Kai Lenny is not only the 2012 Stand-Up Paddleboard champion, but the Hawaii naive and Red Bull athlete is also a world class tow-in big wave surfer, kitesurfer and windsurfer. Lenny is also the first person to ever successfully windsurf across Lake Michigan, and he’s only 20 years old.

So how does Lenny stay mentally focused and physically fit enough to handle all these challenges? We sat down with him as he was preparing for the Molokai 2 Oahu World Championship to find out.

1. You’re the 2012 Stand-Up Paddleboard champion, but you also windsurf, kite surf and big wave surf. Which of these is the most challenging physically, and which is the most challenging mentally?

All of the water sports I do take a lot of physical and mental effort, and each requires a different demand of how to use my body. Each sport has a positive cross-training aspect that supports each other. The challenges really surface when the conditions become extreme or when I am in a competition.

A super windy day or a giant day at Jaws (a legendary surf spot), really puts the challenge into play. I love to push myself, and because of the hours I spend in the water everyday, I fell really conditioned and prepared when the extreme days come around. Competition also brings out the challenges in my sport. I am so competitive that when I push myself, like in a stand-up race, I give it my all and I search really deep, and that’s where I find out how much I can hurt. I remind myself at these times about the accomplishments that I have done.

Last year, during the World Championship Long Distance Race, I was about 200 yards away from the first place competitor and I reminded myself on how gnarly my wipeout was at Jaws and how the hurt I was feeling during this race didn’t even compare. This motivated me to dig super deep and I ended up winning by several minutes.

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Yes, it’s been an entire week since we saluted International Beer Day. However, as I said last week, for many of you out there every day is some kind of beer day. As it happened, this week’s combo was a little too intriguing — and a little too easy to fix — to completely ignore.

The drink is comprised of two ingredients which are old enough to be considered classic but will nevertheless be new to many of you — they’re still new to me. It’s definitely a case of two fascinating liquids that blend intriguingly together.

For starters, I don’t know where Lindeman’s Framboise has been all my life, but this Belgian export is, for my money, pretty gosh darn delightful stuff. Fermented with raspberries in preference to hops, and tasting very much like raspberries, it’s just sweet enough to be cheerful but just beery enough to be actual, respectable beer. To be honest, though, it should be said that, as beer goes, I’m a pretty rank dilettante. It’s the tragic result of the fact that I don’t seem to be able to put away more than a pint of the stuff in a single evening.

The second, and only other, ingredient in today’s beverage is the world’s trendiest bitters, Fernet Branca. Beloved of Batman’s buddy, Alfred, it actually began its career in the mid-19th century as an Italian stomach medicine. Drunk straight, many will feel it still pretty much tastes like an Italian stomach medicine. I don’t complain because people keep sending me the stuff for free. Also,  when combined with other beverages, it can yield intriguing and even delicious results. Such is the case with today’s DOTW.

Shall we begin?

The Framboise Franca Bomb

12 ounces Lindeman’s Framboise (or another Framboise Lambic beer if your feeling experimental, and can find one)
1 ounce (or a bit more) Fernet Branca

Fill a pint glass with your Framboise Lambic beer. Drop a shot glass of Fernet Branca shot into glass. Start drinking and toast all that time you’ve saved by making this cocktail instead of something that requires you to squeeze lemons and what not.

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This drink isn’t only easier and quicker to make than most of the cocktails I select for DOTW — and I’m already pretty darn intent on keeping these drinks easy enough for louts like myself to make — it’s quicker to write about. I suppose I could have experimented with other Framboise Lambic beers, assuming I could have even found any, but I really didn’t see any reason to mess with near perfection.

While this isn’t as spectacular a blending of bitter and sweet as say, an Americano or, better yet, an Ugly Americano, the perfumey, fruity bitterness of the nearly 80 proof Fernet blends beautifully with the raspberry sweet tarty beery of the Lindemans Framboise. Also, the more of the berry flavored beer you drink, the more you’re ready for the stronger Fernet Branca flavor.

