Blood Feud: Animal rights advocates ripping each other apart in surf paradise Hawaii as violent civil war breaks out between cat lovers and bird lovers!

Which side will win?

Hawaii, well known for its rainbows, shaved ice and very find surf, is currently being ripped apart at the very seams as animal rights advocates, typically thin-armed and shrill, are ripping each other apart in a vicious civil war pitting cat lovers against bird lovers.

The troubles started with an explosion of the island’s feral cat population, which has boomed into the millions.

There they sit, under swaying palms, licking their own filth, killing birds.

According to scientists, cats kill an estimated 2.4 billion birds in the U.S. alone. The problem is exacerbated in Hawaii where native birds are not used to feline business and, therefore, easier to munch.

To help reduce the feral cat population, cat advocates have encouraged a program called TNR or “trap neuter release.” Bird advocates declare it is not enough as, once released, the sexless cats continue to kill, kill, kill. They argue that the program should be rolled into TNSD or “trap neuter suffocate dissect.”

The two sides are now engaged in a well-funded propagandhi war, violently handing out glossy pamphlets etc. pleading their position.

Which side will win?

Are you Team Cat or Team Bird?

I once dissected a suffocated cat in school. It looked a little like Tunsis.

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Current World no. 1 Gabriel Medina swims to bottom of the sea, exacerbates a god in “stunning” new ad for Brazilian bank!

Bold n brave.

Surfing’s 2021 has belonged to Gabriel Medina. Oh, certainly Brazil’s Italo Ferriera won gold for their country in our grand Olympic debut, along with Carissa Moore for the U.S., and Japan-by-way-of-Huntington-Beach’s Kanoa Igarashi had a moment in the spotlight but none but no one has outshone Medina.

The two-time World Champion separated from his stepfather and mother, got married, embraced an easy-going attitude and crushed the Covid-ravaged World Surf League Championship Tour. Even though vaccine-hesitancy will keep him from competing at Teahupo’o, he is a lock for the one-day finals at Lower Trestles and could easily win the cup.

Even with so much busyness, success, though, the Man from Maresias had enough time to swim to the bottom of the sea and exacerbate the Greek god Poseidon for banking giant Bradesco.

Marketing director Márcio Parizotto turned to producer Stink and director Squarehead to create the “stunning” advertisement and said, “We decided to use the surfing metaphor, with a flat ocean, to show how important it is that we take the initiative in our own stories. We sought a message of optimism that would encourage people to pursue their objectives in a bold and proactive manner. And it is all personified by Medina, in an advertising fable that features Poseidon and conveys the brand’s commitment to helping its customers overcome their challenges.”

Beautiful.

Industry publication Adweek adds, “Keeping in line with its message of facing a different, more inclusive future, Bradesco’s YouTube channel has included sign language and subtitles, as well as audio descriptions. This initiative also includes a push for gender-neutral language and changing its expression, ‘For blind people to see, with ‘For everyone to see.’

It’s Medina’s world. We are just living in it.

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"You gonna paddle for that wave, punk?" (I know Danny Archer was a Rhodesian but... point remains.)
"You gonna paddle for that wave, punk?" (I know Danny Archer was a Rhodesian but... point remains.)

Listen: It is high time for surfers to turn their grumpy eyes to South Africa and hire mercenaries, that country’s finest export, to come police overcrowded lineups worldwide!

We all have gifts.

We, each nationality here, have skills and abilities gifted to us by our country of origin. Americans are very best at being boringly arrogant, Australians number one at broadcasting a party vibe while internally craving rigid control. Brazilians dance free though emotionally hair-triggered, the British have entirely given up, Scots mock the lack of will behind the British version of “giving up,” the French have invested all in making a perfect flat tire sound with lips and South Africans are mercenaries.

Oh the very best mercenaries in the entire world.

Executive Outcomes is one of the more famous group, founded in 1989 and traipsing across the rest of Africa fighting fights not theirs, but there have been many South African mercenaries and all are good, or, rather, skilled.

Which brings us to surfing. Our lineups are overcrowded, control has been lost. Even the grumpiest local who dreams of enforcing fears the inevitable lawsuit which brings us to the point.

South African mercenaries.

They are flown in, restore order by punching out a handful of fins, pointing a handful of VALs to the beach, gather up a handful of court appointments then head home pockets stuffed with money, mercenary hearts fulfilled.

Good, no?

I floated this on the Grit! podcast a few weeks ago but it was just gloriously embellished by a listener. Who, for example, stuffs the mercenary’s pocket full of money?

Ahhhh. That’s where he came in, from the parking lot of his DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) with the greatest idea to hit surf since the mid-tour cull.

It hits at the 1:02 mark but you should come in earlier than that because David Lee and I discuss Dave Prodan.

