Is Samaire Armstrong a celebrity? Maybe not-so-much, but she was in Not Another Teen Movie (Warning, that link is a buzzkill.) and was a regular on The O.C. for a while as well. She posed for some pinup pictures in Stuff Magazine and Maxim, which are both owned by the same company. In an interview she said she regretted agreeing to both photo sessions, and subsequently fired her managers for talking her into it, among other things. Sounds like a weak excuse. I imagine she regretted being forced to pose with plastic skateboards from the 70’s. Works for me though. Maxim decided fight back by removing the pictures from their website. I pulled these off of a site called Sk8 the Planet.

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Skate Daily noticed that although Rick McCrank is active in Peta print ads and product giveaways, he’s still got a suede shoe model, unlike another Peta collaborator, Ed Templeton. Also in this month’s Print Magazine is a half a page on design variations in Nick Hornby’s book Slam, the one that features a protagonist that regularly converses with Tony Hawk in head, the same way Clarence Worley talks to Elvis, I mean “Mentor.”

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Theme magazine is a quarterly publication that covers global avant-garde Asian culture. issue 13: rebel includes an article called Christian Hosoi Reborn, Skateboard bad boy to Jesus freak. with photos by J. Grant Brittain. Check it out on the website.

Yes, I paid $2.99 to make fun of Ryan Sheckler, so who is the bigger loser? Me, by most standards. Sheckler makes no less than two appearances in the February 2008 issue of Seventeen Magazine, and they’ve even got an online extra.

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Anonymous skater featured in a new magazine from the folks who bring you Portland Monthly

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Mad Magazine is too highbrow for little kids, so they rolled out Mad Kids for the youngsters. I checked out the PDF preview, figuring it would be all Spongebob-y, and it is, but the cartoon ladies that Don Martin draws still have impossibly large gravity defying breasts. Tony Hawk is on the cover #9, where they gave him the Photoshop bug-out treatment. What is that move anyway? He’s also got an interview inside. OK maybe he’s not mad at kids, but mad for the kids! (And not in a creepy NAMBLA way…)

- Thanks to Danimal for the tip.

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You may have noticed banner ads in rotation for Razorcake magazine here on Skate and Annoy. It’s originally the brainchild of Todd Taylor, author, punk rocker, publisher, skater, drinker and general all around good guy to know. Razorcake is bigger than him now, it’s a non-profit organization for baby Jesus’ sake! Issue #41 has a seven page article, How to fight for a skatepark that has heroes, villains and an epic tale of struggle, much like Homer’s Odyssey - mostly because the villains seem to have the intellect of Homer Simpson. Imagine you are tied to a railroad track in the middle of a dessert, and you can see the smoke from the locomotive approaching over the horizon. You think to yourself, surely someone will find and help me, right up until the point where you can see engine approaching, and feel the rails rumble. Todd Taylor was tied to the tracks just blocks away from his apartment as the Red Tape engineer of the City of L.A., The Cho-Bot, and Teflon were intent on railroading prefab modular skateparks from a playground company down the throats and up the collective asses of his L.A. neighborhood’s skateboarding population. It’s a good read, and one that explains how it is possible for the city like L.A. with the largest population base, and in the state that is the supposed birthplace of skateboarding, can only have three public skateparks in the year 2007. The article is not available online, so look for Razorcake wherever you buy your independent media, or head on over to Razorcake.org where you can buy issue 41 or better yet, subscribe for as little as $15.

Gentlemen, here is the link that I believe we spoke of earlier. Mostly interesting for the clay and steel wheel era pictures.

The August 7th 2007 issue of Time magazine had an article about the design of modern skateparks titled “It’s All in the Swoop.” Seriously? August of 2007 and I’m just now finding out about it? Come on people! Anyway, by “modern” they mean tranny, so if you’re looking for street plaza coverage you can save your breath and write a letter to the editor - theirs, not me. I didn’t write it, I’m just reporting on what’s out there. I suspect that delving into that as well would have taken up more editorial space then they had alloted. Quoted in the interview are Wally Hollyday, Mark Hubbard and Tim Payne. Mentioned in article are the firms of SITE Design Group, Dreamland, Team Pain and Grindline. An interesting point is raised by suggesting current skatepark design is also affecting playground and landscape architecture, even for non-skating spaces. There are a few pictures in the print layout that are not duplicated in the online version of the article, so they are preserved and presented after the jump. Both pieces mention a photo essay on the history and evolution of skateboarding but fail to provide a link to it beyond Time.com, and plugging the title into the search comes up blank.

- Thanks to John Aguilar for the goods.

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I found this magazine online a year or so ago and tried to get them to send me a copy but never heard back from them. The whole thing had a sort of fishy, half baked feeling to it, as if they maybe made one issue as a test and were trying to see if it was a viable money making concept. The Pastor Tom cover made me chuckle because of the 8-wheeler on the cover and the tag line “Why every community could use a Tom Fain.” Really? Every community could use a guy who is seemingly completely out of touch with skateboarding culture?

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