All that, and it yields a far better buzz attitude adjustment than a mere pint of beer. All in all, a great reason to keep the Bud and the Heineken packed away and go for something a bit more exotic, I’d say.  With more drinks like this, I think I could add to my beer consumption just a bit.

Aubrey is a beautiful blonde and here she posing with just her lacy panties.

Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Alice Braga, Sharlto Copley, Wagner Moura, William Fichtner, Diego Luna

Neill Blomkamp

It’s hard to put down a movie like “Elysium.” Let’s rephrase that: it’s actually quite easy to put down a movie like “Elysium” – it just gives us no pleasure in doing so. It’s a movie that urges people to think of the needs of others, and the satisfaction that comes from helping the less fortunate. A noble cause, to be sure, but in order to make his point, writer/director Neill Blomkamp (“District 9”) resorts to painting with an awfully broad brush, and the complex issues of health care and the distribution of wealth that “Elysium” seeks to tackle are marginalized by half. What’s left to enjoy are the visuals and some visceral hand-to-hand combat, which is nice (think “Terminator 2,” with humans), but this is a movie that had bigger fish to fry, and let them off the hook.

Set in the year 2154, Earth has become decimated by overpopulation and depleted natural resources. The wealthiest people have abandoned Earth to live on Elysium, an orbiting space station with the technology to cure any sickness in seconds. Max (Matt Damon) is a former car thief trying to live an honest life working on a factory line. Max is exposed to a fatal dose of radiation on the job, and in return the company gives him pills to manage his pain and sends him on his way. Max, with only days to live, hits up his former crime boss Spider (Wagner Moura) for a chance to jump on one of his bootleg trips to Elysium with the hope that he can heal himself. Spider agrees to help him, but Max must pull a suicide mission first. In doing so, however, they find a way to share Elysium’s technological advances with everyone on Earth; they’ll just have to get past Elysium defense secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster) and her dirtbag sleeper agent Kruger (Sharlto Copley) first.

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Amanda Seyfried, Peter Sarsgaard, Sharon Stone, Robert Patrick, Chris Noth, Hank Azaria, James Franco

Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman

1972’s “Deep Throat” was the porn flick that took blowjobs out of the closet and put them on “The Tonight Show.” It’s star was by far the most famous pornographic performer of all time and, it turns out, a victim of shocking abuse.

The only surviving film of a pair of planned projects about the woman who will forever be known as Linda Lovelace, “Lovelace” stars Amanda Seyfried as Linda and Peter Sarsgaard as her first husband, sexual Svengali and tormentor, Chuck Traynor. The most interesting thing about “Lovelace” is its structure. The film breaks down pretty clearly into two parts: one largely comedic, the other brutally tragic.

Part one is mostly a shockingly cheerful porn biopic that will please those who are longing for a less weighty “Boogie Nights” follow-up. It shows us how a sleazy but nevertheless charming and love struck Traynor seduces sweet and only slightly damaged 21-year-old Linda Boreman away from her unpleasantly rigid, super-traditional Catholic mom (Sharon Stone), her low-key security officer dad (Robert Patrick) and her understandably suspicious best friend (Juno Temple). The tone grows more blackly comedic as skeezy Chuck gets involved with pornsters and sells them on his wife’s borderline disturbing ability to suppress her gag reflex. Linda Lovelace is born.

Sometime after we see Hugh Hefner (a miscast James Franco) suggest that life should imitate art in a very specific way during a screening of the now hugely successful “Deep Throat,” “Lovelace” abruptly takes us six years later into 1980 as Linda Marchiano – she’s now married to apparent good-guy cable installer Chuck Marchiano (Wes Bentley) – passes a polygraph test and promotes her book, “Ordeal,” on the “Phil Donahue Show.” Just as abruptly, the film circles back to give us Linda’s very personal point of view of the events surrounding “Deep Throat.” It’s no prettier than the visible bruises on her legs.

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