“Hey BL, how’s that Devon patch you’re sportin’ on the top of your head?”

A couple of years back, BeachGrit outed the world champion surfer Barton Lynch as a filthy communist bastard, which you can read here, and which was swiftly refuted, here. 

Barton Lynch, who is now sixty, clinched the 1988 world title at perfect eight-to-twelve-foot Pipeline, although in later years he became more famous for his oratorical gymkhanas on WSL broadcasts.

(Barton Lynch was the sport’s most popular broadcaster before being dumped by the WSL for, it was rumoured, his role in the activist group Voices4Choices, which questioned vaccine mandates and the role of government during the COVID pandemic.)

The surf community was, rightly, apoplectic with the father of competitive surfing Ian Cairns writing, “You’re the only commentator that illuminates concepts and situations in heats, that former champions recognize as well. These insights are critical explanations to the hoped for expanded WSL audience. Otherwise it’s ongoing blah blah blah. Their loss and your gain!”

Filipe Toledo’s daddy Rich added, “Let’s go!!! We missing u papa Smurf.”

Since the dumping, Barton Lynch has poured his considerable skill and insight into a podcast called The Stoked Bloke Show, which he operates with Peter King, the musician, pro surfer and former bandmate of Kelly Slater.

In the latest episode, Lynch describes the day in 2010 he learned he was suffering male pattern baldness. Lynch tells King he was coaching the then thirteen-year-old Australian surfer Holly Dawn when she looked at him and said,

“Hey BL, how’s that Devon patch you’re sportin’ on the top of your head?”

“What’s a Devon patch?” asks King.

“Devon is processed meat,” explains Lynch, “like bologna. We would call a Devon patch the round patch of baldness on a human’s head.”

“I had no idea,” says Lynch. “I didn’t have an inkling I was balding. When there was no one home, I sneaked into the bathroom and…ooooohhhhh… I’ve got a bald patch!”

Barton Lynch wears his Devon well, let it be said, bringing the viewer’s eyes away from his crown with a beard reminiscent of the German philosopher and political theorist Karl Marx.

But don’t be fooled.

“I am for free market capitalism and democracy 100%,” says Lynch. “Not fond of Communism or state control in any way.”

 

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A post shared by Barton Lynch (@barton_lynch)

 

"Sharks have horns now?"

Earlier this year, and following a series of damning exposés by Chas Smith, here, here, here, here and here, Jen See wrote of the terrible fate befalling writers at Surfer mag.

“You picture yourself in Hawaii watching beautifully tanned surfers ride giant blue waves. You see yourself at San Onofre, where you’ve somehow instantly become a graceful and accomplished longboarder.

“Instead, your job looks nothing like any of these things. Using AI tools, you scrape social media for trending news. Then using another tool, trained on Surfer’s legacy digital content, you produce a story. You do that many times each day.

“You never talk to another person, never go anywhere, never learn to noseride at San-O. Your job is to punch the buttons to create the content that feeds the search engine bots that crawl the internet all day, every day. Eventually, it would have to start to feel like you were becoming one of the bots, yourself.”

Yesterday, Surfer published a story about a middle-aged man bitten on the ankle by what was, possibly, a shark with the headline “Shark gores windsurfer in Western Australia on Christmas Eve.”

“This is a developing story,” the writer gravely announced.

Surf fans, who will rarely suffer a fool and who are wildly overrepresented in the field of pedantry, were unimpressed, pointing out the thoughtless use of the adjective “gored” in the headline.

“Gores”??? They have horns now? The dude was bitten on the ankle and that’s the headline? Surfer mag has jumped the shark.

“(Gored, definition) Blood that has been shed, especially as a result of violence.”

“Gored implies horns in the united states.”

“And the rest of the English speaking world…”

“Maybe it was a bull shark?”

“Sharks have horns in Australia? Gored? Seriously?”

“Since when do sharks have horns?”

“If the shark gored, it must have been extremely hоrnее.”

“Gored? Sharks have horns? Tusks maybe? Get someone educated to write the header.”

“Gored? Must have been a bull shark.”

“Sharks don’t ‘gore’, media…”

“to wound (a person or another animal) with a horn or tusk”

“Is whoever wrote this not versed in the english language? Sharks bite, they don’t gore.”

“I gored my wife last night.”

“GORED !!????….must have been a Narwhal whale that crossbred with a shark, therefore it must have been a narwhal shark.”

For the layman,

“If you stabbed someone with a sword, you gored them. An animal with sharp horns, like a bull, can gore a person to death. Gore is also blood that’s clotting in a wound.”

To wit, in the tabloid age  sharks maul, bulls gore.