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| JUNE 7, 2002 SCREW THE RICH |
| The wide world of surfing made the front page of the Los Angeles Times this morning. This is an astounding piece of good fortune for our sport, as we know that all publicity is good publicity. Normally a commercial icon like Dewey Weber has to die, or a few absolutely stupid surfers in Florida have to "jump over sharks" to get into the waves to make this kind of coverage. It has to be extreme like that, because the pro surf contests never do. For the Los Angeles Times, with literally hundreds of thousands of surfers in its readership area, never covers a surf contest not on California shores. The whole world tour might as well be swamp buggy racing in Central Florida. What happened this time? "Angry Residents Sink Police Chief's Surf Cam". Another Palos Verdes surf fable... I think anyone who is remotely up to date with surf media has read about the localism at Palos Verdes (send your emails to editor@vagabondsurf.com you dipshits). This has been ongoing for decades now, even back when I was roaming the coastlines around here. The hook on this story is that the locals are residents of one of the richest enclaves in Southern California. Far from being some downtrodden urban gang-bangers, they are the sons of wealth. Their biggest "organization" is called "the dirty underwear gang" according to police reports... Anyway, after recent problems the City Council and Police Chief hit upon the idea of putting a Surfline web cam on top of the Chief's city-owned ocean front home near The Cove and Indicators. Local surfers started pestering other residents with leaflets and visits, spreading visions of horrible non-resident surfers urinating on gardeners, changing out of wetsuits in plain sight, and generally driving down property values by not driving Lexus SUVs. The upshot? The locals prevailed upon the council to remove the web cam and shelve plans for a second one, so "their beaches" wouldn't be overrun by out-of-towners. The whole point of the cams was to be a deterrent to violent incidents on public beaches, but I guess since the violence was targeted to strangers the local residents felt they could live with it. Score one victory for the domestic terrorists. The city will pay to have other real-time cams installed, only to be watchable by local police. I suppose, to defray costs, they could make the cams available to approved local residents as well. They are there to "protect and serve", after all. I'd like to give the Times kudos for running a map of PV, however, with surf spot identification. Somebody in there has some surf soul. And much like the rumored Ranch Cams, maybe some good hacker... |