I am now in clearly uncharted waters. Day Four
of Laird Hamilton and Menstruation. No one has dared sail this far
without turning back and I am alone.
Alone with alt-feminist Lena Dunham!
Common sense would have had her raging against Laird’s
proclamation that sharks eat girls who are undergoing
uterine rejuvenation. That she would have stomped her feet at
a caveman spreading unkind rumors about lady parts but Lena has
more balls than The Inertia and don’t care!
Dunham, 31, recounted the 2015
paddleboarding race ordeal in the Hamptons, when
she “got off course and [Hamilton] somehow appeared as I was
alone and panicking and dragged me to shore!”
A spy at the Hamptons Paddle & Party for Pink charity race
told Page Six at the time, “It was a tough paddle … Windy and
harder than expected.” Dunham ended up drifting into Mecox
Bay.
Hamilton even left Dunham with some motivational words:
“Then Laird Hamilton said to me ‘you may have finished last, but
you never gave up so in my book you finish first.’”
Before reading this piece I found Laird a goofy clown and Lena
totally disgusting. After reading this I find them both
heart-warming.
Or am I wrong? Has Day Four blunted my senses?
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Ummmmm which side do we take?
Breaking: The Inertia totally pussies
out!
By Chas Smith
New levels of spinelessness achieved!
I wanted to do one full week of coverage on
Laird Hamilton telling TMZ that sharks attack because women are
menstruating but I only made it for two days. Long enough to be
able to write menstruating without having to Google its spelling
but not long enough to set any tangible record.
Still, pretty good. But really, more than anything, I have
been waiting patiently for The Inertia‘s take on the
incident. Venice-adjacent sometime-white water rafting blog has a
totally un-ironic lefty streak and I was dying for them to jump in
all indignant and shred dear Laird for being a misogynistic
creep.
But then again, would they? Laird Hamilton and his
hydrofoil/SUP/super food non-dairy creamer represents everything
The Inertia holds dear. Would they, instead of castigating their
hero blame TMZ for misrepresenting an honest, albeit naive,
opinion?
I waited and waited and waited and then just this minute right
now found their take on Laird-gate buried deep in their feed. It
read:
We’re not quite sure where this came from, and TMZ has a
reputation for pulling out the worst quotes when its reporters
stick mics in people’s faces, but this nugget from Laird Hamilton
on how woman experiencing their menstrual cycle are at a greater
risk of being bitten by a shark is a head scratcher. Hard to find
any evidence to back that up. So we’ll just leave this
here.
That’s it and I haven’t been this let down since thieves broke
into my family home when I was eleven years old and stole most of
the presents from under the Christmas tree.
WHAT SPINELESS FUCKING PUSSIES!
I mean, I knew Zach Weisberg and crew were spineless and I guess
I knew they were pussies but COME ON! For once, just once, grow a
fucking pair of BALLS. Pick a FUCKING side!
One of you Inertia bastards better explain how you let
this story fall so flat or I’m storming the office and NOT bringing
any paleo granola bars with me.
You don’t deserve them.
None of you do.
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The face of a man who's been inside
things.
Watch: Harry Bryant Penetrates Fiji!
By Michael Ciaramella
Join him in the crystal waters of Cloudbreak!
And do you recall, just two months ago, when I
told you that I surfed perfect Cloudbreak very poorly but witnessed
a young Harry Bryant break his hymen in heroic fashion?
No? Well it happened. And finally the proof has surfaced.
Let’s indulge!
If you’ve ever surfed Cloudbreak, you know how difficult of a
wave it is. The good ones look like closeouts, the closeouts look
like closeouts, and the bad ones look like the wave of your life.
It’s confusing as hell, but somehow, on his maiden voyage to Fiji,
Harry Bryant was baking cakes in industrial-sized ovens.
His last wave I saw from our boat. I even have a shitty iPhone
clip of the damn thing. Seeing a wave like that in real life is
pretty surreal. After a certain point, generally around the
eight-second mark of the barrel, it seems simultaneously impossible
and inevitable that he’s gonna come flying out the end of it.
