If you want to avoid the crowds at the Trifecta this year, but still want a little bit of commotion during your NW Oregon skatepark experience this weekend, consider heading over to Seaside this Saturday for the 3rd annual Skate ‘n Ride Summer JAM. It’s for a good cause.

Haw haw! The Vancouver Skateboard Coalition

For those keeping track, and I’m guessing that’s about three other people, I’ve resurrected the Broken Kingpins column name in Skate and Annoy. This time around, instead of covering all the roster hopping and product release junk like we used to in our ancient print issues, I’m using it for all the miscellaneous links that don’t merit their own post. Besides, there are about a million other web sites that can tell you who has new shoe models and who got kicked off of what tour. [Photo: Denver Post / Andy Cross]

Dateline: Englewood Florida. Headline: County wipes out good, clean fun Overmonitoring, irregular hours and high fees mar new skate park Eric Ernst wrote a piece for The Herald Tribune about micromanaging the fun out of the new Englewood skatepark that Team Pain built. Here in Oregon, most of our parks are free, open from dawn to dusk and unmonitored. And for the most part, this works out great.

Reading and watching documentaries are no substitute for experience. If you want to learn how to work with concrete to build skate structures, here’s your chance. Marginal Way Skatepark will be hosting the Red Bull 10 Stair contest on Saturday, August 4. Red Bull has offered to pay for skatepark improvements as their contribution to the cause. Part of the improvements are needed for the contest. SATURDAY JULY 28 – ALL DAY – MARGINAL WAY NEEDS YOUR HELP! We have 10 yards of mud scheduled for an 8 AM delivery. The site is completely prepped for a flat pad and transition pour around the back of the pillar island. Come down to the skatepark and help us out. Good times, good karma and hard work = MW Phase 2! Marginal Way Collective

I was unaware, but maybe you’ve heard of this before… Apparently, there is some sort of long standing history of skateboarding in Portland Oregon. Who knew? Someone should commemorate that. Besides building 19 new skateparks, the City of Portland is sponsoring an exhibit called Board of Art: A Historical Perspective of Stumptown Skate on August 2nd from 5:00-8:00pm at City Hall (1221 SW 4th). There will even be a half pipe set up in front of city hall. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a city’s top brass embrace skateboarding so much. Thanks Comissioner Sam! Now why wasn’t I invited to be artsy with my peers? Oh wait. I was, and I dropped the ball. Nice one. [Graphic: Bettina McEntyre]

Team Shralp passed along a report on the Vancouver meeting last week. Sorry I’m a little slow in passing along the info. Sounds like there was a decent turnout – a mix of ages and a few skateboarders for a change. Some neighbors thought the skatepark was getting special treatment – dog park people were pissed cause they pay for their trash removal, restrooms, and fencing but the skatepark is going to have those things provided by the city, months ahead of any other feature in the park. What can we say skateboarders have a better lobby. There was some loose discussion of rules, kind of like Battle Ground’s rules: bikes and skateboards all the time, pegs yes, and be polite to each other and people and things around the park. The current plan is to open mid-August and they are going to sneak it – no big event just open the gates and let it happen, just word of mouth. Thanks Jason. skatepark rendering from Grindline

So yeah, now that we were on TV we are all too busy taking lunch meetings at Spago to update the site. All in all, our Attack of the Show profile went off about the best we could have expected, considering the show’s target audience. I’d say it was a fairly benign appearance and it didn’t make us look stupid. This has nothing to do with the fact that we did garner the top spot, after all. There were a few factual misrepresentations – I’m completely unaware of our supposed nationwide skatepark rating system. Maybe they were thinking of different site. Commentary, video clips of the entire segment, and the Skate and Annoy proflie with a special outtakes segement exclusive to SnA after the jump.

A skatepark policy meeting will be held on Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 7 p.m. at Fisher’s Grange Hall, located at 814 NE 162nd Avenue (just a few blocks from Pacific Park). Vancouver Washington area skaters should turn up for this meeting. Multiple sources report that the other meetings were 90% BMXers, which is great for them and embarrassing for skateboarders, especially considering the history of skater activism involvement in nearby Portland. Besides, when’s the last time you were asked to help make the rules at a skatepark?

How telling that the day after our country celebrated our independence I end up making a flippant post about how the US government is helping to fund “extreme sports facilities” in El Salvador in hopes of combating violence amongst disaffected youth. As if Extreme!™ Democracy wasn’t enough (see Iraq). The News Blaze has an article titled Extreme Sports Offer Salvadoran Youth Refuge from Violence – United States provides extreme sports facilities to Salvadoran youth center. This popular rejection of violence is what the founders of Fundacion Salvador del Mundo (FUSALMO) hoped to see when they created a recreational facility for the youth of Soyapango in 2003… …In 2006, with a grant from the U.S. government, FUSALMO expanded its facilities to include extreme sports: bicycle motocross (BMX), skateboarding and break dancing. Break dancing and skateboarding? Sounds like 1987, not 2007. I guess skateboarding heals all wounds. I’m sure a few American-made prefab ramps will make up for the fact that the USA backed a bloody dictator for all those years. I can’t think of a better way to say “I’m sorry for the death squads and you know, those 30,000 executions. Let’s put this unpleasantness behind us with some method airs…