Perverted sales pitch for Lost asymmetrical surfboards… 

This short is a sales pitch for Lost’s asymmetrical surfboards, a design that’s been around even since daddy was swapping wet kisses for milkshakes and hot butterscotch fudge.

The theory is easy enough: a shorter rail on your heel side, ’cause we all tend to surf in the pocket on our backhand, and longer on your toes ’cause we can’t help ourselves and run for miles on the face.

I asked Biolos a year ago about ’em after Chas had been riding an Asym from Album Surf in San Clemente.

“It was almost too much fun,” Chas wrote. “I am getting another asymmetrical to try out because it feels like the key to me getting on the WQS as a 40-year-old man. The feel-good story of the decade! Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I’m a dirty dirty bad boy.”

In these instances, I call either Jon Pyzel or Matt Biolos for a long-term view of any faddish design. Biolos said he’d made his first one in 1993 but had avoided because of the necessity of having boards in stock for natural footers and for goofies.

“Stores don’t want to have to double the amount of boards to cover a size range,” said the Bear Jew. “I think it’s financially daunting. Like glass-on fins are now. No one has the room to stock them although I think they could sell.”

I get the theory, I said. But are they really, as one commenter put it so eloquently, for people who like to go straight?

“Most of the ones you see these days are more about art or ‘Shock and Awe’. So it’s easy to say that and be cynical. But I believe that statement is too broad and sarcastic. It’s just that no one is really working on them in the competitive zone. The best surfing I’ve seen on them is Ryan Burch, by a mile, so you know it can be done. Someone like him could push them to more acceptance. They can actually be made far more subtle and I think make turning a bit more easy. The thing is that fringe, artsy shapers have pushed them too extreme… We can make nice functional, realistically proportioned asyms that work. Not quite the ‘Shock and Awe’ monstrosities you see hype fed on Instagram but more for function than fad.”

October in south-west France and Spain is, theoretically, a spell no man can resist…

The makers of this sub-five minute video, with its notes of late-career Kai Neville and the Argentinian Gaspar Noé, pucker their lens at three Australian who visit south-west France in October, 2018.

Jay Davies, Chippa Wilson and Dion Agius have long been Francophiles, packing their Superman pyjamas each year and chasing the honey pot of beachbreak ramps.

The film is called La Cabane, or the…cough… Cabin, who knew French could be so easy, and is made by the magazine Wasted Talent, which is based in gorgeous Hossegor.

It hits, I think, the right vibe for autumn in France: a little subdued, the colours pulled back, waves certainly not perfect, but with enough exposed velour to raise the heartbeat.

Spain, of course, is all brown and a little Third World and dirty.

No need to clutch the remote, you can watch this start to end.

Oh, and since we’re in France, I’ve always loved this quote from Guy de Maupassant about the guillotine.

“It is done. He was guillotined this morning. He made a good end, very good. It gave me infinite pleasure. How sweet it is to see a man’s head cut off! The blood spurted out like a wave, like a wave. Oh, if I could, I would have liked to have bathed in it! What intoxicating ecstasy to crouch below it, to receive it in my hair and on my face, and rise up all crimson, all crimson! Ah, if people knew!”