The big day was pretty hit-or-miss, but Harry handled himself
with courage and aplomb. Often picking off waves down the reef, the
out-the-back crew would collectively shake its heads every time a
cheer from the channel was matched with a blonde-dyed-pink
head flying over the shoulder.
Amongst a healthy crew of pros and Cloudbreak specialists, Harry
owned that swell. As Ryan Hipwood called it, “I don’t think the
kid’s fallen off his board all day.”
Which leads me to this question, readers:
Have you ever been THE guy? The one who gets all the best waves
in a premier session and is lauded by the crew for a week
straight?
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Sponsored.
Malibu: “Such corporate surfing!”
By Chas Smith
Did you know everyone is sponsored in Malibu? Me
neither!
Just kiddin! But I am proud of how tightly I grabbed him by the
pussy and how absurdly long I held on. That was, like, two full
days of nothin but Laird. A personal best and it will be difficult
to surpass even by sometime yoga instructional website The
Inertia.
But let us move away from Laird’s doctoral thesis and into his
home town of Malibu! There is a new YouTube serial called Malibu
Surf which… ummmm… I’ll let the show’s creator tell you.
“Imagine a world where 4 beautiful boys, 4 beautiful girls,
surf, sand, drama and romance are the norm! This is
real life for Rio, Joey, Ally, Jacob, Keaton,
Courtney, Sofia and Sean. They all live in Malibu, CA
and spend their days lying on the beach or surfing
and their nights causing mischief in Malibu or going
to parties. Some of them are friends…some of them
are frenemies… but all of them live in a world where
it’s a surfers paradise!”
I’ll admit I was slightly confused when I first read because it
is not Surfers Paradise and has nothing to do with Australia’s Gold
Coast. It is Malibu. And it opens with one girl asking another
girl, “What’s Maui like? I’ve never been there.” And
her answering, “It’s so different than here. Like, it’s kind
of the same how everyone knows everyone here but the surfing is so
much more corporate here.” And the the first one says, “Yeah, if
you don’t have a sponsor you’re kinda out.”
Fucking corporate Malibu surf scene with all its sponsored
groms.
Lame. Where’s the soul n shit?
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Mikala Jones, a victim/survivor! | Photo: Scotty
Hammonds
Indo’s Been Bombing! (A Dual Meaning)
By Michael Ciaramella
This escalates quickly...
Do you want the good news or bad news
first?
This is a question that’s presumably been around for ages, and
for good reason — the answer says a lot about a person.
Me? I’ll take the bad news every time. The same way that I’ll
eat my least favorite foods first and wait an hour for a set on a
pumping swell.
I prefer starting low and attaining something positive down the
line to a fleeting moment of happiness followed shortly by
despair. The promise of upward momentum puts my mind at ease.
But for the sake of this article, I’m going to defy my personal
preference. I’ll deliver the good news about Indonesia first,
followed by the very bad news, because it’s important to my
message.
The good news: Indo has been bombing!
Indonesia was recently pegged with a
colorful blob and the islands jumped for joy. Sumbawa, Lombok,
Bali, Java, Sumatra and every little reef pass in
between went ballistic for three days straight. Below is a
clip from Nias — one of the better zones from the swell.
So that happened over a week ago, but waves continue to
batter the archipelago from a series of Southern Ocean lows.
Speaking of which, how’s this triple-up headed that way next week?
Book your tickets, Aussie friends!
Or maybe don’t. Because, well…
The bad news: Indonesia, specifically its
capital Jakarta, was the site of a terrorist attack yesterday
evening. Two suicide bombers, three cops dead, a number of
civilians injured, and widespread panic is what most
reports are stating.
According to9 News Perth, officials are
warning people in high tourist areas, especially Kuta and Seminyak
in Bali, to be extremely cautious at this time. “The Department of
Foreign Affairs has issued an updated travel warning, reminding
holiday visitors to be vigilant,” the report says.
And dammit, this is a tricky one. Not the Indo event
specifically, but the whole Islam/terrorist thing.
