DJ FISHER with Chris Hemsworth and an artist's impression of his Palm Beach tower.

Randy DJ FISHER set to demolish 1950’s beach shack to build nine-storey tower with “unobstructed beach views”

FISHER more than the sum of his outrageous sexual gambits and bank of techno anthems.

Only two years ago, the former-pro-surfer-turned-DJ Paul Fisher, was on a podcast revealing his sexually explicit homosexual fantasies involving Chris Hemsworth and Connor McGregor. 

“I would definitely have to fuck Hemsworth,” said FISHER as he played a game called Fuck, Marry, Kill. “That thing, imagine slapping that fucking arse, it’s pretty good.”

FISHER then nominated the former UFC champion in both the featherweight and lightweight divisions Conor McGregor as someone whom he would enjoy getting down on his knees behind before, cock red as a cheap piece of fishing tackle, working away like a billy goat.

No fuck in vain, as they say.

Little did the world know that randy DJ FISHER was more than the sum of these outrageous sexual gambits and a bank of techno anthems including the wildly anti-work and sexually explosive Just Feels Tight. 

Quietly, FISHER had been buying up exceptional pieces of beachfront land at Palm Beach on Queensland’s Gold Coast.

In 2020, he spent $A2.1 million for a 4000 square foot parcel and followed that up when he bought the neighbouring block three years later for $A3.1 mill. 

Now his plans for a gorgeous nine-storey tower comprising six three bedders and a four-bed penthouse with a rooftop terrace, have been revealed. Two houses, including a 1950’s beach shack, will be demolished for the build. 

According to documents lodged with council, ‘

“The podium base takes reference from the beach shack vernacular of Palm Beach, symbolised by character brickwork” and “This project prioritises spaciousness and liveability, catering to families while emphasising natural light, ventilation, and panoramic views.”

Fisher’s company, YLB Property Developments reflects the initial’s of FISHER’s 2019 hit You Little Beauty. 

Palm Beach is what you would call a recovering suburb, at least if you wanted to be kind. There’s a veneer of hipness, like most of the Gold Coast, but you don’t have to scratch too hard to find the hopelessness that lays just beneath.

Dirty apartments with kids curled under dirty fur blankets. Babies sucking on methadone lozenges. Open cans and cigarettes on the floor. The TV on a perpetual whining cycle. Unemployment (yeah, there’s a social security building on the beachside of the highway) is its major trade. Welcome to Palm-y.

But then there’s the beach, a stretch, five or so miles long, from first avenue on its southern border to 28th in the north. It’s sand so the quality varies but, often, with the wind out of the south, and the swell a little east, you’ll be struck by how good it gets. I lived there for a few years and found it a sublime escape from the crowds and the predictability of the points.

Another notable resident of Palm Beach is Kelly Slater, who dropped just over two mill for a whole-floor beachfront apartment, on sexy little Jefferson Lane.

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Kelly Slater at his Surf Ranch.
Kelly Slater at his Surf Ranch.

Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch submits bid to host surfing at LA ’28 Olympics!

Cowboy hat into the five rings.

The ’24 Paris Games is just barely in the rearview, the joys still reverberating across valleys, around mountains and over oceans. Surfing’s second Olympic offering, conducted in French Polynesia, was a mixed bag. An iconic image of Gabriel Medina going viral and a day so big and terrifying that the King of Teahupoo Filipe Toledo became too scared to paddle, on one hand. Small, inconsistent, lully days, on the other hand.

At the end, the other hand seemed to have a firmer grip with such stalwarts as JP Currie claiming that if surfing is to, indeed, have any Olympic future, the only real option is to throw it into a tank where

To wit, an impeccable source has shared that Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch has thrown its cowboy hat into the ring to host the surfing shortboard portion of LA ’28.

The plow, some 200 miles up the 5 freeway from Los Angeles in the middle of an industrial farming hellscape, is not the palm tree’d postcard Southern California beach scene

Thoughts?

