In troubling sign that Hawaiian gods may be
growing fed up, Florida boat gets struck by lightning seconds after
profoundly caucasian man flashes culturally appropriated shaka at
camera!
By Chas Smith
The Wrath of Kane.
A boat carrying seven people, motoring off the
shore of Clearwater, Florida, was struck by lightning, days ago,
causing massive engine failure though, miraculously, none of the
passengers were injured. Per news
reporting:
The group was participating in a fishing tournament Saturday
when their “39-foot personal vessel” got caught in a storm and was
struck by lightning, according to a press release from the Coast
Guard.
Immediately in need of a rescue, the five women and two men
aboard were then brought to safety without medical concerns, and
were greeted by family members when they returned to an air
station, the Coast Guard said.
“Lightning storms are routinely encountered in the Florida
maritime environment and can pose a significant hazard to boaters,”
Lt. David McKinley, a Coast Guard pilot, said in a statement.
“Fortunately, the boaters in this case were well prepared with all
necessary safety equipment including an EPIRB, flares, and a marine
VHF radio to ensure a quick and efficient rescue.”
Unsaid is the fact that, milliseconds before the bolt smash, a
deeply caucasian gentleman can be seen throwing a high and tight
shaka at the camera.
Might it be that the Hawaiian gods have simply had enough?
One haole too many culturally appropriating?
Possibly and, if true, those going to work at The
Inertia’s offices should demand danger pay.
Scientology’s “Super Power Building” also happens to be in
Clearwater. The colossal Mediterranean Revival-style structure can
be seen from most perches in Clearwater, even the deck of the
world’s first Hooters, which is in Clearwater too.
I was there, once, and decided to walk in to the Super Power
Building but was met by a rather angry man in a dark suit who told
me that I was not allowed. I was then ushered down the street by a
cadre of younger people wearing khaki pants and light blue polo
shirts. Some had walkie-talkies and they charted my progress to my
rental Fiat then glared at me when I drove away.
Uninviting though I’m sure I deserved.
Anyhow, would you take Kane, the Hawaiian god of thunder and
lightning, or L. Ron Hubbard, the beloved Scientology teacher and
friend, in a celestial battle royale?
What if John Travolta was tag teaming with L. Ron?
Hmmmm.
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High-performance.
Pop sensation Shakira embraces cathartic
properties of high-performance surfing in order to mend damaged
heart after breakup with cheating soccer stud!
By Chas Smith
Healing.
We, each of us, use surfing to help with life’s
various lows. There is something cathartic in jumping into the
drink, paddling, catching, standing, blow-tail reversing. Something
healing. The world’s greatest athlete, Kelly Slater, revealed
yesterday that he used surfing to fill a giant void in
his heart and, today, we learn that pop sensation Shakira is using
the same too in order to spackle her own ticker back together.
The “hips don’t lie” songstress has been tied to Spanish
football stud Gerard Pique except the happy coupling came to a
sudden end, recently, with speculation running wild that he was not
true and other, less salacious, gossip suggesting the split is due
financial reasonings. Specifically, that Pique asked Shakira to
invest in something-rather-else but the two don’t mix monies and so
Shakira became frustrated.
Whatever the case, Colombian compatriot Carlos
Vives said, “She is sad. I was definitely sad, it’s a
very tough time when you have such a beautiful family.”
Ah, but surfing. Shakira is said to be on a surf vacation in
northern Spain, Oyambre Beach to be exact, and absolutely ripping,
healing. You may also recall that she recently attempted to
make connection with the
aforementioned Slater via Instagram.
Might he join her or is northern Spain too much like Brazil for
him? MagicSeaweed is claiming solid 3 – 5ft surf. That’s 20 – 35ft
Surfline.
Punchy.
Back to you, though. What interior pain do treat with
surfing?
Grouchiness?
Nice.
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Louie Hamilton, spotted by TMZ sports at Jonah HIll's
Malibu Paradise. | Photo: TMZ Sports
BIPOC race-car hero Lewis Hamilton escapes
FI racism imbroglio with surf session at Jonah Hill’s secret Malibu
paradise! “The guy clearly knows what he’s doing … propping himself
up on the board and maintaining his balance throughout the
run!”
With his trademark sun-kissed braids pulled into a sensible bun,
Hamilton was filmed out paddling a man on the shoulder of a little
wave before brutally fading what appears to be a uterus-bearer on
the inside.
