Breaking: Famous athlete apologizes for
believing conspiracy theories!
By Chas Smith
For all the science teachers, everybody coming up
to me like, 'You know I have to reteach my whole curriculum!' I'm
sorry.
Last evening at a Forbes magazine event, the
Boston Celtics’ star Kyrie Irving apologized for saying that he
believes the earth is flat. He once told a teammate, “This is not
even a conspiracy theory. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. …
It’s right in front of our faces. I’m telling you, it’s right in
front of our faces. They lie to us.”
The basketball player was on stage as part of the 30 under 30
summit and was asked by the interviewer to weigh in on his previous
statement.
“Even if you believe in that, don’t come out and say that stuff.
That’s for intimate conversations because perception and how you’re
received, it changes. I’m actually a smart-ass individual,” he
said.
“At the time I didn’t realize the effect. I was definitely at
that time, ‘I’m a big conspiracy theorist. You can’t tell me
anything.’ I’m sorry about all that. For all the science teachers,
everybody coming up to me like, ‘You know I have to reteach my
whole curriculum!’ I’m sorry. I apologize. I apologize,”
Hmmmm.
Professional surfing’s Kelly Slater has a reputation for
peddling in conspiracy too, though he is virulently anti-flat
earth. Huck magazine once
asked him specifically about his love of the darker corners and he
responded:
I’m into the truth. Not conspiracy theories. If you look at
the big picture, somehow it all actually makes sense. For example,
if I were a doctor, well, if everyone’s not sick, my job doesn’t
exist anymore. I’m not saying doctors are bad, but if people aren’t
sick, there’s no need for them. So we have this ‘self-creating’
society. There are a lot of pieces that work together. It’s like a
big jigsaw puzzle. […] Look at cancer, for another example. There’s
a lot of shitty food out there. Look at what’s happening with the
environment and our food sources, and who’s controlling what. There
are new diseases that didn’t exist a hundred years ago. A hundred
years ago there wasn’t one out of a hundred and fifty kids being
born with autism. There are a lot of really heavy things that are
happening in the world, and you could pick any one of them and
spend your life trying to fight for the whole cause, but number one
you’ve got to look out for yourself and the people closest to you.
I think, generally, the people who make the biggest changes in the
world are the people you don’t even know. Obviously there’re people
like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela, but the people working
behind the scenes – the people they get their information from –
are generally people who are working with just small groups of
people trying to understand what’s going on around them, rather
than someone who’s looking at the bigger picture. I’m not really
sure where I’m going with that, but basically, you can get too
involved in big things and forget about the real things that
matter.
Hmmmm.
Should Kelly apologize too?
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From the marital-innovation department:
Newport Beach man pleads guilty to waterboarding wife!
By Chas Smith
Immediately sentenced to 10 years in prison!
“That’s illegal?” is the first thing I thought
after reading the My LA headline Newport Beach man pleads
guilty to waterboarding newlywed wife. “Waterboarding
is illegal?” Then I realized the story was not about surfing but
continued reading anyhow.
A 37-year-old man accused of waterboarding and beating his
65-year-old wife of two months in Newport Beach pleaded guilty
Monday and was immediately sentenced to 10 years in
prison.
Richard David Schlosser II pleaded guilty to criminal
threats, false imprisonment and corporal injury of a spouse, and
admitted sentencing enhancement allegations of committing a crime
while on bail. As part of the plea deal, a felony count of torture
and a sentencing enhancement for causing great bodily injury to the
victim were dropped.
From Jan. 5 through the next day, Schlosser attacked his
bride for hours, while under the influence of drugs and alcohol,
Senior Deputy District Attorney Mark Geller said.
“He did this for hours,” the prosecutor said. “He kept her
captive in the apartment for hours … He actually waterboarded
her.”
At some point, after he “sobered up,” the victim managed to
contact a friend, who called police, Geller said. The victim had to
be hospitalized for her injuries, according to the
prosecutor.
For sure he surfs. How do I know? Because he lives in Newport
and looks like this.
But I bet he surfs in Huntington and I bet he rides an epoxy
Rockin’ Fig. Or maybe a Lib Tech waterboard.
"A pair of French-Canadian gals, wielding
harsh accents and peachy buttocks like weapons of war take over the
line-up, paddling straight to the inside wave after wave. The
display of aggression, overt and implied, is stunning. Flailing
limbs and basic positioning errors ruin many waves but the gals
resolutely paddle straight back up the inside to the top of the
line."
Opinion: “The Mentawais now belong to the
kook!”
By Longtom
A trip to Indonesian playground reveals startling
truth, "the new line-up politics of adult learners and aggressive
Europeans!"
Despite the darkness an opening ride at Macaronis feels
as inalien as walking down the main street of a
hometown.
A wide awake dream come to life.
Not a single original thought, word or deed is possible after 30
years of hyper-saturation. My trachea are filled with Indonesia’s
finest clove scented tar and nicotine; liver with barley, hops and
fermented sugar cane, bloodstream with the molecules imbibed after
a friend scraped the rendang excreta off a rubber surgical finger
swallowed and carried across oceans.
Soft pulses of light chime around thunderheads arrayed in a
purple bruise which rings the horizon. Megalithic fauna
wanders amongst the mangrove roots and dead trees to the last low
rumble of the night. Mugwumps and plutonium wives slither out from
coral crevices. Blood warm water envelopes like a jade green sap;
the feeling of homecoming, so familiar to every Australian surfer
at least, is almost over-powering.
Florid language is white noise to the working gal. We return to
the prosaic.
Two, three or four hours later a pair of French-Canadian gals,
wielding harsh accents and peachy buttocks like weapons of war take
over the line-up, paddling straight to the inside wave after wave.
The display of aggression, overt and implied, is stunning. Flailing
limbs and basic positioning errors ruin many waves but the gals
resolutely paddle straight back up the inside to the top of the
line.
We portray global lineups poorly whenever harmony is implied.
It’s more accurate to view them in biological terms: full of
dominance, aggression, uneasy truces and, in non-gendered lineups,
sexual sovereignty. Biogeographer Tim Low wrote about the uncommon
aggression inherent in Australian birds and made the case that the
abundance of flowering Eucalypts was a resource worth fighting
for.
“Nectar”, he wrote, “rewards aggression”.
So too, perfect surf. Adult learners master that before a basic
skill set. Like screaming lorikeet flocks fight tree by tree to dab
tongues on sweet nectar heads; lineup politics in the Mentawais are
negotiated boat by boat, day by day, hour by hour, set by set,
bikini by bikini.
The screaming 50’s and roaring 40’s have shrunk the globe for a
second time – not as ends to drive the spice trade – but as means
to ends where a new wave of European expansionism finds common
cause in energetic by-product on the reef breaks of the Mentawai.
Sipora, Siberut, Pagai-Utara, Pagai-Selatan. Kepulauan
Mentawai.
Here you’ll find Germans, German Swiss, Austrians, French,
Italians, Russians,Slovenians, Slovakians, Portugese, English.
Australians remain the dominant force, for now. Perplexed and
enraged, as my Bribie mate was, by the new line-up politics of
adult learners and aggressive Europeans.
“What the fuck are these kooks doing here?” he asked.
The world belongs to them now, I answered.
Why and wherefore this desire to get fucked up in Indonesia?
We hadn’t been in Padang more than an hour when I turned to my
oldest friend and said, “For some reason, I feel like getting
really fucked up.”
He said, “Me too.”
Hours later he was engaged in the kind of stupidity which makes
a family man squirm with shame. Mike Oblowitz’s redacted 2008 doco
Sea of
Darkness offers clues. It charts the course of
Indonesian exploration and exploitation and the dark temptations
that wandered, like Neil Young’s beggar, from door to door.
Filmaker and Indonesian veteran Dick Hoole spoke in the film of
the Asian sense of freedom and the difficulty in returning to
normal life after tasting it. The dream, according to Martin Daly
associate and convicted drug smuggler Jeff Chitty, was “60 feet on
the waterline”. A boat to explore an endless oceanic playground.
Chitty spent most of his adult life doing hard time, Daly veered
left and steered the Indies Trader to fame/infamy. It’s stunning
how easily the dream is now obtainable.
Apocalypse Now/Big Wednesday writer
John Milius called bullshit on the whole program.
I paraphrase, because I was drunk when watching, but his
observation was that the outcome of living this lawless dream was
to become, not larger than life, but smaller than life. It
diminished a man, in his eyes. That scarcely rings true, and if you
look at the vision of Mike Boyum, whose life the film commemorates,
you’d have to say it exerts a greater hold now than ever before.
It’s scarcely possible to imagine an Australian surfer,
fr’instance, who doesn’t have this virus embedded deep within,
ready to take over the organism at the first whiff of clove
cigarette.
Even with a scrappy forecast, the bang for buck on a boat
cruising the Ments is immense. Day three and I’ve surfed into a
state of almost total oblivion. Compared with a three-week passage
between Honolulu and the Marshalls where the board didn’t come out
of the cover and the salty taste of seasick pussy was all that
sustained.
“Maybe you should go back to Kansas,” I suggested.
“Screw Kansas,” she said.
The family man does experience sudden shocks of panic in
Indonesian perfection. He forgets home. Then forgets that he has
forgotten and the whole thing starts to seem like a dream from
another existence. He can’t touch his childrens’ faces, feel their
little fingers wrapped around his neck, see his wife’s naked body
in the moonlight.
Games without frontiers, ay. Family man now though, ay.
The family man does experience sudden shocks of panic in
Indonesian perfection. He forgets home. Then forgets that he has
forgotten and the whole thing starts to seem like a dream from
another existence. He can’t touch his childrens’ faces, feel their
little fingers wrapped around his neck, see his wife’s naked body
in the moonlight.
Is it still there? Or gone.
Another set shimmers in the sunlight and all memory evaporates.
Perfect surf is remorseless.
Feelings of home are counter-factual. The Mentawais remain
remote. Shit can turn pear-shaped in a heartbeat. Clashings of the
Burma, Sunda and Eurasian plates create the most tectonically
unstable area on Earth. It’s probable more than possible that
everything built to satisfy surf lust in the Islands will be one
day smeared into rubble by a wall of water. These facts don’t alter
feelings I have spending hours roaming freely alone up the outer
edge of a central Mentawaiin reef, safer and more at peace than I
do surfing a kay from my house. It makes no sense.
But we are who we are, as Nick Carroll said to Chas Smith at
Lemoore, I think a version of Marcus Aurelius statement: “Whatever
may happen to thee, it was prepared for thee for all eternity.”
What seems more seductive? The Pulitzer or weeks alone on
Tavarua?
I guess he got both, in the end.
In the end I got a prime set wave at a perfect reef and shared
it with my friend, criss-crossing tracks as the coral heads flew by
under-neath.
That was the last wave and now that the high has worn off the
come-down seems scarcely worth it.
Wtf, yes it does.
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If you watch the clip, you'll see what a feat
it was for the photographer to snatch a usable shot from the
incomplete ride. WSL/Bruno Aleixo
From the what-is-wrong-with-this-headline
department: Maya Gabeira wins Guinness world record for biggest
wave ever ridden!
By Derek Rielly
Special women's-only big-wave record!
It’s been five years since the Brazilian Maya Gabiera
was squashed in what you might wanna call 70-foot
waves. A busted tibia (lower part of the bone, near the
ankle) and drowning was the price tag Maya paid for taking on the
world’s creepiest wave.
When I called her the next day she’d just been released from
hospital.
I’d asked what it feels like to drown.
“It’s really tough. But it gets peaceful when you black out.
When you’re gone, you’re gone. And I knew before I was gone I knew
that the only thing I could do was to try my very hardest to get as
close as I could to the shore so Carlos could do his part. And I
did my part and he did his part. That’s how we work. I try my best
and when he sees me he’ll make sure he doesn’t lose my body.”
Now, after a short ride in January this year, Maya, who is the
daughter of the anti-dictatorship revolutionary and
one-time exile Fernando Gabeira, has been
awarded a Guinness World record for “Largest wave surfed unlimited
(female).”
From the WSL presser:
The 31-year old from Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
successfully surfed a wave measuring 68 feet / 20.72 metres from
trough to crest at the infamous big-wave break known as Praia do
Norte in Nazaré, Portugal on January 18, 2018.
“To set the world record has been a dream of mine
for many years,” said Gabeira. “But of course, after the accident
in Nazaré 2013, it felt like a very distant dream. It took a lot of
work to have a season like last year, to be 100% again, and to
complete it with a GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS title is
quite special.”
What’s wrong with the headline?
Well, doesn’t it seem, and let’s pull a buzz word out
of the bag, a little sexist? That the good burghers
at the Guinness Book of World Records deem the female of the
species incapable of being towed into the same-sized wave as a
man?
I mean, #runlikeagirl ain’t a pejorative anymore, am I
right?
Or is it a selective thing and I failed to read the
fine print?
Oh, and whomever is doin’ Maya’s wiki page might wanna
fix the typo up. Getting towed into six-foot waves ain’t that
special by anyone’s measure.
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Entrepreneurship: Harness surfing to make
money the “new economy” way!
By Chas Smith
I think.
I read a sentence this morning in Forbes
magazine, publication for wealthy individuals and/or individuals
who aspire to wealth, and I had no idea what it meant. Not even the
faintest flicker of recognition. Absolutely nothing. Can you
help?
Unleash Surf is the world’s first digital nomad travel
company for entrepreneurs who surf.
What is digital nomad travel?
Is that what we do? I mean, not “we” as in me n Derek n Longtom
n Jen n Trav n etc. but, like, “we” as in upwardly mobile young-ish
surfers?
Digital nomads?
I have to read the interview with Amy Schwartz and her partner
John Furness to discover. Want to with me?
“When we hatched the idea, we were digital nomads in Peru,
surfing every day and living a more relaxed lifestyle,” explains
cofounder Amy Schwartz, who created the company with her partner,
John Furness. Schwartz had heard of companies that help remote
workers travel the world, but none that cater specifically to
surfers with barefoot living in off-the-beaten-path locations, a
variety of waves, private apartments and reliable internet
24-7.
So they launched a remote working concept in Peru in early
2018, and the results have been more impressive than the founders
ever expected. “We didn’t set out with a cliche goal of changing
lives — we just wanted Unleash to open our clients to the practical
possibility of taking their work remote while surfing and
experiencing a new place,” says Schwartz. “Many of our clients have
reshaped their jobs, their priorities and their lives.”
We caught up with Schwartz and Furness to find out how
Unleash Surf is catering to a group of digital nomads who take
their work seriously but want more time to embrace slow travel. And
we found out their tips for starting and running a
business.
I still have absolutely no idea. Let’s skim the interview
ok?
What inspired you to create Unleash
Surf?
John Furness: I created my business so I could work remotely
and travel, but like many small business owners with that dream, my
mortgage and lifestyle closed in on me and I forgot that I could
make that leap if I wanted to. For years Amy and I had planned on
taking a few months to live and surf somewhere warm, where the
internet was good enough for me to run my business. Three years ago
we decided to escape the winter, so we bought plane tickets to Peru
— where Amy had done her masters studies — and rented an apartment
in a small, wave-rich town. I converted the extra bedroom into an
office, upgraded the internet and we spent our days living the
lifestyle we’d dreamed of: surfing as often as we wanted, getting
our work done, no commuting, exploring Peru and going on adventures
to places like Machu Picchu and Lobitos. We ate fresh healthy
foods, made friends and we built a community in a new place. We
realized how happy, healthy and productive we were on that trip and
wondered how we could create a business that offered other people a
similar experience, without quitting their job.
Still nothing. Do we keep going?
How does Unleash Surf work? Tell me about the
business model.
Schwartz: People who come on Unleash are generally
successful entrepreneurs, freelancers or people who work for cool
companies that encourage remote work. Or they’re taking time to
cultivate new ideas. Our groups are small, with 8-10 people from
all over the world. People who come on Unleash aren’t necessarily
beginner remote-workers, though: Many are experienced digital
nomads or remote workers who are a bit further along in their
careers and don’t have the time or energy to do all the legwork.
With Unleash, they just have to show up, surf, get their work done
and enjoy the amazing place we’re in.
Our clients come for two weeks, one month and up to three
months. We ensure that when they get off the plane, they don’t miss
a beat in terms of feeling at home. John and I personally take them
to their fully-equipped apartment, then on a walking tour of the
surf spots, markets, restaurants, juice stands and surf shops. We
introduce them to our friends and make sure they have everything
they need to get to work or to get in the water as soon as they
need.
If I used emojis I’d use the one with the puzzled face right
here but make it a lighter shade of brown to reflect Peru.
What’s in store for 2019?
Schwartz: We’ve got a roster of fascinating workshops lined
up, including learning to build a caballito de tortora — the
world’s first surf craft — with a local fisherman and learning to
ride it. We’ll be taking people to Peru’s second largest produce
market with a chef and then doing a cooking class with them. Taking
people to the hole-in-the-wall restaurant, where they make a
mouth-watering pecan-sauce fish unlike anything I’ve ever tasted.
And, of course, having sunset beers with the group on our cowork
space balcony and doing dance classes in traditional Peruvian
marinera, which has some similarities to flamenco.
If they did Cocaine + Surfing tours I’d totally go. Wait, is
that digital nomad travel means? Cocaine + Surfing? Buy here!