex. Sex without the fear of an unintended pregnancy. You know… the primary reason young Americans use birth control.

And for arguments sake, maybe there’s a good reason for this. Maybe–just maaaayyyybe–we’re trying to appeal to conservatives. Perhaps we’re making our funders happy. Or maybe we’re just trying to sell a message that is palatable; easy to consume.

Nope. Bullshit. Not buying it.   [Read more…]

Community/Labor forum blasts Prop 32

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by Dave Rice / San Diego Reader

A Better San Diego, a non-profit consisting of community, faith, and labor-backed groups hosted its monthly breakfast forum yesterday, this time using the meeting to host a panel of speakers opposing passage of Proposition 32 on the November ballot.

Prop 32 is marketed as a proposal to ban contributions from labor unions and corporate entities to political candidates and candidate-controlled committees. One specific point of the measure bans voluntary payroll deductions from workers that are directed toward political action committees (PACs).

But opponents argue that while the measure is effective in blocking political contributions from typically liberal-leaning union members, the door is left wide open for more conservative business interests to continue buying influence.

For the full article, click here.   [Read more…]

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