Wish you were here. ... View from the GoPro Hero at good ol' A-Beach.

Well, the dog days of summer are here, and there hasn’t been a whole lot that’s inspired me to post of late.

So on Saturday, I decided to bail on the A-town second-hand smoke – courtesy the Santa Barbara/Cruz wildfires – and hit the beach with my new GoPro Hero waterproof digital camera.

As our dozen dedicated followers know, we here at The Bias occasional take a break from blogging about Manny and Co. to review cool gadgets like the GoPro Hero.

As many surfers know, there’s a real shortage of worthwhile waterproof cameras out there. And until a couple years ago, waterproof digitals were unthinkable. Too expensive. Too big. Too damn dangerous in the impact zone.

Stoked.

Enter: The Hero.

It’s fairly inexpensive as far as digitals are concerned (about $200). It’s small enough to strap to your wrist or mount on a helmet (for you mountain bikers and reef kooks). And the thing takes solid photos and surprisingly good video – considering you’re in choppy, blown-out surf half the time in Cali. these days.

I could go on and on about this thing, but I’ll let the video do the talking. And yeah, I’m on a long board, because the surf’s about as big as that camera (did I mention it’s less than 3 inches wide but holds nearly an hour of video or 2,000 photos on the 2GB SD card). Sick.

Pembertonian’s out there too, on the banana board, which explains why he hasn’t posted on The Bias in months.  Bum.

See a photo gallery on the jump.

Perhaps it’s that failure to come through that caused his superiors at work to recently pass on him for a promotion. (Fifteen years of experience? NOT priceless.)

It’s okay, though, because Pembertonian bounced back with a plan. As he told BSlim, he went home, wrote out all his ambitions and dreams on a piece of paper, burned them in his fireplace, then buried the ashes in his front lawn.

Because all that stuff they say about “You can do anything you want if you work hard enough?”

Buncha crap.

Because, really, you always, always, ALWAYS have to have someone give you a break. And, well, Pembertonian is in a bigger slump than David Ortiz in the spring. Except Pembertonian’s slump began in 1991.

So Pembertonian has decided to take on a very Dude-like existence, not worrying about trivial things like success, bills and that mythical notion of The American Dream.

And he’s decided that energy once channeled into ambitious things will now be directed toward surfing.

That’s right — surfing.

In surf tribes, the feeling you get from the physical act of surfing is often called The Stoke. And for many the Stoke can do what Prozac, Xanax and all those other anti-depressants cannot: It takes your troubles, squishes them like a can crusher, and stores them deep in the back of your brain so that only a failure to achieve the Stoke — or significant head trauma — can bring the troubles back to your conscious brain.

So, ah . . . what was I saying?

Oh yeah — The Stoke. After years of getting rejected in several facets of life, Pembertonian has committed himself fully to achieving the Stoke on a regular basis.  In turn, he has given up all ambition.

Even in his unambitious creative life, he has dedicated himself to the Stoke, as in the cave art-inspired painting above.

Of course, it might be his last piece of art since painting more than one piece might be construed by some as ambitious. In fact, Pembertonian will only continue to write for WCBias if he can be demoted to Junior Blogger and if it can be shown that his blog posts are actually decreasing traffic.