The thirty-seven-year-old world #6 polishes off the wave with a
cool “what-me-worry” style, even hooking his anchor through several
small turns.
“The guy clearly knows what he’s doing … propping himself up on
the board and maintaining his balance throughout the run (no
porpoising here, thankfully),” writes TMZ Sports.
What I saw was pro surfing that in certain moments felt
like meaningful sport. The quality of the waves was at times
rendered irrelevant by surfers with the enthusiasm and skillset to
perform regardless. This is a magic touch for this
game.
Brazil is everything pro surfing needs to
be: “Give me passion, fury, tears, and death threats. I want epic
battles. Even if that means dirty surfing and compromised style for
scores!”
By JP Currie
And there was evening and there was morning, and
then there was J-Bay.
Give me an entirely Brazilian finals day any
day.
Give me passion, fury, tears, and death threats. Give me
whistling that could piece armour. Give me writhing throngs of
tanned bodies yowling their support for countrymen doing battle in
mediocre waves.
Shit, give me all powerful deities that mainline professional
surfing for kicks.
Brazil is what pro surfing needs to be.
This was clear from the hooter today as Italo Ferreira and Sammy
Pupo battled for the first wave, Ferreira paddling partially over
Pupo’s back. It wasn’t clear if words were exchanged before or
after, but the contact was enough for Italo to flip his board over
and examine it for damage.
Countrymen they may be, friends uncertain, but it was clear that
both were happy to leave the water with the steely taste of blood
in their mouths.
That’s what competition is.
It was clear again at heat end when Pupo sat on Italo holding
priority. He held a narrow lead built in the opening exchanges and
the waves had been slow ever since.
Ferreira managed to sell him on a dud with less than a minute
left, and in doing so gave himself one last swing. He needed
something in the range of seven when he took off on a smaller
wave.
He surfed it hard, claimed it harder, and it was not enough.
Back to the drawing board once again for Italo. Despite sitting
comfortably third in the rankings, he’s still looking for his first
final of the year.
Next into the arena were Filipe Toledo and Yago Dora. The
additional ceremony of the surfers standing side-by-side on the
blue carpeted runway that led from the event site to the beach was
a nice touch. It had the tone of a UFC face-off at the weigh-in and
added drama amidst the baying crowd. It should be a regular
feature.
Turpel, with his inimitable psilocybiny delivery, called them
“two very peaceful human beings”.
Presumably he found somewhere to park his flying saucer.
The scoring in the second semi was erratic.
(A quick aside, to watch this I had to go to YouTube because the
WSL app wasn’t working. It often fails in its most basic purpose of
actually showing the surfing. As a power-user, this causes me great
anguish.)
With his first two waves Yago Dora had Filipe comboed, thanks to
an 8.67 that seemed as dubious as his moustache.
(He does look quite Gerry-like though, right? Do you think he
took Ashton’s flirtation to heart?)
Toledo quickly broke combo with an 8.43 which to my eye didn’t
look cleanly finished. Somewhere, Caroline Marks should have been
apoplectic and appalled.
Judges continued to be unnerved by Pritamo loitering over their
shoulders and overriding their scores, giving Toledo a 4.93 for an
alley-oop that would’ve scored in the high eights for Jackson
Baker.
I was building IKEA furniture whilst I watched the replay of
this, a small desk for the corner of my bedroom where I sit now,
for rolling out of bed in unsociable hours to tap out missives
about surfing.
The end product is fine. It does a necessary job, but it is
cheap, flimsy and underwhelming.
This is essentially how Filipe’s aerial surfing sometimes
appears, flat-pack furniture.
The judges in their own flimsy tower clearly regretted reacting
to Pritamo’s barks and compensated for the 4.93 by awarding an 8.93
and heat victory to Toledo for two turns.
On balance he probably won it, but I looked at the pieces of
white lacquered MDF laid out in front of me and sighed, knowing
things could be better.
Chris Cote knew this, too, with a working man’s highbrow
allusion to Hemmingway.
“Courage is grace under pressure,” he said. I was unsure of the
context.
Fair play to Cote, though.
Even if he is occasionally the auditory equivalent of a Jackson
Pollock painting, god loves a trier. He sent me a clip of his
“research” the other day on Twitter when I probed him about how
much he prepared. Remind me to share, if you’re interested.
