This morning

An early start today...


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Quiksilver promotes women! Hang on, what?

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This is an ACTUAL video that Quiksilver have on the Quiksilver Pro website to promote the competition. Come one, come all to watch the Quiksilver Pro on the Gold Coast!! Everybody is welcome - even women! As long as you're a sick chick who is willing to have guys ogle her and comment on her body openly and in a way that is apparently encouraged by Quiksilver. But seriously, this is not a joke. That video is on the homepage of video section on the Quiksilver Pro website . On a website that includes women surfers who are also competing. Women who Quiksilver likes to suggest they consider athletes. I sort of wondered for a while if I would even post the clip here, because posting it is promoting their product and site, so I want you to know that I'm not unaware of the complexity of my including it on my blog in order to critique it. But I also want you to know that I think Quiksilver clearly employs some moronic promotional techniques that encourage and even permit sexist ...
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the sea is all about us

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From The Dry Salvages   by T.S. Eliot (published in 1941) The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land's edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices, Many gods and many voices. ---------------- I just read this at the beginning of the Afterword by Jeffrey S. Levinton in the 1989 edition of Rachel Carson's,  The Sea Around Us. It is a section of a much longer poem, that itself is part of a set, Four Quartets , that were largely written during World War II. The Dry Salvages was written during the air-raids in Britain, and it is very sad. I'm not vouching for the whole thing, but ...
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Laura Crane has skin in the game: a surf story in five parts*

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*The title of this essay is inspired by  Kylie Maslen's recent article about women's sport, 'Skin in the Game '. The essay itself is dedicated to my friends in the Institute of Women's Surfing (Europe), with my thanks for sharing your stories and friendship and resources. I. Oh hey, surf media! Surf media is such an interesting world. I used to consume it voraciously, reading everything I could find - every book, magazine, website, and blog. I was trying to understand it, to understand the world it was describing, to see the patterns and themes as well as the points of difference and resistance. I wasn't out to create a typology or anything like that, but to get my head around what it is that we say to ourselves as writers, editors, photographers and readers. I wanted to know who was talking and who might be reading and to know what was missing from these stories; to find the gaps. It didn't take long for me to turn away from mainstream print magazin...
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