steve shearer wrote:Several times in these, how shall we say it, Last Days of Chez Carroll, you've alluded to thorny or controversial topics, but steered away from committing to a firm opinion on them.
Examples: Sexism in surfing.
Power Balance bracelets.
A fully Candid memoir .
Why do you shy away from these controversial topics?
Don't you feel entitled to some kind of reasoned and firm intellectual committment based on your experience and your reasoning in the manner of, say JK Galbraith?
Or is there some reason that you don't wish to give offence?
Some stronger moral/philosphical guiding principle?
Ha ha ha shearer is that all you've got? Oh dear.
My apologies to Kurungabaa readers and to shearer -- he is not a New Sarcastic at all.
Anyway this is number 6000 so I will try to answer the few remaining questions in this last pack of posts.
As to the above, you wanna go and look at the Other Things I Hate thread.
bumfluff, I wouldn't be overly concerned about the stock market...despite the horrors apparently awaiting us according to that other thread about the doom of the global economy, I suspect everything will be sort of OK in the mid term. (ooo shit that wasn't very JK Galbraith was it. Still ol' JK never minded deficit spending.)
rightbrain, re Quiksilver having "juice" on the North Shore, perhaps it's because they've poured a lot of money and support into key surf-cultural areas there in the past 25 years...nurtured a lot of long term relationships...and avoided some of the errors of some of the other big surf co's in the process. It's not rocket science and it doesn't speak to the fabulously cheeseball old surf grapevine rumour about Quik and the surf industry in general being founded on drug money. Sorry. Oh well.
And Paul Sargeant is currently in Japan, where he is currently engaged in re-establishing his contacts within the Australian qualifier-level pro surfer milieu. He seems to have recently attended the 4-star qualifying event in Chiba, which was won by Davey Cathels. I'm not sure if this means his ASP event ban is over. You can find Paul on Facebook.
OK that's it, thanks heaps to to the lot of yas, it's been a real pleasure and a gift to be able to have this kind of contact with surfers whom I might never have got the chance to meet otherwise. It's reminded me of why I took up the writing gig in the first place; a bit like the Tracks letters pages in the late 70s. I'm gonna leave my account active here mainly so Buffy or some horrible rejuvenation of KK can't start pretending to be me -- it'll also mean if you want to contact me for some reason I'll be pm-able. And I might come back briefly to hype whatever "Internet" project I end up entangled in down the track. Otherwise, see ya! and thanks a million to Don Norris for setting the Realsurf thing up in the first place, it's clearly been of great value to a lot of surfers and I hope it continues to be. Good on ya Don.