He’s grown on me a bit, to be honest. As, more bizarrely, did
Pete Mel. He was more upbeat than usual, and I’d sooner listen to
his weather knowledge than Kaipo’s mangled meteorology.
The final was a dud, which was a shame because there was a real
sporting crowd in attendance. For once, the noise levels matched
the WSL broadcast team hyperbole. They deserved a competitive
heat.
What they got instead was a shut out from the off, courtesy of
Toledo’s ten.
What did you make of it? It didn’t scream ten points to me, but
perhaps I was fumbling with plastic-packaged dowels.
Afterwards, the vivacious Sammy Pupo just tried too hard,
boosting monster air attempts that disconnected him from both his
board and the likelihood of breaking the combination.
Toledo victory. Near perfect heat. (According to the score, at
least.)
How was Rio for you in the end?
I’d guess I watched a lot more than you.
What I saw was pro surfing that in certain moments felt like
meaningful sport. The quality of the waves was at times rendered
irrelevant by surfers with the enthusiasm and skillset to perform
regardless. This is a magic touch for this game.
Give me a full Brazilian tour and I’d watch. All Brazilian
surfers, venues and crowds.
This is intended as sporting entertainment, and that’s exactly
what this would give us.
As much as I can appreciate the lackadaisical finesse of the
likes of John Florence, I’m happy to watch well-produced versions
of it.
If I’m tuning into live sport I want epic battles. And if that
means a little bit of dirty surfing and compromised style for
scores, then so be it.
If we look upon all that was made, we see it was good.
And there was evening and there was morning, and then there was
J-Bay.
Nice one, god.
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Happy days.
World’s greatest athlete Kelly Slater
removes pants, delivers most stirring interview yet detailing wild
highs and crushing lows: “Just looking down . . . like this would
all be over in a few seconds. That’s where my mind was. . . . I was
suicidal for a minute.”
By Chas Smith
In black and white.
Kelly Slater is the latest coverboy for
legendary athletic publication Sports
Illustrated and provides new insight as to what makes
him tick and how long he plans to keep being the center of our
attentions. The interview begins with the 11x world champion, his
girlfriend, and the journalist Brandon Sneed driving south from LAX
to San Clemente.
It is hot, apparently, so hot that Slater must remove his pants
in order to cool.
It is taken as metaphor.
And, I suppose it is apt. Of all the many Kelly Slater chats
I’ve both conducted and read, this one seems… most raw. The
just-north-of-fifty-year-old discusses his interior garden, for
example, and what seems to be its manic landscape:
Slater says he, too, experiences emotions with a profound
intensity, beyond the norm. Extreme highs and lows. Early on, those
highs came with fame and fortune and that world championship at 20,
clinched at Pipeline. It was a hell of a crest for a self-described
redneck from the Space Coast. But the lows came just as heavy, one
year later. He ended an engagement, he lost the world title and he
found himself six figures in debt. He has never publicly shared the
depths that his anguish reached, but emotionally he felt almost
like he was pinned against the reef again. He says that one night
he found himself at the edge of an apartment building’s roof in
Coolangatta, on Australia’s Gold Coast, with a beautiful view of
the eastern Indian Ocean. He remembers “just looking down . . .
like this would all be over in a few seconds. That’s where my mind
was. . . . I was suicidal for a minute.”
His response to the great blackness:
To quell this he says he tried therapy (but inconsistently
at the time) and antidepressants (but he didn’t like how they
numbed him). He cares too much about his body to escape into drugs,
and he found drinking’s hangover a waste of time. Instead, in these
peaks and valleys, he says surfing became a place to funnel those
emotions, redirecting them toward the waves. “I learned how to
focus and channel that energy [into competition]. It consumed me. I
became really obsessive about it.”
The coming career end:
He can picture it. Surfing just to surf. Maybe he’ll taper
off, a couple of competitions each year, then let it all go.
“There’s a part of everyone that, when they quit, becomes a little
empty,” he says. He does wonder, though, what might fill that void.
“Maybe something could.” But he won’t know until he lets this go.
“Not until [surfing]’s done.”
And the most important lesson he has learned throughout his
half-century:
The big lesson has been simple: “I definitely have learned
to be kinder to myself,” he says. “I used to have a really negative
internal dialogue.”
Who knew?
Tom Brady is also consulted and shares secrets of greatness.
Tony Hawk too. Slater eventually puts his pants on but then,
presumably, takes them off again to get a painful massage wherein
the masseuse castigates him for being a wimp.