I have a solid feeling that Huntington Beach will win, at the end, even though brave LGBTQ+ Olympic hopefuls will be very discouraged. Surf City, USA didn’t come by the moniker lightly, flashing teeth and biting Santa Cruz hard in order to win the dub. Lemoore, I’d imagine, would experience a greater grape of wrath.

Back to Olympic surfing, though. If Huntington doesn’t snuff the flame right out, do you think Brisbane ’32 will re-ignite it bigly?

Mick Fanning coming out of retirement to ride for the Southern Cross?

David Lee Scales and I did not discuss Mick Fanning, specifically, during our weekly chat, but did get into a savage Layne Beachley story. You must hear to believe.

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Shannon Hughes (right) interviews the great Kelly Slater.
Shannon Hughes (right) interviews the great Kelly Slater.

Former World Surf League commentator Shannon Hughes reveals booth to be house of toxic sexist horrors

"In 2022. I lost the majority of my work because a man groped me and I said something about it."

Professional surfing and its commentary form one of the most life’s most delicate tangos. The professional surfer showcasing his or her talent, trying to best an opponent by achieving speed, power and flow. The commentator, in booth, describing the nuances of priority, interference, speed, power and flow. The surf fan, watching and listening at home, is mesmerized by it all and, likely, imagines the commentary booth to be a paradise of sorts.

Shock, then, today when the very popular surf commentator Shannon Hughes revealed it to be a house of toxic sexist horrors. Taking to Instagram, the talented voice pulled no punches in describing the bad behavior, though not detailing which professional surfing governing body for which she was calling the action.

“In 2022,” she wrote, “I lost the majority of my work because a man groped me and I said something about it. In 2023, I had a producer aggressively seek to stop me from commentating with another woman because he considered it ‘unprofessional’ for two women to comentate together in sport. Almost a decade ago now, my male co-commentator did everything he could to not let me speak on air. At the end of the day, he chastised the producers for putting me and another woman alongside him, before stating in front of a group of ourpeers that he refused to ever work with a woman in the booth again.”

Extremely disturbing.

Hughes, who just finished calling the Olympics, signaled that she is stepping away from surf commentary in order to heal various ailments but also promised to return for the sake of women in sport.

Here’s to hoping the return comes sooner rather than later.

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Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe slammed by NY Times.
NY Times film critic Glenn Kenny not impressed by dolly-cock-surf film Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe, which opens in US cinemas tomoz, Friday, August 16.

New York Times slams Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe as “spectacularly inane” and “humongously bad”

The Times on the wrong side of history again!

It is impossible for mainstream media, and none are as mainstream as the New York Times, a race-obsessed left-tilting newspaper that swings between parody and propaganda, to write about surfing without some sorta nod to 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. 

The Times’ film critic Glenn Kenny, whose review of Vaughan Blakey and Nick Pollet’s dollys-with-cocks animated film The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe, which opens in US cinemas tomoz, doesn’t waste a single second, leading with:

Jeff Spicoli, the surfing-obsessed truant portrayed memorably by Sean Penn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982), may have been an airhead, but he had a vocabulary. Things he enjoyed were “gnarly” or “humongous.” 

Later in the huffy review,

The dolls — with minimally articulated limbs — are made to embody Fanning and a few other real-life surf stars.

These figures (the animation makes the puppetry of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “Team America: World Police” look like “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) enact an asinine story of how a vaccine eradicated all memory of surfing, and a mission to bring the activity back. The line “Ten years ago a sport existed, it was called surfing, and you dominated it” — emphasized with an expletive — is repeated more times than anyone would be amused to hear it.

And wraps with, 

The climax of the movie features the dolls, many of them with faces smeared with brown goo, fighting each other with sex toys. After this, it looks as if a longer segment of surfing is in store. One’s relief then is palpable. But brief. The doll nonsense soon resumes, and then, mercifully, come the end credits.

The premise for the film, as you know, is beautiful: It is ten years in the future and a virus has hit and John Fig, played by Vaughan, has made a vaccine to save everyone but the vax wipes out everyone’s memory of surfing.

