Eleven-time world champion Kelly Slater missed the World Surf League tour’s mid-season cut Saturday in a blow that could spell the end of his more than three-decade career.
The 51-year-old American, widely regarded as the greatest professional surfer of all time, was eliminated in the round of 32 at the Margaret River Pro in Western Australia.
It meant he finished outside the top 22 halfway through the season to miss the cut, a contentious new concept introduced in 2022 to slim down the field.
He can no longer compete on the top level championship tour unless he is offered a wild card for the back half of the year. Alternatively, he could surf the second-tier challenger series, or retire.
“It is what it is. Let’s see how things turn out,” the Florida-born Slater said on the WSL website after his elimination, adding that he was not sure about his plans.
Live beach cams are up on the Brownie Bytes website. Live cameras on the East coast of Florida have a hard time staying up. Weather is usually the culprit. Hurricanes, lightening strikes, and lack of attention/maintenance of some of them render them out of service pretty often.
As of today, we have 18 live ad-free cameras on our Surfing Webcams in Florida webpage.
This is primarily a surf-check webpage for surfers. I review the cameras almost every day and update the page frequently to try and keep the webpage up-to-date so click below to see the page:
The live cams are organized on the page north to south from St. Augustine Pier to Boca Raton Inlet.
There are lots of surfing webcams in Florida but these are my favorites because they stay up (most of the time) and show a wide range of views and information for surfers and don’t have ad interruptions.
Why this page? I just do it as a community service for surfers. To provide a single-source to be able to see all the cameras on one page rather than checking 18 different sites to get daily surf updates.
I’ve been up today since, you guessed it… 4:48 AM. Thank you Florida state government Emergency Response Team.
The governor is pissed. So am I and a lot of others throughout Florida because the alarm went out to every cellphone in the state.
But, I’ll bet the coffee companies are happy because of the millions of Floridians that couldn’t go back to sleep and just got up and got coffee. We’ll need some more between 2 and 3 PM this afternoon to stay awake beyond dinner.
Officials apologize after ‘Emergency Alert’ test sent in ‘error.’
Typically, only a few agencies have the ability to request and send out emergency notifications to cell phones, and they’re usually for imminent situations, such as severe weather warnings, an AMBER Alert for a missing child, public safety alerts, or a national emergency.
Hours later, the Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM) apologized for the incident in a tweet, and said the Emergency Alert System (EAS) notification was part of a monthly test, but that it was supposed to air on TV, not cell phones.
Florida Governor DeSantis’ press secretary @BryanDGRiffin says “party responsible” for 4:45 a.m. emergency alert will be fired, “This morning’s 4:45AM SERT test alert was not appropriate and not done at our direction. The party responsible will be held accountable and appropriately.”
Twitter is Lit Up
“ICYMI: Florida‘s got its feathers ruffled today because at 4:45am the EAS decided to send a TEST to our phones. All of our phones. All of them. We are grumpy.”
“To whoever decided to do a test of Florida’s Emergency Alert System at 4:45 a.m.: I hope you step on a Lego. Jerk.”
“On the night my sister’s six-month-old was actually sleeping through the night for the first time. She’s out for blood.”
“The only thing the state of Florida achieved with this 4:43am emergency alert test was helping people find out how to turn alerts off, probably at the expense of all other alerts including AMBER alerts.”
And Then… the Cool Huge Rocket Blew Up
SpaceX Starship launches
SpaceX Starship blows up at about a minute into the launch just as it tried to separate stages.
The giant rocket started to spin weirdly and wiggle, then… BOOM!
Geek wording for an explosion of SpaceX Starship today: “Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation,” SpaceX said in a statement on Twitter.
No longer just a niche hobby for dads and hipsters, vinyl is experiencing a major resurgence in mainstream music. According to the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) annual revenue report, vinyl records outsold CDs in the US last year for the first time since 1987, selling 41 million units against 33 million for CD.
Vinyl record sales have consistently increased over the last 16 years according to the RIAA report published on Thursday, now accounting for 71 percent of all physical music format revenue. The growth margins here aren’t trivial, either — while physical formats as a whole increased by 4 percent, earning $1.7 billion between 2021 and 2022, vinyl sales alone accounted for $1.2 billion, experiencing a 17 percent increase in sales compared to the previous year. Comparatively, CD sales plummeted by 18 percent in 2022.
Brownie Bytes asks why? Why do you think this music format is making a comeback? Doesn’t the digital version sound better?
Brownie Bytes 