First of all, I feel it’s pointless to waste your time
worrying about being hit by an attack. Much like with
sharks, if it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen. Of course
there are things you can do to lessen your odds of becoming a
victim, like avoiding high risk areas (major cities/Reunion
Island/Ariana Grande concerts/SoCal), but at the end of the day you
can’t let fear handicap the most enjoyable parts of your
life.
The more I think about it, the more connections I see between
terrorist organizations and sharks.
For instance, there’s a group (conservatives) who want to
destroy them at all costs. It’s somewhat noble, in the sense that
they’re trying to protect “innocent” lives, but the means of
achieving their goals are often shortsighted, inhumane, or
downright impossible (how many sharks are you going to kill, and
what happens if you do fuck up the food chain? How do you
defeat terrorism, when the very act of bombing people in these
regions only multiplies their number of adherents?)
Then there’s the other side (liberals). They find it
repugnant to cast blame on Muslims or sharks but totally acceptable
to cast blame on those who cast blame on Muslims or sharks. They
don’t have any real answers, other than the cold, hard fact that
they retain the moral high ground on any and all issues. In their
eyes, doing nothing is often better than doing something drastic.
(Don’t kill sharks, don’t bomb the Middle East/blame Islam, because
it’s “immoral” and the repercussions could be worse than the issues
at hand.)
Then there’s the concept of what a “terrorist” even is.
I once took a class on terrorism (in Australia, no less!) that
opened my eyes to the concept of perspective. It made me reconsider
several truths that I once held self-evident.
For instance, is an ISIS member a terrorist because he beheads
American POWs or makes a bomb out of himself, with hopes of
taking civilians’ lives along with his own? Is a shark a terrorist
because it occasionally eats people?
The easy answer, the most emotionally-charged answer, is yes.
Their disregard for our western values/aquatic playtime is
unjustifiable, their murderous tendencies inhumane.
But let’s take a second to really think about it.
Imagine you were (like me) born in 1993, but instead
of suburban Pennsylvania you were raised in bumblefuck Afghanistan.
At the age of eight, your country was bombed and ransacked by
the West as a result of the 9/11 attacks — an atrocity
perpetrated by exactly zero Afghan pilots. For years you watched
these Western nations bomb your home, take over your villages,
and disrupt your political system. Innocent friends and family
killed in the pursuit of “justice”.
So, assuming that you come from a group the
West deemed as unscrupulous and were treated as such, are
you a terrorist for fighting back against the
intruders in any way possible? Even if it means killing innocent
people to strike fear in the Western world — the only means of
power you really have?
Put yourself in that position. Feel the bomb-blown sand in your
eyes, hair, teeth. The stillness of a once-familiar corpse at your
feet. How would you react?
I’m not saying you’d be right to retaliate, but how can
someone take the definitive stance that you’d be wrong for
aligning with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or even ISIS? That you’re
bloody pissed at what the West has done to your people, your
home?
This is one mediocre example of a simple, if under-appreciated
sentiment: terrorism is in the eye of the victim. To
many Middle Easterners, we’re saviors. To others, we’re the
terrorists.
You can argue that our intentions are more noble or our means
more moral than the ISISes of the world, but they
probably feel just as justified in their own minds. A man in
the sky told them so.
In essence, we’re killing over ideologies (and oil), they’re
killing over ideologies. The idea that the West maintains a
monopoly over “legitimate” violence is ludicrous.
Now, sharks are slightly different because, well, they’re not
human. Sad as it may be, I can’t justify giving sharks equal
and empathetical treatment to a person. Even a member of a
“terrorist” organization. Darwin’s rules, not mine.
That said, I do care about the ecosystem and sharks’ role
in it. If a few people gotta die to maintain the balance of
the ocean, that’s cool with me. If we can kill a few sharks (and
save people) without affecting the overall ecosystem, I’m cool with
that too.
The problem is, it’s difficult to achieve objective scientific
answers for these types of questions. Much like it’s difficult to
discern the effects of “terrorist” eradication.
Anyways, have fun in Indo!
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Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by
@theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros