"Police officers need to be accountable, and so do the rest of us."

Hawaiian-born Shane Dorian, the second-best big-wave surfer in the world if we’re to accept the notion that Kai Lenny is untouchable, has waded into the furore surrounding the fatal shooting of a black teenage girl by a cop in Columbus, Ohio, last Tuesday. 

Ma’Khia Bryant, who was sixteen, was shot in the back by a cop as she screamed “I’m gonna stab the fuck out of you, bitch,” and attempted to drive her eight-inch blade into a girl in a pink tracksuit, and while her daddy kicked hell out of another girl on the ground. 

According to CNN, the fight was between Ma’Khia and two other former foster children over a “messy house and unmade bed”.

In a recording of the 911 that got the cops there in the first place a female voice says, “Get here now! We got…girls here trying to fight us, trying to stab us, trying to put her hands on our grandma. We need a police officer here now.”

As it has with other police shootings of African-Americans, mainstream media went full-throttle on the race card, cops got a blood-lust for hunting blacks etc. The basketball star LeBron James added a little of his own fuel to the fire when he tweeted, “You’re next” alongside a photo of the cop and an emoji of an hourglass. 

Now, Shane Dorian, who is forty-eight and who was the world number four in 2000, has gone to Instagram to tell his almost half-a-million followers, 

“Would not want to be a police officer these days. Thankfully this officer was able to save this girl’s life. The media is so offed with this stuff. Pushing a narrative that brings them ratings. Police officers need to be accountable, and so do the rest of us. Breaking the law should have consequences fo police officers, and for the rest of us.”

Alongside a CNN logo, Doz writes, “Sketchy media outlet.” 

Fair comment, I’d suggest.

Fifties-fab and pregnant with the fingerprints of the Gold Coast's most successful surfer ever… 

The world surfing champion turned property tycoon Mick Fanning has listed his “retro beach pad” at 2/219 Boundary Street, Rainbow Bay to rent for a very affordable four hundred dollars per week, with a sixteen-hundred dollar surety, refundable if you don’t destroy the joint. 

The apartment, one of two in the duplex, features two bedrooms, one bathroom, and is, even at the slowest canter, or with legs heavy from much surfing, ten minutes walk from the Snapper Rocks jump rock (if you dare). 

Mick, who is forty, bought the duplex in 2005 and two years before his first world title, for $1.39 million. 

The following year he bought another joint for $1.2 mill and in 2007 swiped his card on an apartment block in the same street, number 213, for $3.1 million before selling it in February, this year, for $2.86 mill.

The shock loss, close to a mill after a fancy reno and buying and selling costs and maintenance, was a lesson in the caprices of the Australian property market. 

Rent Mick’s apartment here, move in date May 7. 

Carson joins titans of the creative game including directors Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee on Masterclass… 

The surfer David Carson is the world’s most imitated graphic designer, at least among magazines that do “hip” and “edge” and who like to break every typographic rule there is while straight-jacketing themselves to another set of strictures.

Carson, who is sixty-five, re-tooled Surfer magazine in 1991, Matt Warshaw calling his work “jarring but innovative”, and added “a majority felt, as one Pasadena subscriber put it, that the new look was “jumbled, ugly, chaotic and hard to read.”

The prestigious Harvard Graduate School of Design asked Carson to create publicity and posters. Apple called him one of the 30 most Influential Mac users ever. London Creative Review magazine named him the most famous graphic designer on the planet.

A big name, therefore, in the design game.

Now, thanks to online education platform Masterclass, you can sign up for thirteen lessons in graphic design from the little master whose surfer bona fides are proved by the fact he was once invited to the prestigious Smirnoff Pro Am in Hawaii.

Lessons include, An intuitive approach to design, send a message with typography, using photography in design, developing a logo, life as a working designer, tapping into the power of colour, collage art for designers, working with clients, designing impactful magazines , designing your future and making it happen.

A hundred and eighty, US, buys a yearly sub to Masterclass, which includes skateboarding with Tony Hawke, shooting threes with Steph Curry, how to make grits with Gordon Ramsey, self-expression and authenticity with Ru Paul and so on.

Regular readers will recall Carson’s brush on the island of Tortola, where he keeps a fine spread overlooking the blue-water right-hander Cane Garden Bay, at the height of COVID mania.

As the island bunkered down to fight the spread of Coz-vid number nineteen, Carson flouted its six-day long twenty-four hour lockdown law to ride empty three-to-four-foot CGB, posting the event on his Instagram page.

Six years ago, Carson designed, at BeachGrit‘s behest, 151 new logos for the WSL.

The existing logo, he said, “has no soul. The logo just doesn’t represent the sport very well. It’s pedestrian, unoriginal, forgettable,  safe, gentrified and corporate. All things surfing is NOT, at least to me.”

Readers were divided. 

A surfer to the bone but also with a few things to say about making pretty pictures.