I got back from vacation and found a free monthly neighborhood paper sitting in the pile of neglected mail. The cover story of the Sentinel is Skateboarders Without Borders. It’s about local D.I.Y. project that is not so much of a secret, but still, the article pretty much gives the exact location and shows a landmark photo that all but draws a map for you. On top of that, the author interviewed the current land owners. I heard there was a “bust” of sorts during construction but that there were no real consequences. If they weren’t already numbered, my guess is this spot is about to become extinct. I hope the guy in the interview used a fake name.

I hooked up with House of Neil and his friend Mark to skate one of the newer concrete parks in Chicagoland. Northbrook is also a well off suburb, and they took a different approach to building a skatepark for their community. It’s part of a massive athletic complex that you pretty much have to drive to get to. There’s baseball fields, batting cages, soccer fields, a golf course and a fishing pond. You can even get pole on loan from the golf pro shop if you want to drop a line in. So theyt spent some money on this park, but how does it skate?

My sister said there was a skatepark by her house. I asked her if it was concrete and she said it was. I drove over to check it out. There was a lot of concrete, a big slab of it sitting under some prefab ramps. Metal frames with some sort of black masonite-type surface that was delamming like waxy masoninte left out in the rain. I made my way past the high school lurkers with their longboards loitering under the shelter and entered the park. The slab of concrete was indeed massive, dwarfing the paltry selection of ramps. They had a nice miniramp though, maybe 4 feet tall and at least 24 feet wide. I dropped in and did a 50-50. My axles got unnaturally squirrelly and I almost wilsoned. The coping was slippery as snot. Someone had waxed the hell out of it. I rubbed my shoe on the coping and big cornflake size pieces came off. Absurd. I spent 10 minutes trying to clean off the coping and took a couple runs, but there were some slick spots on the surface from residual wax I’m sure. A shame. You don’t see many miniramps that wide. Kids on scooters…

Not completely out of touch with what the Members sang about, but in this case it’s the “Ka-chunk. Ka-chunk” sound of wheels rolling over the metal plates of prefab ramps in suburban Chicago. I skated my former hometown’s Centennial Park Skate Facility in Naperville Illinois. It’s about 4 years old and prefab, so I was expecting the worst. The surface was in surprisingly good shape given the weather extremes in the Chicago area, have I been mislead about the evils of prefab? No, it turns out they are replacing the surface annually, according to one local. So much for saving money by going prefab.

In Calgary there’s an Aryan Guard member who lives within eyesight of a skatepark and makes regular visits there trying to recruit kids for white supremacist causes. He allegedly uses cigarettes to bribe underage skaters! It’s kind of like a (more) bizarre skate church. You’d think he’d want the white kids to live longer and not die from lung cancer, but then again, there’s not a lot of logic to white supremacy in the first place. Well, old Willis (That’s lil’ Hitler’s name) went down to physically confront a multiracial group of youth from Anti-Racist Action Calgary at the skatepark and got beat down. The graphic above comes from an article on the web site called the 325 Collective. There’s no definition of the collective anywhere and the site is pretty amateurish and mixed in message. Somehow they’ve got anti-fascism and anti-racism mixed in with a pro-graffiti message. Oh those little anarchist rascals. It looks like they modified a graphic from a Czech organization called Good Night White Pride that seems to be about ridding hardcore (punk) music from the influence of neo-nazism. Everyone knows the best way to combat violent ideologies is by threatening violence. It worked for Ghandi,…

I’m in the burbs of Chicago for about a week for my grandmother’s 90th birthday. I didn’t get a chance to get anything scheduled before I left, so the updates from yours truly are going to be infrequent and brief. If any of the other contributors want to stage a coup and step up the posts, now’s the time. What’s the picture relevance? Those are vintage Chicago Trucks, harder to find a decent picture of than I thought. Couldn’t score a close up. Left: Current eBay auction. Right: A Bahne setup with Chicago Trucks via Surfa Sam’s 2005 Australian eBay report. I’m in Naperville, actually. Since I last visited there is supposedly a new concrete skatepark in addition to downtown’s prefab park. I’m going to check them both out, but let’s face it, I’m not going to hold my breath.

From Dennis the Menace, August 7th. I guess I should have tipped off MC. Although I’m not sure this is the type of skate comic he’s interested in. Dennis’s unnamed friend must be sporting clear grip tape.

You’ve seen it under construction, and now here’s the newly/nearly finished Modern Skate & Surf skatepark in suburban Detroit (Royal Oak), Michigan. Now you may ask yourself, where is my beautiful house? Does Skate and Annoy have some sort of unholy arrangement with Team Pain? The answer is no, it’s just that Tito is kind enough keep us supplied.

Help! I’m creatively bankrupt! (AKA Skate and Annoy is looking for contributors.) Skate and Annoy is looking for a few more good contributors. Sure, the benefits are mostly limited to the respect/scorn of your peers, but think of the glory…

Here’s another edition of Skateboard Gossip from My Wife, who incidentally, gets all her info from gay men who write celebrity blogs on the Interwebs™, so you know it’s relevant to this site too. First up, It’s Ryan Sheckler on the cover of ESPN Magazine, although it looks like he’s been replaced already. No, the word “Hot” is not editorial commentary from SnA, rather it’s from Perez Hilton, who seems to have a bit of a non-heterosexual man-crush. He’s reported on Sheckler before. Guess what? He’s officially a celebrity once non-skating gay males start fixating on him. This one is for the haters. From the cover, Sheckler appears to be quoted as saying “I want to give them more reasons not to like me.” It’s official again! Ryan Sheckler is Punk Rock! I’d love to get the rest of the context, but ESPN has some sort of convoluted “Digital Edition” of the magazine designed to annoy people enough to not want to read the content online for free. Part two of our feature is Linda Hogan, wife of Hulk Hogan, visiting their son Nick Hogan who is in jail for pulling an attempted Vince Neil. What did she bring him…