bookofjoe

'The Eddie is on'

So wrote Jesse McKinley in yesterday's New York Times story about the Quiksilver in Memory of Eddie Aikau Competition on the North Shore of Oahu, which took place this past Tuesday for the first time since 2004 and only the seventh since its inception 25 years ago, the deciding factors being the presence of giant waves and good weather.

A nice slide show accompanied the Times article.

The contest director, 79-year-old George Downing, studied overnight buoy readings before declaring the contest on just after dawn on Tuesday.

Twenty-eight of the world's greatest big wave surfers took part, with Greg Long (who appears in the video up top) winning the competition.

The contest website has a ton of great videos.

Magnetic Legs

For fridge, locker or any iron or steel surface.

Woman or

Man.

$15.95.

[via Interior Design Room and Nerd Approved]

Free video rentals? There's an app for that

"Red Box Free Rental Promo Codes, a week-old 99-cent iPhone app..., gives users a list, updated twice daily, of promotional codes for free rentals that it finds by trawling the Web,"

wrote Eric A. Taub in a brief item in today's New York Times.

Table Saw

Just the thing for that special person who never has enough tools.

12"L x 4"H x 0.5"D.

Washable.

 

$7.99.

What's with the night posts, joe?

Regular readers may have noticed that both last evening and Monday night, posts appeared long after our customary 4:01 p.m. quitting time.

What's going on?

What about the union?

I mean, France mandates a 35 hour week but I'm lucky if I get 35 minutes a week from some of the clowns who're taking up space around here.

Anyhow, the reason for these post-sunset posts is that fans and readers and friends have been sending me really interesting stuff that shouldn't have to wait for tomorrow's sunrise to appear.

So when that happens, from now on if the spirit moves me I'll put it up.

Don't Tag Me T

"Want to definitely

get tagged

in a photo?

Wear this shirt."

$17.99.

[via The Daily What, Zoomdoggle, swissmiss and @wspencer]

James Cameron's Pandorapedia

.................................................................

From a great story by Frank Rose about the director and "Avatar" in the latest issue of Wired magazine: "James Cameron didn't just imagine the planet Pandora, he created an immensely detailed alien world. It's all cataloged in the 350-page 'Pandorapedia.'"

Above, an entry.

No, you can't buy one.

Yet.

From the article:

••••••••••••••••••••••••

Thirteen months after he began work on "Avatar," Frommer wrote a pamphlet titled "Speak Na'vi" and started teaching the actors how to pronounce the language. He held Na’vi boot camps and then went over lines one by one with each actor. "Cameron wanted them to be emotional, but they had to do it in a language that never existed," Frommer says. If an actor flubbed a Na’vi word, Frommer would often step in with a correction. "There were times when the actors didn’t want me to tell them that they had mispronounced a word that had never been pronounced before," he says.

With the language established, Cameron set about naming everything on his alien planet. Every animal and plant received Na’vi, Latin, and common names. As if that weren’t enough, Cameron hired Jodie Holt, chair of UC Riverside’s botany and plant sciences department, to write detailed scientific descriptions of dozens of plants he had created. She spent five weeks explaining how the flora of Pandora could glow with bioluminescence and have magnetic properties. When she was done, Cameron helped arrange the entries into a formal taxonomy.

This was work that would never appear onscreen, but Cameron loved it. He brought in more people, hiring an expert in astrophysics, a music professor, and an archaeologist. They calculated Pandora’s atmospheric density and established a tripartite scale structure for the alien music. When one of the experts brought in the Star Wars Encyclopedia, Cameron glanced at it and said, "We’ll do better."

Eventually, a team of writers and editors compiled all this information into a 350-page manual dubbed "Pandorapedia." It documents the science and culture of the imaginary planet, and, as much as anything, it represents the fully realized world Cameron has created. For fans who want to delve deeper, parts of "Pandorapedia" will be available online this winter.

Screwpop 4-in-1 tool

Takes the key ring screwdrivers,

mashes them up

and throws in a 1/4" hexagonal nut driver and bottle opener —

twice the functionality,

half the space and the same price.

Not bad.

$4.95.