Listen here.

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Medina out, tells world via Twitch.

Two-time world champion Gabriel Medina sensationally pulls out of Tahiti tour event in bizarre live-gaming moment as unvaccinated status revealed; Kelly Slater, others, likely to follow!

"I’m not anti vax. I’m anti mandating medical procedures," says Kelly Slater. "Think I’ll wait for the antibodies naturally if I get COVID."

The Brazilian two-time world champ Gabriel Medina has revealed via the live video-streaming service Twitch that he ain’t going near the Tahiti Pro following next week’s Mex event, which may or may not run after Oaxaca shut down all beaches following a new COVID outbreak. 

Bedecked in jewels, Medina, who is twenty-seven, says he refused the Brazilian Olympic committee’s offer of a COVID-19 vax prior to the Tokyo Games, and therefore cannot meet France’s strict-ish quarantine laws. 

See, ‘cause he ain’t vaccinated, Medina would be forced into ten days of quarantine following Mex, meaning he’d miss the event. 

“There’s no time to go from Mexico to there, because it’s one after the other. I’ll be forced not to go,” said Medina. “But good. I can rule out a stage, so it’s good.”

And Medina isn’t going to be the only surfer choosing one of the other contest given some high-profile surfers’ objections to the COVID vaccination.

Two months ago in a social media stoush, Kelly Slater revealed he wasn’t anti getting jabbed, necessarily, but wanted to sit back a little, examine the side-effects.

Responding to a claim that he was pushing “anti-vax nonsense”, Slater wrote,

“Why does this account always end up with these triggered, bitchy people who can’t take a joke? And second, I’m not anti vax. I’m anti mandating medical procedures. But I’ve never even pushed that.”

Asked whether he’d be getting the vaccine, Slater wrote, “probably not anytime soon… It hasn’t been studied long enough to know long term cons. A friend’s dad also died a couple days after getting it from blood clots, so there’s that. Think I’ll wait for the antibodies naturally if I get COVID.”

And, although no longer on tour, the much-loved former world number two, Taj Burrow, warned his 326,000 followers back in May of the folly of vaccination.

“Do not get the poisonous needle,” wrote Tez.

Medina’s decision reveals one of the two flaws in the Finals Day format; that a surfer with enough wins in the first half of the year can pick and choose which contests he appears in during the back half.

Heady days etc.

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San Francisco’s lightly controversial district attorney Chesa Boudin revealed as proud VAL: “And that’s Samoa – the first wave I got barreled in. I was on this backpacking trip and found this resort…”

"You go out on a boat, shallow reef …”

The rise of the VAL, or vulnerable adult learner, will be one of the great marking features of 2015-2025 when historians look back and lionize this age. Grown men and women deciding to pursue surfing, whole-heartedly, splashing out into the great unknown, chins out and brave but also older.

Oh and we know the wonderful story of Jonah Hill, Patron Saint of VALs, and World Surf League CEO Erik Logan, Oklahoman who discovered power inside a wetsuit, but now let us learn about San Francisco’s lightly controversial district attorney Chesa Boudin who lives in Ocean Beach and, according to a new profile in New York Magazine, “surfs many days a week before dawn” at the “famously difficult break where winter waves can exceed 15 feet” though this has not always been the case as Boudin picked up our surfing after graduating from Yale Law school at the ripe VAL age of 31.

The magazine was profiling Boudin due the light controversy surrounding his tenure as San Francisco’s DA. Videos of mass burglary and theft have circulated online, images of very full tent cities crowding sidewalks, leading many to believe that his progressive attitude toward crime has made San Francisco a lawless pit.

The writer, famous Daniel Duane, meets Boudin in his office and describes thusly:

Boudin has thin brown hair and a scraggly beard that barely camouflages a gigantic jaw. The first time we met, at his office in Potrero Hill, a light-industrial neighborhood popular with start-ups, he wore a fashionable gray-blue suit; he was bound for a political event later in the afternoon. On a wall opposite his desk hung framed photographs of Boudin surfing substantial waves. He pointed to one and said, with the vowels of a Midwesterner and the rapid-fire cadence of a trial lawyer, “That’s me right there in El Salvador. And that’s Samoa — the first wave I got barreled in. I was on this backpacking trip, and I found this resort. You go out on a boat, shallow reef …”

A VAL trifecta, El Salvador, Samoa, backpacking discoveries. Boudin then swings to his childhood, fascinatingly the son of two Weather Underground radicals, his rise into law and politics and the troubles he is facing in San Francisco today. Well worth a read but, for our purposes, Boudin’s position, his stature and his open love of surfing is what will most interest historians.

Does the VAL now own surfing entirely?

Are we mere purposeless danglers?

Like appendixes?

Much to ponder.

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