“Mick’s a yogi meditation guru bogan. Griff is a hyped-up guy stuck in the desert who hasn’t seen anyone in years, Wilko is a cowboy, Ando is a ninja, Mason is a volcano tour guide in Hawaii and Jack’s trying to be a rock star but he’s real bad,” says director Nick Pollet.

The idea for the dolls came from Mick Fanning’s retirement dinner when each guest was gifted a bobble-headed Mick.

“It was on my desk and I was tinkering around and I ripped the head off it, grabbed a Superman doll from my kid, ripped the head off that and put Mick’s head on it. Then I started mucking around with a green screen,” says Pollet.

For three hundred dollars each, and after much to and froing with a factory in China, Nick had reasonable facsimiles of the cast, including the WSL commentators Ronnie Blakey, who is also Vaughan’s brother, and Joe Turpel, and surfers Mick Fanning, Mason Ho, Griffin Colapinto, Jack Freestone, Matt Wilkinson and Craig Anderson.

“They all came with a bag of dicks and that’s the reason there’s so many dicks in the movie,” says Nick, revealing a crucial plot line.

Vaughan Blakey was thrilled by the review in the New York Times telling BeachGrit,

“I never in my wildest dreams thought the military industrial complex-sympathising war propagandists and socials elites at the New York Times would run a critical eye over our ninety-minute surfy dick, balls and fart joke! I am thrilled to bits!”

He qualifies the thrill.

“The bit that says we’re no Spicoli kinda hurts but I guess I can cop that. Having fun is not for everyone.”

It isn’t the first time the Times has been on the wrong side of history.

Over the course of World War II the Times shunted stories about Nazi death camps into the back pages, its Jewish owner, the anti-Zionist Arty Sulzberger believing European Jews were “responsible for their own demise in the Holocaust.”

Lately, editorialising around the Duke University lacrosse case and the furore over historical inaccuracies in the 1619 Project has dulled the titan’s once untarnishable rep to the dullest sheen. 

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Kelly Slater fanning peace in Abu Dhabi.
Kelly Slater fanning peace in Abu Dhabi.

Tears of joy in Middle East as World Surf League adds Abu Dhabi to Championship Tour!

Peace in our time.

The Middle East is a wonderful region, one of my favorite in the whole world, though often beset with tension. Unrest. Strife. Etc. You can image the pure euphoria, then, this morning with the announcement that one of the greatest non-governmental organizations on earth, the World Surf League, will be hosting both a Championship Tour and Longboarding event in Kelly Slater’s new Abu Dhabi wave tank.

“We’re looking forward to seeing what the Surf Abu Dhabi facility can deliver for the world’s best surfers – and the broader surfing world – in the future,” said World Surf League CEO Ryan Crosby. “Both the evolving wave technology and the region itself present interesting opportunities for the WSL, and we’re excited to see that come to life in the coming months.”

“The collaboration with Kelly Slater Wave Company and Surf Abu Dhabi allows us to build a destination ready to welcome surfers from all levels and communities and nurture a new generation of surfers in the region. Together, we’ve created a facility that provides perfect waves time and time again, new wave profiles suitable for every level, and the uniqueness of this being the first saltwater-based wave pool. We can’t wait to welcome the world’s best surfers and all the new fans this region is bringing to the sport,” said Bill O’Regan, Group CEO at Q Holding.

“The collaboration with the Kelly Slater Wave Company and Surf Abu Dhabi showcases our creation of a world-class facility that will provide perfect waves to a region to help grow an entirely new Surf Community in Abu Dhabi,” said Jeff Fleeher, Kelly Slater Wave Company President. “The partnership with the WSL now amplifies this opportunity, creating a platform to showcase the world’s best surfers to both new and existing fans, seated in the heart of Hudayriat Island’s broader sports ecosystem.”

All very cool. Peace in our time.

Unless.

A picture surfaces of three Australians from the same small island and Brazil’s Pedro Scooby gets a hold of it via WhatsApp.

Then all bets off.

Feelings, though. Do you have any? Will the “world’s longest manmade barrel” be more dynamic than its Lemoore, California sister?

More as the story develops.

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